What is God saying to you?

It's a serious question. What is God saying to you at the moment?

God speaks to his people in a number of different ways. Firstly, He speaks to us all in a universal way through Divine Revelation. From the earliest days of civilisation, He began revealing Himself to the people He would form as His chosen people - Israel. When the fullness of time had come, He brought this Revelation to completion in the person of Jesus Christ, God-with-us. Finally, in the latter days, this Revelation is entrusted to His Holy Church, who preserves, explains, interprets and announces God's Divine Message in every age until Christ returns. So, in a very real sense, God is always speaking to us through the teaching of the Church; handed on in Scripture, the Liturgy, the official teaching documents, traditional devotions, authentic theology, writings of the saints, etc. etc.

However, universal teaching can speak to us only in a way that is very general. Yet, God desires to have a relationship with each of us, which is also personal and individual. This is where the life of prayer comes in. Whilst the Bible does teach many things in a universal way, its message can, and should, also be received in a personal way by individual followers of Christ. When we allow ourselves time and space to sit with the living Word of God, we will often find that it resonates with us on an interior level. With spiritual growth, we can learn to hear the voice of God speaking to us in this. (I have written about this at some length in the past elsewhere.) In a similar way, the profundity of the Liturgy or the depths of the writings of a great saint speak in a universal way to the Church - but their greatest value is in when a believer hears God speaking directly to himself, through these sacred channels.

There is, though, a third way in which God speaks directly to us - and that is through the circumstances of our lives. Almighty God, Creator and Redeemer of all that is, is certainly very much in control of the events of our lives; and therefore, the circumstances in which we find ourselves are - to a certain extent - an expression of His Will for us.

That, of course, has to be laden with a heavy caveat. Human sin has introduced much into this world which is flat contrary to the Divine plan. Pain, suffering, death; injustice, sadness, even despair - these things are not what God wants for us. However, since we have brought them into the world, freely, God is not simply going to take them away. He is far too great a respecter of human freedom for that. What He has done, instead, is to take those things and sanctify them. By embracing the Cross, Jesus Christ entered into all those things which we find at the depths of the human experience, and transformed them into the very stepping stones to Heaven, if only we will follow Him.

In Romans 8.28, St. Paul teaches us that "diligentibus Deum, omnia cooperantur in bonum" - for those who love God, all things unite for the good. That is to say, that whatever the circumstances of our lives, even in dark circumstances, if you love God, then He will be working things together for some greater good. What we must remember, though, is that the good from God's perspective - His eternal standpoint - is always going to be primarily your holiness and your salvation.

Which brings me back to the question. What is God saying to you at the moment? Either in your prayer? Or through your circumstances? Or, more ideally, through a combination of both?

When life is thrown upside down, there is often the rare opportunity to see life and our own selves from a new perspective. A chance to learn something new about who we are, what we're like, what matters to us - or, more likely, to what have we attached ourselves. This is valuable. In the spiritual life self-knowledge is golden.

As we grow closer to God, the light of His Truth shines on our souls more radiantly. An inevitable consequence of this, is that we see ourselves - our strengths, our weaknesses, our fragility and our brokenness - with much greater clarity. This is absolutely essential, because unless we see this, God is not able to sanctify our merits and heal our fragmentation. However, if these things remain hidden from us, and if we remain slightly afraid of what we might discover about ourselves, then it can cause us to draw back from God. If we are not at peace in the depths of our souls, then it is instinctively frightening to come closer to one who can only shine light on the darkest corners of our being.

Therefore, God often uses the circumstances of our lives as opportunities to cause us to grow, and in particular to grow in an awareness of ourselves. This in turn, produces the fruit that we are enabled, mysteriously, to go forward in the life of contemplative, personal prayer.

But... to really benefit from the full fruits of this, we have to do a little bit of work. We have to be being attentive to what God is showing us through the circumstances in which He allows us to be placed ... and we have to plough that into our experience of prayer.

All of us have had our lives, to some extent, turned upside down recently. This means we should all have had an opportunity to see something new about ourselves. If you haven't, give some time to reflecting on it. If you have, make sure you talk to God about it in prayer.


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