Letters to His Roses

Dear Roses, “Believe that He loves you. He wants to help you Himself in the struggles which you must undergo. Believe in His Love, His exceeding Love.” Stumbling upon this quote from St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, (one of our patron saints), led to my pondering the power of simply believing, the power of child-like faith, in the Bridegroom’s deeply intimate love for me… for each and everyone of us. I began recalling the many stories in Scripture when Jesus tells someone who has come seeking healing that it is their faith that has saved them. He doesn’t require knowledge or understanding, nor that we deserve or earn His love… nothing but that we believe and have faith. And we know it is safe to believe in His Love that is beyond our comprehension because He is Truth and so He cannot sp...

Dear Roses, God wants us to be like His most precious Son and so He allows trials and sufferings that have the potential to make us more Christ-like. The key is these events have the potential to sanctify us but whether they do depends on us, on our free will. We must choose to accept our crosses as Christ accepted His. How can we be like Jesus in the times when it is most difficult to even retain our faith… times of intense suffering, our winters of exile? I contemplate Jesus’ moments of most excruciating suffering, the agony in the garden, the scourging at the pillar, and the Crucifixion and I understand that He was not outwardly joyful or cheerful in His suffering but He was willing. He was willing to suffer and die because His Love impelled Him to accept the will of His Father an...

Dear lovely Roses, What stirs your love for Jesus? Perhaps it is reading of His healing miracles, praying with Psalms of praise, singing of His love, gazing upon sacred art, praying the Rosary and contemplating His life with Mother Mary, or maybe just sitting silently letting Him gaze upon you. Probably, what kindles the fire of your love changes from day to day or season to season. This teaching of St. Teresa has given my heart and mind such freedom in prayer! My prayer is no longer about what I “should do” or even what is the “right thing” to do. It is about my heart and my Jesus’ Heart; it is about our spousal relationship; it is an intimate dialogue of love sometimes with words, sometimes with music and sometimes with silence. My prayer is as unique as my heart is unique. This prayer t...

Dear Roses, “There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways. Grace has the power to make straight the paths of human love.” This quote by St. John Paul the Great has given me much to ponder. Here is a bit of my pondering…. May we be unafraid to invite Jesus into the secret depths of our hearts so He can pour His healing grace upon all our wounds especially those caused by the “torturous ways of human love.” For by His grace, our hearts are made new and we are empowered to love Him and others as though we had never been wounded. God has promised to give us a new heart, ”I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you” Ezekiel 36:26, and Jesus wants to give us His very own Heart. One of my go-to prayers for years has been, “Jesus, meek and humble of he...

Dear Roses, I hold each one of you in my prayers and my heart. And I thought of you when I came upon an entry in my journal from February 2019 describing a moment of life-changing prayer. This healing experience with Jesus happened as I looked into my own eyes in a mirror and was astounded by what I saw. I decided to share this encounter with Christ straight from my journal without rewriting or editing. I pray that by sharing my story, you will find the courage to look yourself in the eyes and see Jesus gazing back at you. Together in His Heart, Laura 🌹 Seeing Jesus in Me Oh My Jesus, was that Your voice I heard tonight? Were those Your eyes I gazed into in my own reflection in the mirror? I was getting washed for bed and praying… praying to see Your loving gaze. Thanking you for my precio...

Dear Roses, As I drew the image below, I contemplated the Light, Christ, the Light of the world, that Our Lady bore within her very being… she opened her womb to God’s Plan as she had already opened her heart… and He filled her with His very Self… God the Creator of the Universe become one with our humanity within the womb more spacious than the heavens. I drew through tear-blinded eyes overcome by Love… the immensity of His Love and Light and her love… love of God that caused her to unhesitatingly say “Yes”… her love of us, of all her children, and of her precious Son, that caused her to bear, to birth, to mother, and to suffer with our Savior… how did she bear His Pure Light and Love within her finite yet sacred body and not just burst into brill...

Dear Roses, I give thanks to our God at every remembrance of you. I am so grateful for your continued prayers for my healing. Know that I am keeping each of you and your intentions in my daily prayers. This time of rest and physical healing gifts me with time of stillness and quiet to pray and reflect. And so, today’s letter is a brief reflection on my experience of speaking heart to Heart with Jesus hidden in the tabernacle. Even after the night that Jesus miraculously healed my chronic physical and mental illness there was still much healing work to be done in my heart. I was drawn by the gentle yet overwhelming and irresistible force of His Love in the Eucharist. I began going to daily Mass and found that I just could not leave the church afterwards. I spent every free moment I could fi...

Dear Roses, On June 24th 2019, I said “Yes” to Jesus the Bridegroom’s proposal to consecrate my heart and soul to Him by making a private betrothal promise. The waterfall of healing, grace, and pure love He has showered on me this past year is amazing! I started Hope’s Garden as a means to sharing the beautiful healing truth of Christ the Bridegroom’s deeply personal and intimate spousal love for each and everyone of us. He is the one, true, eternal Spouse of every soul regardless of your vocation or state in life. He offers His unconditional love and only asks that we reciprocate by opening our wounded hearts to His loving gaze and saying “Yes, let it be done unto me according to Your word.” I urge you to place any fears, doubts, and disbelief into our Mother Mary’s hands and ask her to w...

Dear Roses, The Grace and Peace of God be with you! I am delighted to be writing to you again and sharing my love of the Bridegroom and His divine love song, The Song of Songs, with you. The Bridegroom’s love song is the root of all that is in bloom this autumn at Hope’s Garden. We will be live streaming the third session of our Eternally Loved Virtual Workshop tonight on our Facebook page. It is not too late to join us! Each session stands alone and offers many seeds for spiritual growth. Tonight’s talk by De Yarrison will focus on tending to the vineyard of our hearts so the focus of today’s letter is the verses from The Song of Songs that inspired this talk. “Take no notice of my swarthiness, it is the sun that has burnt me. My mother’s sons turned their anger on me, they made me look a...

Dear Roses, This past weekend was the two year anniversary of Jesus leading me out of the desert of divorce and into His freedom. On the very evening that my divorce was finalized He came to me as the radiant beautiful Bridegroom of The Song of Songs and asked me to be His bride. As my children would say… Jesus didn’t wait a hot second to reveal His desire for me to be all His! In that moment, my response was disbelief… “Me?? You cannot possibly want me. I am such a mess!” And yet He did and He does! Not just despite my wounds and imperfections but actually because of them!  And now, I can say with the Bride of The Song of Songs, “I am black but lovely, daughters of Jerusalem.” because my Lord and my Bridegroom loves me right here and now and His love heals, sanctifies, and red...

Dear Roses, “Return, return, O maid of Shulam!”  7:1 Praying this verse from The Song of Songs has been a key to maintaining my inner calm despite the chaos around me and anxious thoughts in my mind. Making it a frequent prayer is a reminder to pause, breathe deeply, and shift my focus, my thoughts, and my heart back to Jesus dwelling within me. As the bride of Christ, I am betrothed to Him Who is Peace; I am the “maid of Peace.” His peace that passes all understanding is mine if I choose to ask, to open, and to receive His peace again and again. And so when I feel myself becoming anxious and overwhelmed by the work and worries of life, by repeating slowly and prayerfully this Scripture, I choose to return interiorly to the One Who is my peace, the One Who is the Only One Necessary Thing. ...