Spirituality for Beginners

Fr. Bede's almost-daily reflections. When it comes to the spiritual life, we're all beginners. I also send these out by email. Contact me at bcamera@anselm.edu. God bless!





Thursday, December 17, 2015

God is working things out for you.

Today’s gift from the prophet Isaiah:

And I will lead the blind in a way that they know not,
in paths that they have not known
I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them.  (Isaiah 42:16)

No matter what we may have planned, we don’t really know what the rest of this day will bring us. Perhaps things will go as we have planned, but perhaps things will go the way God has planned and perhaps His plans are different than ours. Have you ever found this to be true? I know I have. In fact, I wrote about it in a reflection back in June:

A few months ago I was praying for things to turn out a certain way. Well, they didn’t. And so, once again, like so many other times in my life, I am walking on ground I have not walked on before. Just like Abraham, and Moses, and the Blessed Mother, and the apostles, and so many of the saints, and in the lives of countless ordinary people who have been led in directions they never would have planned for or predicted or perhaps even wanted.

Through it all, God is with us, and the promise He makes through the prophet Isaiah can reassure us if we take it to heart. It is He Who is leading us, He Who will bring us through whatever life might throw at us, He Who is most powerful in our lives when things seem most hopeless, He Who is most powerful in our lives when it seems to us that He isn’t there at all. (Consider the famous “footprints” poem.)

Don’t forget that these words were directed to the people of Israel when they were living in miserable exile in a land that they didn’t know and that they would never have chosen for themselves. But even at this time, when things seemed the bleakest, He was working something out for them.

He is doing that for you as well.

May this prediction from Isaiah fill you with peace, and hope and a new type of wisdom that you wouldn’t have been able to understand a short time ago.


Blessed Advent to you!


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