I wrote this a year ago after I had a series of injuries due to mine and other’s mistakes. My Aunt Betty’s words to me are in red:

You need to ask the Lord for a special grace to forgive yourself. You’re tempted to beat yourself up because of your mistakes. Let’s pray for a special grace to have a forgiving heart toward yourself. Of ourselves, it is totally impossible. “Lord, with your forgiving heart, pull us out of our bad choices. Glorify yourself. Work the miracle of helping us live our Christianity. Lord have mercy on us. Help us to live what we say we believe. Lord, you are our hope. Do within us what we can’t do for ourselves. In You, all things are possible.” Our salvation is to be found in our faith. That’s our hope.  We have to get convicted. We can’t afford the luxury of rebellion.

If you don’t want to do more damage to yourself, then you have to avoid the things that put you into those compulsive behaviors in which you get fixated. You want to figure this out and understand why. That is what is really destroying you right now. It’s the pain part. You can’t get out of the world without suffering. But you keep trying to go back and say, “Oh, but I have to figure out how to stop my feet from hurting.” Maybe you can’t figure that out. It’s like, “Oh, come on. Ok, you already learned that. Don’t go there, because you’re just torturing yourself.” Why do you want to torture yourself? You can’t accept what is, or you don’t want to accept what it is. In the rebellion, you bring on all this additional suffering. I don’t know. I don’t think you can quite understand what I’m trying to say to you here. That’s distressing, because I see you being forced to live in suffering, because you can’t understand. That’s where you need to say, “How can I not waste this crisis, and use it for the healing of my family?”

I don’t torture myself and waste the graces of redemptive suffering. Stop torturing yourself. You have to accept it. This is what’s happening. You get fixated into the places that will torture you, and throw you into depression. And I say, “to what purpose?” What good is this bringing about? No good. Well, then stop it. Once you find out it’s a dead end, move out. It’s like, “Ok Lord, I see there’s no solution here. So, I have to hand this over to you, and put my focus on that which will help my family or whatever.” Don’t waste the crisis. The Divine Will has helped me to realize that all of this has purpose. Say, “There’s good that’s meant to come about here, so Lord, don’t let me miss it.”