From my heart do I sing, from my all do I give.

By Ralph Hathaway

07/25/2023 • View profile

What I am is not mine as I look upon the Christ who is all that I am. Words that have penetrated my weakness and will become to me the forgiveness promised through the Passion he gave on the Cross of new life.

It is not the easiest reality to sit back and ponder on that Good Friday that as a weakened person through my personal sin, Jesus, the Son of the living God, became every sensuous movement that is me and willingly allowed those nails to sever his flesh for me?

The pleasure I felt at each reality of sin’s occurrence came too quickly and without remorse until the desires were over. Then, praise God, the knowledge of mistrust became the sustenance of conviction that turned my heart back to Christ. This is the “all that I give” as a song of peace coming from a forgiven soul.

How often did I see the grace of God before me, offering the gift of mercy and welcoming my weakened heart into his own Sacred Heart with rays of love penetrating my own weak heart. Who am I, a man in sin that the Son of God, who is God Incarnate, would stoop to my level and pick me up from the knees no longer able to stand before his Sacred Image of love and forgiveness?

Who indeed, is this image and likeness that foreshadowed myself that would not adhere to his simple command of obedience and trust.? A creator who brought everything in the cosmos into being, a garden of beauty which is human flesh to honor him, and a promise to accept our weakened existence to pay the ransom for divine insult.

O, the beauty of the soul that knows what grace really is when the sins that cluttered the pure image of God from within his all have now been erased from the punishment due him. What God created out of love, he now forgives out of the same love. His desire that man would live with him forever in eternal bliss. That is the story of how “from my all do I give back” what never was mine until I learned the grace of God’s forgiveness.

Ralph B. Hathaway