Joshua Nickel 
In order to truly abandon yourself to him, you must learn to distinguish between him and his gifts. One way this happens is through the trial of your senses, when your familiar and comfortable ways of connecting to God seem to have passed away.
Although you cannot always be in the house of the Lord, you can take that house with you, making your surroundings into a holy temple, and the attitude of your heart into a spiritual sacrifice.
You have no rights over yourself; you belong totally to God. Are you threatened by this or relieved? And how threatened are you, or how relieved? This will be the measure of your abandonment to God.
When you try to forget yourself, your attention is on your own efforts. You need something bigger to focus on until you lose sight of yourself. The good news is that there is nothing bigger than God himself, and your business is to be occupied with him.
Jean Pierre de Caussade promises us that we will be able to see through created things. But this does not happen how we might expect it to. We do not render created things transparent; instead, we see them more clearly. It is when we “see created things as they truly are” that we see the Creator behind them.
Suffering simplifies. Let it simplify your abandonment to God. Few things are truly essential. Jean Pierre de Caussade reduces it to three: “love God, fulfill your duties, and flee from sin.”
The water is with you wherever you go. But still, you must drink. The Spirit comes from within and satisfies you, so that you can then be satisfied with what the Spirit is doing around you. The active presence of God connects your inward life with your outward circumstances.
Curiosity itself is always good, and only increases with holiness. The danger is in feeding the mind at the expense of the spirit.
Job was a deeply spiritual man, yet his intellectual knowledge of God was no match for a direct encounter. The advice of his friends only made things worse. God’s presence, however, instantly cured him of his delusions.
The apostle Paul was talking about money when he said, “God loves a cheerful giver,” but the same thing can be said about the gift of yourself. The delivering over of your entire being into the hands of God is the gift he seeks from you.
