This year at the Easter Vigil, I received the Eucharist for the first time. I was overcome by the reality that my heart was united with the heart of God and not merely in a metaphorical sense, but in the truest sense there is. In a single moment, the 2,000-year span that separated me from the physical presence of my savior vanished. 
Like His disciples, family, and friends who had touched His hands, feet, and face, I had held Him and embraced Him. It was an overwhelming joy. 
But that feeling gave way to an unexpected and incredibly humbling thought: My joy was nothing in comparison to Christ’s joy in that moment. 
My desire to be united to Him was a faint echo of His deep desire to be united to me. It’s as though Christ was saying, as He did to His apostles, that He had been eagerly waiting and desiring to share this meal with me. I am grateful to encounter Him in the Eucharist, and I am in awe of the fact that through the Eucharist He desires to encounter me.