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Remain in Me and I in You: Relating to God as a Person, Not an Idea
“They should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (John 17:3).
Sometimes we become so consumed with “activism” that God becomes a mere concept, an uplifting idea we try to wrap our minds around, and we forget that He is really present and in love with us. Far too many souls, even good religious souls, tend to forget that God is a Person — a Trinity of Persons, in fact — longing to enter into a relationship with us.
Fr. Wayne Sattler awakens us and places us in that fruitful mindset. He relates how Mother Teresa of Calcutta would ask her sisters, “Do you really know the living Jesus — not through books, but by being with Him in your heart?” Fr. Sattler’s stories will stir you to want to authentically know, love, and serve the Lord in your daily life and respond meaningfully to God’s invitation to “remain in me and I in you” (John 15:4).
Drawing from Scripture, from saints such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and from contemporary examples, Father guides you into a more vibrant prayer life and a deeper, more personal relationship with God by
Why it is important to offer vocal prayers with fervor and devotionHow to “waste time” with God, as inspired by St. Teresa of AvilaWays to grow in purity of heart so that you come to see God’s faceHow to instill the desire to be where God is in your soulThe ways to attain peace in the place God wants you to beWith this book, may you be renewed in the joyful truth that God is love, a Trinity of Persons seeking a relationship with you that is so intimate that it is best described as union. This powerful book will open your heart to God, help you overcome your fears, and enable you to experience authentic love, beauty, and freedom.
Sometimes we become so consumed with “activism” that God becomes a mere concept, an uplifting idea we try to wrap our minds around, and we forget that He is really present and in love with us. Far too many souls, even good religious souls, tend to forget that God is a Person — a Trinity of Persons, in fact — longing to enter into a relationship with us.
Fr. Wayne Sattler awakens us and places us in that fruitful mindset. He relates how Mother Teresa of Calcutta would ask her sisters, “Do you really know the living Jesus — not through books, but by being with Him in your heart?” Fr. Sattler’s stories will stir you to want to authentically know, love, and serve the Lord in your daily life and respond meaningfully to God’s invitation to “remain in me and I in you” (John 15:4).
Drawing from Scripture, from saints such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and from contemporary examples, Father guides you into a more vibrant prayer life and a deeper, more personal relationship with God by
Why it is important to offer vocal prayers with fervor and devotionHow to “waste time” with God, as inspired by St. Teresa of AvilaWays to grow in purity of heart so that you come to see God’s faceHow to instill the desire to be where God is in your soulThe ways to attain peace in the place God wants you to beWith this book, may you be renewed in the joyful truth that God is love, a Trinity of Persons seeking a relationship with you that is so intimate that it is best described as union. This powerful book will open your heart to God, help you overcome your fears, and enable you to experience authentic love, beauty, and freedom.
- GenresCatholic
144 pages, Paperback
Published March 18, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 30, 2026
3.5 stars rounded up. There were soo many good nuggets from this book that I will be sitting with for a while. But it’s just not the book I expected it to be. I felt like the introduction was the only part of the book that discussed relating to Jesus as a person rather than an idea. And because of that, I had a hard time not being at least a little disappointed - even in the midst of so many good reflections.
March 2, 2026
“To gain the happiness of heaven, we must know, love and serve God in this world.”
St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa) would wisely ask her sisters a very telling question, “Do you really know the living Jesus, not through books, but by being with Him in your heart?”
Part One: Knowing God
Benedict XVI in which he stated that “the first ‘task’ a priest has to do is to be a believer.”
“the man who has God with him is never less alone than when he is alone.” In their cell, the monk is alone at last with “Him whom my soul loves” (Song 3: 3), and “with Him who we know loves us.”
Solitude is the conscious choice to be alone with God. Isolation is just being left alone.
the great desert father Abba Moses, who advised the monks under his care to “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
“If you can’t find God here [pointing to his heart], you will not find Him anywhere.”
The first step in coming to know any person is to become aware of their presence.
to know Him as the person He is, to enter into a relationship with Him as a person, we will first need to know His name and we will need to talk to Him. When we do this with God, we call it prayer.
St. John Chrysostom taught, “Whether or not our prayer is heard depends not on the number of words, but on the fervor of our souls.”
the Lord’s Prayer - a gift from Jesus to His followers, lovingly formed with great care to lead us into a deep relationship with God.
We never get so advanced in prayer that we don’t pray vocally. Just as in marriage, a couple is never so intimate that they don’t communicate verbally.
as our relationship with God progresses, we will want to become better acquainted with His thoughts, His ways, His emotions. In vocal prayer we did all the talking. Meditation is our initial effort to listen to God.
Meditation is also referred to as mental prayer. Mental prayer, St. Teresa of Avila writes, “is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.”
To know God more distinctly as the person He is, we will need to learn to waste time with God.
The time St. Jerome spent with Sacred Scripture led him to the conviction that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
Vulgate means “in the common tongue.”
For a kiss to be a deep form of communication, it requires full, consensual attention. Talking will necessarily stop, and when the communication deepens, so will thoughts. A kiss can be the gateway to eventually “knowing someone” in the biblical sense. To “know” someone in the Bible refers to the intimacy of the marital embrace. In the marital embrace something even more profound will be communicated between the two persons now joined together by God.
Just as the kiss can eventually lead to the union of the marital embrace, contemplation is the gateway that will hopefully lead us to union with God, to “know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13: 12). Union with God is the ultimate end we hope for. To lead us to union with God, there is first what we might call the kiss of contemplation.
Vocal prayer might express what a great thing it is to know and be known by God. Meditation can try and deepen in our heart what we know of God, His thoughts, His ways, His will. Our imagination could do some pretty amazing things in meditation. It will all pale in comparison with the actual kiss of contemplation. In contemplation, something of God is made known in a way that other forms of prayer can only lead to. As St. Teresa of Avila explains, “God so places Himself in the interior part of the soul that when it returns to itself, it can in no way doubt that it was in God and God was in it.”
Contemplation is something I can only be disposed toward receiving, it is not something I can bring about on my own.
St. Teresa observes how the Lord gives such favors “in conformity with the love we have for Him.”
Let Your Mind Stop When the slightest inclination then comes to put down what you are doing and close your eyes, do that. The kiss of contemplation may be coming. For the kiss to come, it is necessary for the talking to stop.
Both St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross are careful to recognize the suspending of our senses as the work of God in a soul as it begins to receive His gift of contemplation.
In the human experience of a deep kiss, some may experience getting weak in the knees. In this deep kiss of God, it would seem to be the neck.
Although contemplation is what God does in prayer, the kiss still takes two. Going back to the basics, a kiss requires the free, mutual participation of two people.
Think of all the times God may be trying to come in for the kiss of contemplation, but we would not stop talking.
It is not unusual for a child to experience this “secret, peaceful, and loving inflow of God's love.”
There is another level at which a foreign language can be appreciated. When one is fluent, no translation is necessary. It comes peacefully.
In vocal prayer we take what we know in human terms and try to express it to the Divine. In meditation we attempt to take what has been divinely revealed and translate it into what we can humanly grasp. In contemplation, no translation is necessary. It comes peacefully. We are now fluent in the silent language of God.
as only God can do in prayer, He draws me into His rest and allows me to emerge refreshed, renewed in a way that a few minutes of sleep could never do.
St. Teresa assures us that we can “be certain that the more advanced you see you are in love for your neighbor, the more advanced you will be in the love of God.”
Part Two: Loving God
“Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. . . . [T] he lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
Philia is a love that affirms the goodness of a person based more on their virtues.
Marital union is an image to help us appreciate the reality of our union with God.
have found it helpful to think of marriage as like a photograph of the Bahamas and union with God as like being in the Bahamas. A photograph is nice to have, to hang on your wall and let it inspire you to get to the Bahamas. When you arrive there, it will not even dawn on you to look at the picture, because you are immersed in the beauty of being in the Bahamas.
Union with God is infinitely beyond the experience of human intimacy.
When sexual activity is separated from eros, our ability to love authentically is damaged,
Great care must be taken to ensure that it is the marital embrace being sought and not a mere sexual escape. To embrace means to take into one’s arms. To escape is to flee suffering by stepping “out of one’s cape.” The embrace is an in; the escape is an out. How fulfilling the experience of taking into one’s arms the commitment of being faithful in good times and bad, sickness and health, till death do they part, rather than merely looking for a moment’s escape from the hardships of life by stepping out of one’s capes.
St. Teresa of Avila - “The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer—and don’t forget this because it’s very important—should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every possible effort to bring his will into conformity with God’s will.”
“If anyone wishes to come after me,” Jesus said, “he must 1) deny himself 2) and take up his cross daily 3) and follow me.”
“the initial thing necessary for such favors is to love God without self-interest.”
Mother Teresa - In her private writings, she painfully expressed how her love for God was being purified. Amid her dryness in prayer, with God seeming so absent, her love became so pure, so free of self-interest, that she writes how she was willing to accept this suffering “to the end of life.”
St. Augustine came to recognize, “If we receive the Eucharist worthily, we become what we receive.”
When we come to Mass looking to “get something out of it,” our love for Mass will remain at a very sentimental level. We will tend to measure our experience of Mass by how we feel. How did the music make me feel? How did the homily make me feel? How reverently did I feel it was being celebrated? When we don’t get the feeling we were hoping for, it might seem as if we “didn’t get anything out of Mass,” or that “Mass was boring,” as otherwise, we go through the same routine each time… to say “we do not get anything out of Mass” is perhaps the deepest insult we could give to Jesus Christ… For in Mass, at every Mass, Jesus gives us Himself.
To be made without spot or wrinkle or any such thing is what will happen when we are truly Loving God.
St. John of the Cross - “where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love.”
give our consent for God to love out of us all that is not of Him. The purity of heart with which we hope to see God is, in the end, God’s work in us. “A clean heart create for me, God”
The path by which our heart is made pure by God is referred to as the passive purifications. Passive, for it is the work of God purifying our heart, a work we are free to either give our consent to or walk away from.
For most of us, it will be in Purgatory that God creates in us a pure heart.
Loving God consists in giving our consent to allowing His love to purify our heart in this way. Loving God then ultimately consists in allowing Him to love out of me all that is not of Him.
All God wants to do is love us. All God needs from us to receive His love is our poverty. He waits for us to come to Him with empty hands so that we might “receive His gifts, His love, Himself.”
pray for the grace to see what cord or thread may be keeping us from allowing God to enter our poverty and put His love there.
simple penance of looking at the crucifix while saying, “He did that for me”
What is most pleasing to God are the souls who receive Him as their Bridegroom. Souls who are intent on Loving God by allowing Him to sanctify them. Loving God by consenting to His work of creating in us a new, clean heart. Loving God by allowing Him to remove from our bodies the stony heart, and being made without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Loving God as He loves out of us all that is not of Him, so that we, in turn, may come to “see him as he is” (1 John 3: 2).
‘Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors to Christ.’ Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life.
Part Three: Serving God
Serving God is what happens when we are Knowing God and Loving God, for then we will want to be where He is.
the servant who is faithful in small matters will be entrusted with more.
“God needs nothing of our wealth, but He does need our poverty, through which, alone, we may receive His gifts, His love, Himself. God is not able to be Himself, to be love, if He is not able to be self-outpouring into our hearts in the extravagant folly of His gratuitous love.”
Our wounds, our sins, our weakness, our poverty, can sometimes prove to be the precise place we do not want to be led. Yet it is precisely there that we realize more deeply how we “couldn’t find a better friend.” Jesus is the only Savior.
By being with God in our poverty, where we need to be loved, where we need to be saved, we realize how “no one else understands you as well as he does, and no one knows like him how to console and help.”
‘Follow me’ ” (John 21: 18–19). Jesus knew where Simon Peter needed to be led to become the saint he was created to be. Just as Jesus met Peter where he needed to be loved, where he needed to be saved, He does the same thing for each of us.
Our Lord knew where Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu needed to be led to become St. Teresa of Calcutta.
St. Catherine of Siena’s observation, “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
Our Lord knew where Karol Wojtyla needed to be led to become St. John Paul II.
It is by being alone with God in our heart that we will hear Our Lord ask, “Do you love me?” If we listen carefully, we will hear Him ask us again and again and again. We must pray for the desire to truly know Him, love Him, and be where He is.
God never surfeits us with the gift of himself but creates in us an ever larger capacity for love and, having done this, he replenishes us with a desire, a thirst, more ardent still. And it will always be this way with God for eternity without end, because God is without end.
“Do you think God needs your gifts and talents to save the world?” “He doesn’t! He needs you! Give yourself to Him and let Him decide how to use you!”
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do. It is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
“Give yourself to God and let Him decide how to use you.”
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do; it is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do. It is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
Peter is martyred by being crucified upside down. The “kind of death [by which] he would glorify God.
We must strive to be “like clay in the hand of the potter” (Jer. 18: 6), recognizing how the potter has “a right over the clay” (Rom. 9: 21). For outside of this potter’s house, “neither security nor peace will be found.”
To be who God created us to be, for our capacity to be filled by Him to continually increase, we must be willing to be formed by Him again and again in matters big and in matters small.
St. John Henry Newman - I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; “the Lord doesn’t look so much at the greatness of our works as at the love with which they are done.”
Little Flower was canonized because she did small things with extraordinary love.
in Heaven we will get a new body, but the soul we die with is ours forever. This brief time on earth is given to determine the capacity of our soul forever. That is why God is so intent upon leading us to where our capacity to be filled by Him will increase.
God’s plan for peace on earth is no longer an idea. It is a Person!
serve the Risen Lord “like sheep in the midst of wolves,”
the Person who is our peace, who has made our peace “by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1: 20). Those who share in this authentic relationship realize, as did Benedict XVI, how “the peace of Christ is not synonymous with the mere absence of conflicts. On the contrary, Jesus’ peace is the result of a constant battle against evil.”
St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa) would wisely ask her sisters a very telling question, “Do you really know the living Jesus, not through books, but by being with Him in your heart?”
Part One: Knowing God
Benedict XVI in which he stated that “the first ‘task’ a priest has to do is to be a believer.”
“the man who has God with him is never less alone than when he is alone.” In their cell, the monk is alone at last with “Him whom my soul loves” (Song 3: 3), and “with Him who we know loves us.”
Solitude is the conscious choice to be alone with God. Isolation is just being left alone.
the great desert father Abba Moses, who advised the monks under his care to “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
“If you can’t find God here [pointing to his heart], you will not find Him anywhere.”
The first step in coming to know any person is to become aware of their presence.
to know Him as the person He is, to enter into a relationship with Him as a person, we will first need to know His name and we will need to talk to Him. When we do this with God, we call it prayer.
St. John Chrysostom taught, “Whether or not our prayer is heard depends not on the number of words, but on the fervor of our souls.”
the Lord’s Prayer - a gift from Jesus to His followers, lovingly formed with great care to lead us into a deep relationship with God.
We never get so advanced in prayer that we don’t pray vocally. Just as in marriage, a couple is never so intimate that they don’t communicate verbally.
as our relationship with God progresses, we will want to become better acquainted with His thoughts, His ways, His emotions. In vocal prayer we did all the talking. Meditation is our initial effort to listen to God.
Meditation is also referred to as mental prayer. Mental prayer, St. Teresa of Avila writes, “is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.”
To know God more distinctly as the person He is, we will need to learn to waste time with God.
The time St. Jerome spent with Sacred Scripture led him to the conviction that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
Vulgate means “in the common tongue.”
For a kiss to be a deep form of communication, it requires full, consensual attention. Talking will necessarily stop, and when the communication deepens, so will thoughts. A kiss can be the gateway to eventually “knowing someone” in the biblical sense. To “know” someone in the Bible refers to the intimacy of the marital embrace. In the marital embrace something even more profound will be communicated between the two persons now joined together by God.
Just as the kiss can eventually lead to the union of the marital embrace, contemplation is the gateway that will hopefully lead us to union with God, to “know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13: 12). Union with God is the ultimate end we hope for. To lead us to union with God, there is first what we might call the kiss of contemplation.
Vocal prayer might express what a great thing it is to know and be known by God. Meditation can try and deepen in our heart what we know of God, His thoughts, His ways, His will. Our imagination could do some pretty amazing things in meditation. It will all pale in comparison with the actual kiss of contemplation. In contemplation, something of God is made known in a way that other forms of prayer can only lead to. As St. Teresa of Avila explains, “God so places Himself in the interior part of the soul that when it returns to itself, it can in no way doubt that it was in God and God was in it.”
Contemplation is something I can only be disposed toward receiving, it is not something I can bring about on my own.
St. Teresa observes how the Lord gives such favors “in conformity with the love we have for Him.”
Let Your Mind Stop When the slightest inclination then comes to put down what you are doing and close your eyes, do that. The kiss of contemplation may be coming. For the kiss to come, it is necessary for the talking to stop.
Both St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross are careful to recognize the suspending of our senses as the work of God in a soul as it begins to receive His gift of contemplation.
In the human experience of a deep kiss, some may experience getting weak in the knees. In this deep kiss of God, it would seem to be the neck.
Although contemplation is what God does in prayer, the kiss still takes two. Going back to the basics, a kiss requires the free, mutual participation of two people.
Think of all the times God may be trying to come in for the kiss of contemplation, but we would not stop talking.
It is not unusual for a child to experience this “secret, peaceful, and loving inflow of God's love.”
There is another level at which a foreign language can be appreciated. When one is fluent, no translation is necessary. It comes peacefully.
In vocal prayer we take what we know in human terms and try to express it to the Divine. In meditation we attempt to take what has been divinely revealed and translate it into what we can humanly grasp. In contemplation, no translation is necessary. It comes peacefully. We are now fluent in the silent language of God.
as only God can do in prayer, He draws me into His rest and allows me to emerge refreshed, renewed in a way that a few minutes of sleep could never do.
St. Teresa assures us that we can “be certain that the more advanced you see you are in love for your neighbor, the more advanced you will be in the love of God.”
Part Two: Loving God
“Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. . . . [T] he lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
Philia is a love that affirms the goodness of a person based more on their virtues.
Marital union is an image to help us appreciate the reality of our union with God.
have found it helpful to think of marriage as like a photograph of the Bahamas and union with God as like being in the Bahamas. A photograph is nice to have, to hang on your wall and let it inspire you to get to the Bahamas. When you arrive there, it will not even dawn on you to look at the picture, because you are immersed in the beauty of being in the Bahamas.
Union with God is infinitely beyond the experience of human intimacy.
When sexual activity is separated from eros, our ability to love authentically is damaged,
Great care must be taken to ensure that it is the marital embrace being sought and not a mere sexual escape. To embrace means to take into one’s arms. To escape is to flee suffering by stepping “out of one’s cape.” The embrace is an in; the escape is an out. How fulfilling the experience of taking into one’s arms the commitment of being faithful in good times and bad, sickness and health, till death do they part, rather than merely looking for a moment’s escape from the hardships of life by stepping out of one’s capes.
St. Teresa of Avila - “The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer—and don’t forget this because it’s very important—should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every possible effort to bring his will into conformity with God’s will.”
“If anyone wishes to come after me,” Jesus said, “he must 1) deny himself 2) and take up his cross daily 3) and follow me.”
“the initial thing necessary for such favors is to love God without self-interest.”
Mother Teresa - In her private writings, she painfully expressed how her love for God was being purified. Amid her dryness in prayer, with God seeming so absent, her love became so pure, so free of self-interest, that she writes how she was willing to accept this suffering “to the end of life.”
St. Augustine came to recognize, “If we receive the Eucharist worthily, we become what we receive.”
When we come to Mass looking to “get something out of it,” our love for Mass will remain at a very sentimental level. We will tend to measure our experience of Mass by how we feel. How did the music make me feel? How did the homily make me feel? How reverently did I feel it was being celebrated? When we don’t get the feeling we were hoping for, it might seem as if we “didn’t get anything out of Mass,” or that “Mass was boring,” as otherwise, we go through the same routine each time… to say “we do not get anything out of Mass” is perhaps the deepest insult we could give to Jesus Christ… For in Mass, at every Mass, Jesus gives us Himself.
To be made without spot or wrinkle or any such thing is what will happen when we are truly Loving God.
St. John of the Cross - “where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love.”
give our consent for God to love out of us all that is not of Him. The purity of heart with which we hope to see God is, in the end, God’s work in us. “A clean heart create for me, God”
The path by which our heart is made pure by God is referred to as the passive purifications. Passive, for it is the work of God purifying our heart, a work we are free to either give our consent to or walk away from.
For most of us, it will be in Purgatory that God creates in us a pure heart.
Loving God consists in giving our consent to allowing His love to purify our heart in this way. Loving God then ultimately consists in allowing Him to love out of me all that is not of Him.
All God wants to do is love us. All God needs from us to receive His love is our poverty. He waits for us to come to Him with empty hands so that we might “receive His gifts, His love, Himself.”
pray for the grace to see what cord or thread may be keeping us from allowing God to enter our poverty and put His love there.
simple penance of looking at the crucifix while saying, “He did that for me”
What is most pleasing to God are the souls who receive Him as their Bridegroom. Souls who are intent on Loving God by allowing Him to sanctify them. Loving God by consenting to His work of creating in us a new, clean heart. Loving God by allowing Him to remove from our bodies the stony heart, and being made without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Loving God as He loves out of us all that is not of Him, so that we, in turn, may come to “see him as he is” (1 John 3: 2).
‘Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors to Christ.’ Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life.
Part Three: Serving God
Serving God is what happens when we are Knowing God and Loving God, for then we will want to be where He is.
the servant who is faithful in small matters will be entrusted with more.
“God needs nothing of our wealth, but He does need our poverty, through which, alone, we may receive His gifts, His love, Himself. God is not able to be Himself, to be love, if He is not able to be self-outpouring into our hearts in the extravagant folly of His gratuitous love.”
Our wounds, our sins, our weakness, our poverty, can sometimes prove to be the precise place we do not want to be led. Yet it is precisely there that we realize more deeply how we “couldn’t find a better friend.” Jesus is the only Savior.
By being with God in our poverty, where we need to be loved, where we need to be saved, we realize how “no one else understands you as well as he does, and no one knows like him how to console and help.”
‘Follow me’ ” (John 21: 18–19). Jesus knew where Simon Peter needed to be led to become the saint he was created to be. Just as Jesus met Peter where he needed to be loved, where he needed to be saved, He does the same thing for each of us.
Our Lord knew where Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu needed to be led to become St. Teresa of Calcutta.
St. Catherine of Siena’s observation, “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
Our Lord knew where Karol Wojtyla needed to be led to become St. John Paul II.
It is by being alone with God in our heart that we will hear Our Lord ask, “Do you love me?” If we listen carefully, we will hear Him ask us again and again and again. We must pray for the desire to truly know Him, love Him, and be where He is.
God never surfeits us with the gift of himself but creates in us an ever larger capacity for love and, having done this, he replenishes us with a desire, a thirst, more ardent still. And it will always be this way with God for eternity without end, because God is without end.
“Do you think God needs your gifts and talents to save the world?” “He doesn’t! He needs you! Give yourself to Him and let Him decide how to use you!”
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do. It is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
“Give yourself to God and let Him decide how to use you.”
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do; it is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
Serving God is not about the actual work that we do. It is about Knowing God, Loving God, and desiring to be where He is.
Peter is martyred by being crucified upside down. The “kind of death [by which] he would glorify God.
We must strive to be “like clay in the hand of the potter” (Jer. 18: 6), recognizing how the potter has “a right over the clay” (Rom. 9: 21). For outside of this potter’s house, “neither security nor peace will be found.”
To be who God created us to be, for our capacity to be filled by Him to continually increase, we must be willing to be formed by Him again and again in matters big and in matters small.
St. John Henry Newman - I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; “the Lord doesn’t look so much at the greatness of our works as at the love with which they are done.”
Little Flower was canonized because she did small things with extraordinary love.
in Heaven we will get a new body, but the soul we die with is ours forever. This brief time on earth is given to determine the capacity of our soul forever. That is why God is so intent upon leading us to where our capacity to be filled by Him will increase.
God’s plan for peace on earth is no longer an idea. It is a Person!
serve the Risen Lord “like sheep in the midst of wolves,”
the Person who is our peace, who has made our peace “by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1: 20). Those who share in this authentic relationship realize, as did Benedict XVI, how “the peace of Christ is not synonymous with the mere absence of conflicts. On the contrary, Jesus’ peace is the result of a constant battle against evil.”
April 1, 2026
A RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
Knowing God, Loving God, and Serving God are the three sections of this wonderful book. Fr. Sattler covers these topics in depth with a conversational style. I recommend this book to anyone interested in growing on their journey to God.
Knowing God, Loving God, and Serving God are the three sections of this wonderful book. Fr. Sattler covers these topics in depth with a conversational style. I recommend this book to anyone interested in growing on their journey to God.
March 26, 2025
Wonderful book. Much spiritual food to ponder
April 6, 2025
A wonderful, spiritual book.
April 5, 2026
If read slowly and thoughtfully there are many beautiful insights into how we can go from just going through the motions of faith to actually loving God.
May 15, 2026
A very thoughtful, spiritual work. It gave me a lot to think about--how can I grow in my relationship with Jesus? What are the things that still keep me from understanding His love more deeply?
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