Hi friends and welcome to season 11 of the Abiding Together podcast. Abiding together is a place where you can find connection, rest and encouragement in your journey with Jesus Christ.

Hi, my name is Sister Miriam James Hyland and every week I'm joined by two of my very dearest friends. Heather Kim and Michelle Bensinger and we talk about all things Christ, about life, about beauty, about sorrow, we laugh, we cry, you'll fit right in.

So grab a cup of coffee, settle in and welcome home.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Abiding Together podcast and welcome to part two of our series on bright and this is our final kind of installment of the identity series, which we started with daughter sister and then mother.

And now we're finishing with bride as the really the fulfillment of all of our vocations to belong totally to the Lord forever for eternity.

And we're going to take those vows and really expand upon them. But the statement of intention for this week is what you're asked at the wedding ceremony is do you come here fully without reservation and tend upon giving yourself to your intended spouse and marriage, which that's a lot.

And so that's what I was saying.

And I think about when I was 23 saying that you didn't know anything girl.

And I think that the reservation or coming fully, which is so deep. Yeah, I think coming fully, like coming fully is very similar to freely, you know, but coming with your whole self coming and giving without reservation where there's no hindrance is very similar to what we talked about last time, but realizing that love is a powerful force is most powerful force on earth.

And to love in this quote by Pope Benedict, which I had never read and I discovered it is from actually World Youth Day. And 2007 it says, my dear young friends, I want to invite you to dare to love.

Do not desire anything less for your life than a love that is strong and beautiful and that is capable of making the whole of your existence.

A joyful undertaking of giving yourselves as a gift to God and your brothers and sisters and imitation of the one who vanquished hatred and death forever through love.

Love is the only force capable of changing the heart of the human person and of all humanity by making fruitful the relations between men and women between rich and poor between culture and civilizations.

That's a good word. Wow. Yep. And so love is the only force capable of changing the heart of humans. You know, and love you love the saying but love heels.

That's the only thing that does love heels and transforms. So I think for us to come fully and to everything is to really take a sense all parts of our heart and see which parts of our heart are still closed and see which parts of ourselves that are still being.

Like that we are hiding from very similar to last podcast episode and how do we give ourselves fully to one another.

Yeah, and we really don't have a perfect model for that in one another. But we do have a perfect model of that in Christ.

That he is the perfect teacher he came to earth to show us how to live among other things but but that's one of the reasons why he came and so in his life we can come to understand how to give ourselves fully because that's what he did.

He came to give himself fully to us in everything hold nothing back even to the point of death, you know, and all of it was for a purpose for us like it was all for us not for him but but as a gift. So he made a gift of himself completely to us.

And I think when we hold ourselves up to that standard often we can just go I can't do that. You know, I can't love like that. And there's a part of that that's so true. We can't we are incapable of that kind of love on our own power because there's distortions.

There's our own stories. There's our vulnerabilities that have turned into fear. There's all of those things at play. But it truly is allowing the love of God to come into us so fully that that's what we're able to give to others.

And that's a process of of allowing ourselves to become transformed. But we have to at least pursue it to know that that's the goal to know that that's where love is actually found he is love God is love we hear that all the time.

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