Michel Quoist
MEET CHRIST AND LIVE!

translated by J. F. BERNARD
GILL AND MACMILLAN

We don' t even know where to start. My husband and I are 'involved'. He's active in his union, in a cooperative, and in our community association. I belong to the parent teachers' association, and I work in my parish as a catechism teacher and as an officer of various clubs. We have meetings to attend, books to read-and we are constantly being asked to join this or that movement or organization.
We have our home, of course, and our children. We have relatives, friends, people we know from work, our neighbors. We think that our lives are full; that we are doing enough. Yet, we compare what we are not doing with what we are doing, and we sec how much there is still to be done. The very magnitude of the task seems to solicit our help, to demand it. And still, we must find time to read, to pray, to relax, to sleep. We don' t know what to do. There is simply too much to do.
In the midst of this feeling of frustration and of powerlessness, we paused and tried to find out what the Lord was trying to tell us.

First of all, we must learn to accept our frustration. It is possible to reduce it; but we must face the fact that it will exist, no matter what we do, for the test of our lives. We will always be asked to do infinitely more than we are capable of doing.
What we must learn is to face that situation, accept it and offer it to God. This will help to lessen our frustration by lessening its power to discourage and exasperate us. Even more, it enables us to make use of our frustration by converting it into a means of redemption - like the Cross, the scene of the tragic 'frustration' of Jesus Christ as he hung between heaven and earth, between sin and love, between life and death.
We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we cannot always see things clearly. We sometimes have obligations which seem contradictory, and it is difficult to choose between them. We would like to have a straight road, but in fact it has many forks. It is only by going forward that we will find signposts, that we will discover whether to turn off or go straight on, whether to take the right or the left turning. In other words, we must learn to live in faith. We must sharpen our sight in order to be able to read the wishes of the Father in what happens around us. We must learn to trust him and to let him be our guide through the maze of roads that lie ahead. We must learn to let ourselves be led at the very moment that we wish to go our own way.
We must learn to accept our limitations, however humiliating, exasperating and crippling they may be. These are the limitations imposed by time, our strength and our health, our material means, our intelligence, the people with whom we work and the thousand other things which prevent us from doing as much as we would like. These limitations are felt all the more keenly as our mind is quick to conceive, our heart quick to be moved, our ears quick to hear the cries of our brothers; for then they make us painfully aware of the chasm separating reality from possibility. We must acknowledge that
we are doing only one-tenth of what we can clearly see we should be doing;
we are doing only one-hundredth of what we could do, if only. . . .
we are doing only one-thousandth of what we would like to do. . . .

In an active life, the hardest thingby far is to accept one' s limitations. We must not forget that the Cross was not very large, and that the drama of crucifixion did not require much time or many words. Yet, it was sufficient to hold much suffering, and the infinity of love.
To act-in the sense of participating-means' to struggle constantly against selfishness; and to become less selfish we require the cross. There can be no conscious act on earth that does not have need of being redeemed. The bond between action and redemption is one that has been created by sin.
If we are to succeed in our work, we must learn to offer to God the frustrations of our apostolic lives, the problems in discovering our duty, and the burdens of our limitations. This is the sine qua non of successful action.
Frustration, therefore, is inevitable in our lives. But it can be greatly reduced, and it should never deprive us of interior peace. Everything depends upon our faith and our love.
We are not expected to do everything by ourselves. We have the time and the means to do what the Father wants us to do. Therefore, if we do not have the time or the means to do something, we may conclude that the Father does not expect us to do it. So why should we become discouraged or disgusted?
We should be humble enough to know that we are not indispensable at any given moment, in any given situation, to any given person. We must be very strict in judging the authenticity of our motives for commitment. Sometimes we are not motivated by the desire to serve our brothers but, unconsciously, by pride, aggressiveness, the wish for power or simply by a desire to escape from a humdrum life or an unpleasant home situation.
What is most important is not the sum total of what we do, but the inte1lsity oJ the love which transforms our actions.
Plasma enters and gives life to the body of a sick man through a tiny hole in a needle. In the sa me way, an authentic commitment, undertaken in love, benefits the whole of mankind, no matter where the love is lived and no matter what the human dimension of that commitment.
Through our action, however limited, we participate in mankind's universal progress. If we act with Jesus Christ, through him we are building the Kingdom of the Father.
If we are exhausted by the many things we have to do, if we dissipate our energies and become discouraged, it is because we forget the basic unity among all things. We are looking up at the sky, and we see only the branches of the tree. But, if we lower our eyes and look closely, we will see the trunk which feeds all the branches with its sap.
Too often, we go from branch to branch and forget about the trunk.
'I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut off from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is like a branch that has been thrown away - he withers; these branches are collected and thrown on the fire, and they are burned' (John 15: 5-6).
The more numerous our commitments, the more diverse our work, the more time-consuming our participation, then the more we should stop and contemplate the only source of all action, Jesus Christ. In his light, we will discover, and learn to live, the basic unity of what we do.
If the diversity of our commitments disturbs us, it is because we do not throw ourselves entirely into each of them. We cannot, because we are fragmented: 
a part of us dreams about what should be done;
a part is busy worrying about a particular event or person ;
a part remains attached to the past;
and a part is speculating on the future.
If we knew how to concentrate, we would be able to do more things in less time, and we would do them much more efficiently.

What harms us and exhausts us is this practice of living our lives 'in pieces'. When we can truly say, with St Paul, that we are 'all things to all men', then we will have peace and joy.
We must give all of our attention and all our strength to each one of our actions; for each of our actions is for us, and for the moment, the only thing that God wants us to do.
Only Jesus Christ can give us interior unity. And only he can unify 01.1r apostolic lives in the midst of our commitments. There is only one love to be lived through the demands made upon us by our brothers.

Lord, make us strong enough to do what we should do, 
calmly,
simply,
without wanting to do too much, 
without wanting to do it all ourselves.
In other words, Lord, make us humble
in our wish and our will to serve. 
Help us above all to find you in our commitments,
For you are the unity of our actions;
You are the single love
in all our loves,
in all our efforts.