"Time, in which we have found nothing to offer up to God, is lost for eternity"

      "Every offering has value only insofar as one snatches it away from one's own benefit and dedicates it to God through this self-conquest. One loves and gives precisely because one loves, and because one considers what is given as a good, as a treasure. Love of creatures must be subordinated to the love of God, whom one is pledged to love above all things.
     "Time, in which we have found nothing to offer up to God, is lost for eternity. If it is only the duties of our vocation that we fulfill with dedication to the will of God; if it is the sweat of our faces that, in resignation, we wipe from our brow without murmuring; if it is suffering, temptations, difficulties with our fellowmen—everything we can present to God as an offering and can, through them, become like Jesus his Son. Where the sacrifice is great and manifold, there, in the same proportion, is the hope of glory more deeply and more securely grounded in the heart of him who makes it."

     St. Francis Xavier Seelos (1819-1867), Letter, as translated for the Liturgy of the hours, 5 October, Archives of the Redemptorists of the Baltimore Province, (variously (?) translated and) published now, presumably, in Sincerely, Seelos:  the collected letters of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, ed., trans., and introduced Carl Hoegerl, C.Ss.R. (New Orleans:  Seelos Center, 2008).