By Gretchen Rubin
December is the month of gift-giving, and my birthday falls in December, so I get practically all my gifts during this month.
Often when I read, I’m struck by a particular passage without understanding why it has caught my attention, then over time, its significance becomes clear. I’ve read Story of a Soul, the spiritual memoir of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (my spiritual master), several times. Recently, I suddenly realized why I kept thinking about one particular paragraph.
Its context: one day in 1897, when she in her early twenties, and weakened by the tuberculosis that would soon kill her, Thérèse was sitting in her wheelchair in the garden of her convent. Ordered by her Prioress to complete an account of her childhood memories, she was trying unsuccessfully to write:
When... More...
