Here are some things I learned while reading "New Seeds of Contemplation" by Thomas Merton (my favorite spiritual writer):

1. the love of God seeks us in every situation

2. God's love seeks our good ("For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, NOT for woe, plans for a future full of hope" - Jeremiah 29:11)

3. God wants us to know our true self--an awakening that implies a death to our exterior self

4. Knowing our true self implies that we know our virtues as well as the attachments of our exterior self--addictions/sin (lust, gossip, pride, pre-marital sex, holding grudges, laziness, pornography, cheating, boasting, drunkenness, etc)

5. Knowing our addictions and our sin causes either reaction: 1) our refusal to change (either out of apathy OR out of FEAR because we are attached to our exterior self) and remain in the slavery of our desires, or 2) a risk of faith in which we "make choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality"

6. Those who choose #1 cannot received the "seeds of freedom" because they are in love with slavery, and thus their hearts are hardened against true love.

7. Those who choose #2, however, allow that seed to grow within them and yield a tremendous harvest

"My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom--still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: "Here is the one thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found... By consenting to His will with joy and doing it with gladness I have His love in my heart, because my will is now the same as His love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, Who is Love." - p. 18