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In her autobiography, "The Story of a Soul", St. Thérèse of Lisieux describes an inner struggle that many of us can relate to. As she describes it, she was oversensitive, overly dependent on other people’s opinions of her, and convinced that her happiness was dependent on her ability to please others.
Thérèse summed up her sense of being in bondage to her feelings when, referring to her older sister, she said, “If poor Céline omitted to look happy and surprised about these good deeds of mine, I was miserable about it and burst into tears.” Thérèse was more concerned with calming her own sensitivities and pleasing others than with being true to herself. She knew that “God had to perform a miracle on a small scale to make me grow up.”
That little miracle was granted to Thérèse early on Christmas morning, just days before her fourteenth birthday. That morning she received the grace to leave my childhood’s days behind; call it, if you will, the grace of complete conversion. We’d just got back from Midnight Mass…. I would go off to find my Christmas slipper in the chimney corner;…
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