Consecration Through Joseph Day 1 - My Identity as Child of the Father

 What is it, then, for our hearts to rest in God?

Our adopted sonship with the Father occurs through our union with Christ . . . The journey toward union with God is the story of our human development. God initiates and invites us into this journey, and then accompanies us along the way and provides everything we need to keep going. Through Christ, he unites to our humanity, and our humanity can return to Him through Christ. This means we enter fully into the humanity of God through the door of the humanity of Christ. 

Greg Bottaro and Jen Settle   

Consecration to Jesus through Saint Joseph: An Integrated Look at the Holy Family

p. 11 -12

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."

Mathew 1:23

God has become human so as to be able, in all completeness, to live with us and die with us. We have found in Jesus a fellow human being who is so completely one with us that not a single weakness, pain, or temptation has remained foreign to him. Precisely because Jesus is God and without any sin, he is able to experience our sinful, broken human condition so thoroughly that we may say he knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more than we love ourselves.

No one else, however well disposed, is ever in a position to be with us so completely that we feel ourselves to be understood and loved without limit. We humans remain too self-centered to be able to forget ourselves fully for the other person's sake. But Jesus does give himself fully, he holds nothing back for himself, he wants to be with us in so total a fashion that we can never again feel alone. Jesus is the compassionate God who comes so close to us in our weakness that we can turn to him without fear.

Henri J. M. Nouwen

"Jesus: God With Us"

from Advent Expectations