Chapter 9: Why Does God Allow Spiritual Desolation (Rule 9)

1.  What means is God using to make your soul great?  How are you assisting or resisting?

2.  Consider times when God's healing love worked in your life through spiritual desolation.  What did you gain?

3.  Reflect on an experience that you felt unprepared to handle, but did by God's grace.  Did you recognize His work at the time?  Did you invite Him into the situation right away?

4.  Examine a personal experiences with each of the three main causes of desolation.  How where they different?  similar?

Chapter 8: Spiritual Desolation: A Time for Patience (Rule 8)

1.  What helps you be faithful to the "God given tasks" of your vocation as wife and mother?

2.  How do you work to persist in patience?

3.  Do you have any tricks to counteract negative thinking or self-talk?

4.  Examine a grace spiral (page 109) that has occurred in your life.  Meditate on the actions/events in light of St. Paul's words (1 Cor 15:10), "His grace to me has not been ineffective.  Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me."

Chapter 7: Spiritual Desolation: A Time for Resistance (Rule 7)

St. Joan by George Bernard Shaw
envisage-contemplate or conceive of as a possibility or a desirable future event.

1.  Examine a past trial from God's perspective.  Looking back, what was the divine purpose in allowing it?  What did you learn or how did you grow?

2.  Consider how your natural powers: the ability to think, to choose, to call certain truths to mind and to envisage spiritual realities can assist in overcoming desolation.

3.  What trials are you able to resist more quickly and surely now than in the past?

4.  Take time this week to remember God's fidelity as He worked in your life, perhaps journaling or creating a spiritual time line of key moments in your spiritual journey.  Look back on it when you forget.