Divine Intimacy - Lenten Meditations for 2026 - Day 15

When the urge to fix everything by ourselves runs hot, the Scriptures offer a better way. We open with Esther’s desperate prayer, where trust replaces leverage, and follow Jesus on the road to Jerusalem as he overturns our ideas of power: greatness is service, honor is sacrifice, and confidence is born from dependence on the Father.

We bring those threads into real life with a candid look at self-reliance. Many of us were taught to power through, and that mindset often sneaks into prayer and penance. Drawing on Divine Intimacy, we explore why God allows our best-laid plans to fail when they rest on our own strength, and how humility—far from shrinking us—actually frees us to act with courage. You’ll hear how childlike trust does not cancel responsibility; it reshapes it. Repentance becomes lighter, service becomes joyful, and leadership becomes a quiet descent into love.

Along the way, we challenge cultural scripts that idolize going it alone and consider a saner middle: take ownership of your choices while leaning hard on grace. Expect practical takeaways you can use today—short prayers of surrender, small acts of hidden service, and a fresh lens for setbacks that turns them into invitations. By the end, you’ll have a clearer picture of how to walk Lent with confidence that does not come from you, but from the One who calls you.

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Transcript

Setting The Lenten Frame

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fifteenth day of Lent here. It's now been two full weeks since Ash Wednesday. And we are on Wednesday in the second week of Lent. And things are moving quite along. And after today, we'll have what for uh 31 more days of Lent. So just over basically a month until Easter. We're going to do what we've done every day so far, almost every day so far. We're going to do the readings from Mass for today, and then followed by um followed by readings from Divine Intimate Intimacy here. As I've done every other day, I'm going to throw up an image on screen so there's nothing to uh nothing to look at. And you just have to listen. And these videos go up on YouTube. And then you also have the audio on all the audio podcast apps. So without further ado, I'm gonna grab the missile here, and we'll start with our mass readings. Okay. So our lesson for today is from Esther 13, 8 through 11 and 15 through 17. In those days, Mordecai prayed to the Lord, saying, O Lord, Lord, Almighty King, for all things are in thy power. There is none that can resist thy will, if thou determined to save Israel. Thou hast made heaven and earth, and all things that are under the cope of heaven. Thou art Lord of all, and there is none that can reset resist thy majesty. And now, O Lord, O king, O God of Abraham, have mercy on thy people, because our enemies resolve to destroy us and extinguish thy inheritance. Despise not thy portion, which thou hast redeemed for thyself out of Egypt. Hear my supplication and be merciful to thy lot and inheritance, and turn our morning into joy, that we may live and praise thy name, O Lord, and shut not the mouths of them that sing to thee, O Lord our God. Now our gospel is from Matthew chapter twenty, seventeen through twenty eight. They shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified. And the third day he shall rise again. Then came to him the mother of the sons of Zebedee with her sons, adoring and asking something of him, who said to her, What wilt thou? She saith to him, Say that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left in thy kingdom. And Jesus answering said, You know not what you ask. Can you drink the chalice that I shall drink? They say to him, We can. He saith to them, My chalice indeed you shall drink, but to sit on my right hand on my right or left hand is not mine to give to you, but to them for whom it is prepared by my Father. The ten hearing it were moved with indignation against the two brethren. But Jesus called them to him, and said, You know that the princes of the Gentiles lorded over them, and they that are the greater exercise power upon them. It shall not be so among you, but whosoever will be the greater among you, let him be your minister, and he that will be first among you shall be your servant, even as the Son of Man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Okay, now we move on to the readings and meditations from divine intimacy. Humility and confidence.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Out of the depths of my misery I've cried to thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice, I trust in thee. Meditation one Christian humility does not lower, it elevates. It does not cast down, but gives courage. For the more it reveals to the soul its nothingness and objection, the more it moves toward God with confidence and abandonment. The very fact that in everything, in essence as an act, in the natural as in the supernatural order, we depend on Him, and that we can do nothing without Him, shows us that God wants to sustain us continually by His help and His grace. Consequently, the relations of a humble soul with God will be those of a child who confidently expects everything from its Father. This is the lesson that Jesus wished to give his apostles when they asked him who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Amen I say to you, unless you be converted and become his little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. To remain little, explains Saint Therese of the child Jesus, is to acknowledge one's nothingness and to expect everything from the good God, as the child expects everything from its father. Even among the poor, a child, while he is very little, is given everything that is necessary. But when he has grown, his father no longer wants to support him and says, Go to work now, you can rely on yourself. It is that I might never hear those words that I never wanted to grow up, because I felt incapable of earning my own living, eternal life. To the soul who humbly acknowledges its poverty and turns toward God with complete confidence, he is a very tender father who delights in showering his gifts upon it, and in doing for it what it cannot accomplish by itself. Then the smallest soul, that is, the one most thoroughly convinced of its own nothingness, becomes the greatest, since it has the greatness of God Himself at its command.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Meditation two.

Detachment From Self-Reliance

SPEAKER_00 7:42

God does not introduce a soul to a higher spiritual life, nor admit it to a deeper intimacy with himself, as long as it is not completely despoiled of all confidence in itself. When a soul practically forgets its nothingness, and still relies on its own strength, knowledge, initiative, or virtues, be it ever so little, God leaves it to itself. The failures which follow, the falls, the fruitlessness of all its works, all reveal its insufficiency. And the more a soul insists upon trusting itself, so much the more will the Lord prolong this experience of its nothingness. In speaking of her definite total conversion, Saint Teresa of Jesus confesses that what prevented her from overcoming the last obstacles was really a remnant of confidence which she still had in its in herself. I must have failed to put my whole confidence in his majesty and to have a complete distrust of myself. Confidence in God increases in proportion to our mistrust of ourselves. It becomes total when the soul, having acquired a thorough comprehensive comprehension of its nothingness, has lost all faith in its own resources. The soul then realizes the truth of Jesus' words. When you shall have done all these things that are commanded you, say we are unprofitable servants. Even if the soul has had much experience in the interior life, in prayer and in virtue, it knows that it cannot rely on its own strength at all. It realizes that even if it has worked for the glory of God, it cannot depend on its own works. Hence it will rely wholly and solely on God's mercy and grace. All its confidence rests on the infinite merits of Jesus, on the merciful love of the Heavenly Father, and on the workings of grace. This confidence makes it more courageous, more daring than ever, because it knows that with God it can do everything. What pleases Jesus, says the Saint of Lusseux, is to see me love my littleness and poverty, the blind hope that I have in his mercy. This is my only treasure.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

In all the colloquy.

Colloquy: Prayers Of Surrender

SPEAKER_00 10:17

But you deign to teach me the knowledge which makes me glory in my infirmities. This is a very great grace, and only in it do I find peace and contentment of heart, for now I understand your ways. You give as God, but you want humility of heart. O Lord, your light penetrates my soul and makes me understand how far from your ways are mine. Instead of being disturbed on account of my miseries and discouraged by my falls and failures, instead of pretending to succeed in everything and to accomplish great things, I must humbly accept the fact that I am weak, needy, and absolutely unable to get along without your help. How sweet it is, O my God, for a soul who loves you, to need you so much that it can do nothing without you. It is sweet for me, for in this way I learn that you wish constantly to take part in my poor life, that you want to sustain me always by your grace, and that you will never of yourself abandon me. To give me the fullness of your divine help, you are only waiting for me to come before you with the humble, trusting attitude of a child, who, not being able to rely on his own strength and resources, expects everything from his father. You wish me to be thoroughly convinced of my nothingness, and to accept with love the fact that I am nothing so that you may be my all. Deprive me, O Lord, of every remnant of confidence in myself. Every man is like the grass of the field which springs up today and tomorrow is not. Free me, O Lord, from such stupidity, and place me, I beg of you in the way of truth. O you who are truth, sanctify me in the truth, in the truth of my nothingness. You alone are good, my God, and you alone can make me good. You alone are just, and you alone can justify me. You alone are holy, and you alone can make me holy. The less I expect from myself, the more I can and will expect from you. Good will and constancy, strength and patience, purity and goodness, virtue and sanctity. Hasten, O Lord, to come to my aid. My nothingness implores you, my misery sighs for you.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Those are the mass readings and meditations from Divine Intimacy for today.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

And I don't know about you, but I know I find it hard to not um I find it hard to surrender uh surrender trust.

Personal Struggle With Surrender

Culture, Pride, And Isolation

Finding The Middle Ground

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Um not not not that I don't trust God, but uh I guess I I guess I've just always been raised not in a bad way to uh to just rely upon myself, be self-sufficient, um, you know, do everything that I can to succeed or to to provide, just you know, to to trust yourself to to do what you need to do. That is definitely um translated to my spiritual life as well, right? Like if uh if I've failed at something in the spiritual life, if I've sinned, if I've failed to do something, it's it's my fault, and I need to be the one to correct it and you know work through it and just buckle down and you know, so on and so forth. And once again, not that the responsibility isn't mine or or anything like that, but to surrender everything to to God and and and to come to the realization that that really without without him, there is nothing I can do myself uh for anything, um that's hard. And I think you know, in some in some ways, uh society as a whole has well, I shouldn't say society as a whole, but many have decried the lack of responsibility in people now for a couple generations, right? Um millennials zoomers, of course, are you know, boomers will say we're you know, there's no responsibility, no self-sufficiency, blah blah blah. Uh millennials and zoomers will say the same thing about boomers, so on and so forth, you know. General wisdom would say that the lack of self-responsibility, self-resufficiency, you know, it is a problem with society. But in a way, if you think about it, it's almost in some ways, it's the opposite, too. If you think of some of like the errors uh that are prevalent throughout society, things like feminism. Uh feminism, for instance, teaches that women should not surrender trust to uh to their fathers, to their husbands, um, and should instead rely only upon themselves. And uh we've we've seen the the horrors that has that have that has caused. You have things like atheism, which you know explicitly teach, you know, to not put trust into a god, but into to instead trust only only upon yourselves. Uh liberalism, the the political philosophy as a whole, you know, which sorry American conservatives, American conservatism is just another form of liberalism. But liberalism as a whole is all about um the individual. Only we're doing um only relying on yourself to do things for yourself, and it gets away from kind of the the medieval concepts of like the common good and things of that nature. Uh so many errors throughout our world today um kind of destroy that whole sense of humility, that whole sense of relying upon uh ultimately God, but relying upon your husband, relying upon um, you know, society as a whole to work for the common good. In instead, it uh so many errors of our day teach you to rely only upon yourself, to only put trust in yourself. And uh we gotta work against that, you know. Like many things, there is a middle ground where one can be one can recognize self-responsibility for the the the things in which maybe you've done wrong or haven't done well, but also recognize that um that we need to put trust in others. Uh ultimately we need to put trust in God, but we need to put trust in our our spouses, our families, our our you know, our our societies, our civilization, all these all these different things. If we all just are so proud where we all go it alone, um things get really bad. So that's my takeaway from all this for today. Uh tomorrow, Thursday, here in the second week of Lent should be normal for for these this recording. Um, I'll be traveling later in the day. Uh, but yeah, just to remind you also, the these for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm not exactly sure what they're gonna look like yet. I don't know if they're all gonna come out at you know the 8 a.m. central like they've been doing. That's the plan right now. Um, but the but yeah, we'll see what happens. Anyways, thank you all. Hope you have a great day, and we will see you tomorrow morning.