Befriending the Stranger

Our lives are moulded and fashioned
by all the graces we have received or refused;
by all the gestures of love as well as the acts of hatred
or indifference;
by our successes as well as our failures.
Absolutely everything is engraved in our being.
So the experience of being loved by God
does not change our lives completely,
yet something is changed
when we realize that God loves us just as we are,
not as we would like to be
nor as our parents or society would have liked us to be.
God loves us today
with our gifts, our qualities, as well as our failures and our fragility.
If we have the impression people are disappointed in us
because we do not live up to their expectations;
if there seems to be a gap
between the way in which others perceive us
and who we really are,
between what we like to think we can do
and what we actually can do,
we need to discover God is never disappointed in us.
God knows us;
God knows our abilities and disabilities;
God knows we are a mixture of light and darkness.
Others may be disappointed
because they have an ideal image of Him,
but not God, who knows me today just as I am.
God does not live in the past or the future
but in the "now" of the present moment.
God sees me in my present reality
as I am in each present moment.

-Jean Vanier, Befriending the Stranger
(reposted from Abbey Roads blog)