Jesus as Friend:

To treat Jesus as a friend instead of just as God is to let him be a friend—and this is one way to grow in awareness of him as a friend.

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We will do very much more if we are plunged into interior and exterior darkness, filled with sorrow, weakness, exhaustion, without consolation, persecuted at every step, surrounded by constant failure, abandoned, ridiculed, scoffed at, as was Jesus on the Cross -- provided that we want by all means to draw all people to God.

- Saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941)