Real Beauty

When you are forgotten or neglected or purposely set at naught, and you not sting and hurt at the oversight, but your heart is happy, being counted worthy to suffer for Christ, that is dying to self.

When your good is evil spoken of, when your wishes are crossed, your advice disregarded, your opinions ridiculed, and you refuse to let anger rise in your heart, or even defend yourself, but take it all in patient loving silence, that is dying to self.

When you lovingly and patiently bear any disorder, any irregularity, any impunctuality, or any annoyance, when you can stand face to face with waste, folly, extravagance, spiritual insensibility and endured it as Jesus endured it, that is dying to self.

When you are content with any food, any offering, any raiment, any climate, any society, any solitude, any interruption by the will of God, that is dying to self.

When you never care to refer to yourself in conversation, or to record your own good works, or itch after commendation, when you truly love to be unknown, that is dying to self.

When you can receive correction and reproof from one of less stature than yourself and can humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly, finding no rebellion or resentment rising up within your heart, that is dying to self.

 Author unknown.

Without self-denial there is no community, but individuality.

It is true that one of the attractions of the Amish is the sense of community, yet this community could not arise without the individual self- denial of its members, and it is actually that quality of self-denial which we feel attracted to, the real beauty.

Jesus in his great commandment did say to love our neighbor as ourselves, yet this comes about only if we have been able to die to self. Where marriages break, the church will break and the government too. It is just a matter of time. So community starts at self-denial.

This self-denial is always joyful, when one sees mortifications without joy,  that is not self-denial but a hiding form of pride, self-pity or victimization. The joy of self-denial is something that God gives and makes people around you to want the same as you have, it is the real beauty, what people  see in you and long for. Because once you practice self-denial Christ can enter and shine through you.

There are many ways of practicing self-denial, but you can tell when is rightly so. You have the longing of training your flesh, training your will, training your heart and mind, and at each step God guides you particularly on what to do, the choice is always ours, to procrastinate or make haste. And by the end of it you can also tell if joy was in your heart or you should keep trying again, by praying and supplication, so God changes your heart. Obedience is not easy, but once you taste the sweetness of it, it will help to keep obeying in more things. The more we obey the more is given to us as a task and the more joy we will receive from the Father, it actually resembles much of child-training, yet as adults, we use our will to enter into training. God gives commands and suggestions, he even changes our hearts, yet we still have the free will to obey or not, he will not use force, manipulation, or other means aimed at limiting our freedom, but once we are his children he will reward and chastise us too, like children, and we can always remove ourselves from his family if we would want to, that is why Love is with freedom, we cannot be forced to Love God the Father, but I hope we would always want to.

The Lord is good to me

When the sun is almost dawning

He brings yet a darkest night

To Him now must fiercely clinging

Leave all my life and my might.

So the inner layers are scattered

Like pieces of flaky flesh

That were still in my heart bounded

Invisible like a mesh.

I find amazing how always

It all starts anew once more

When nothing else is kept away

I think, submitting my core.

Yet he brings another night still

This a longer sharper dark

And in my insides gets revealed

Choking bits of self unmarked.

Will this path of Christian life take

Bring me close enough to God

There is one more thing to forsake

Yet, at every step I trod.

The Lord is good to me indeed

He keeps me in a good pace

Lord cleanse me ever more, I need

To be made yours every day.