Astonishment

Reading this morning from the small prayer book, The Light of the World, Prayers to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Translated by the V. Rev. Archimandrite Maximos Costas, New Rome Press,  A prayer to Our Lord Jesus Christ, by St Isaac the Syrian, these words:
"Let your soul which You surrendered to your Father when you were on the cross, guide me to your grace..."
The word 'soul', jumped out like a hammer, and whacked me on the head. 
Jesus, fully God and fully man, as He is defined in Christian Tradition, struck me with a new reality. 
Jesus is fully man, in that he was born of a woman, and moved on this earth healing people, loving those around Him, and being attacked, stoned, slandered, punched, beaten, crucified, killed, and then resurrected from the dead. In the process of His life, He carried with him a soul, just like each of us. 
Here is the thing that I had not seen before: In His Heart, the Father lived and spoke to Him, and in this knowledge, He labored in all that the Father intended of Him. And see how He did this, by treating disrespect, violence, and distrust and all the sins committed against Him without holding it in His heart.  No grudges, there, simply pointing out, “behold the leaven of the Pharisees”.
In this He set a pattern for the “New Adam”, a name that He is called. By laying aside all of the passions, (avarice, pride, vanity, lust, etc.) He did not respond to those traps which we fall into. By carrying the Father in His heart and responding to the Father’s direction, the hardest perhaps, to wait for Lazarus to die, and the other to be crucified, He laid a pattern for us to follow.
At His resurrection he laid the pattern and refashioned us in His image as mankind.  We, through prayer, fasting, and Loving of Him, not ourselves, have been conceived to carry Him in our hearts, listening for His Instruction, or the instruction of the Holy Spirit whom the Father sent to instruct us. If we do not act on the passions when they confront us, or we when are tempted- we gain Theosis, (the deification of man), to become, little Christs. Listening, not acting on impulse, and not struggling with the why of things, so much as trusting what we know is right in our hearts and following that even if it is hard. That is the way Saints are made.
This is an amazing gift.  The words of Jesus to Peter, when he asked about John come to me, “What of Him?” Jesus says, “Don’t look at him, follow me.”