“You will guide my by your counsel,

and so you will lead me to glory.”

(Psalm 73)

How does that counsel come to us? The ways are countless. Since God is in everything, it follows that God can use everything in his never-ending process of guiding and leading us. 

The problem is that we can often miss his counsel because we don’t recognize it for what it is. In fact, there are times when we might outright reject his counsel because we don’t approve of the way it comes to us. Be careful. Be open. Tune your receiver to a broader bandwidth. Be especially on the lookout for the unexpected, the unorthodox, and for anything that arouses a great deal of resistance in us. So often we fight the word that leads to life.  

But just remember that, as Jesus has shown us so dramatically, sometimes the path that leads to glory leads through some pretty rough terrain at first. Just ask John the Baptist, whose feast we celebrate today. And by all means, keep in mind all the Christians in the world who are being beheaded now in 2015 for what they believe. May they reign in glory.