Hello, I'm Father Joe Roche of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception.

Thank you for joining us as we continue with our year-long journey,

reading the diary of St. Maria Faustina Kavalska from beginning to end.

Today we take up from where we left off, beginning with Diary Entry Number 207.

I prayed today for a soul in agony who was dying without the Holy Sacraments, although

she desired them, but it was already too late. It was a relative of mine, my uncle's wife. She was a soul

pleasing to God. There was no distance between us at that moment. Oh, you small, everyday sacrifices,

you are to me like wild flowers which I strew over the feet of my beloved Jesus.

I sometimes compare these trifles to the heroic virtues, and that is because their enduring

nature demands heroism. In my sufferings I do not seek help from creatures, but God is everything to me.

And yet it often seems that even the Lord does not hear me.

I arm myself with patience and silence, like a dove that does not complain and feels no bitterness when its children are being taken away from it.

I want to soar into the very heat of the sun, and I do not want to stop in its vapors.

I will not grow weary because it is on you that I am leaning.

O you, my strength. I fervently beg the Lord O you my strength.

I fervently beg the Lord to strengthen my faith so that in my drab everyday life I will not be guided

by human dispositions, but by those of the Spirit. Oh, how everything drags man towards

the earth, but lively faith maintains the soul in the higher regions and assigns self-love its proper place, that is to say, the lowest one.

Once again, a terrible darkness envelops my soul.

It seems to me that I am falling prey to illusions.

When I went to confession to obtain some light and peace, I did not find these at all.

The confessor left me with even more doubts than I had before.

...