Heeding the Spirit's suggestions

The first reading of today’s liturgy open with “Get up and head south on the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, the desert route” (Acts 8: 26).  Philip obeys and encounters a man who is reading the book of Isaiah.  Simply, Philip asks: Do you understand what you are reading?  The man says “How can I, unless someone instructs me.”  We are any one  or all of those characters on any given day.  The Spirit of God nudges us to go speak to, listen to, be with a certain person.  And we respond generously, sometimes fearfully, at other times with joy.  Our faith and our trust in God may be challenged.  At other times we are the one in need of being instructed and God sends another person to us.

Every day we are being drawn by God closer and closer to Jesus Christ, as was the eunuch in today’s first reading. In today’s Gospel, John 6: 44-51, Jesus tells us that no one comes to Him unless the Father draw him/her.  That being drawn is continual throughout our life times.  Without realizing it, we are being drawn into the death of our Lord Jesus Christ and into His resurrection into eternal glory, as yesterday’s Scriptures pointed out:  “The God of all grace…[calls] you to his eternal glory through Christ Jesus… (1 Peter 5: 5b-14).  That journey takes us into the suffering that purifies us, into situations that transform our thinking into the thinking of Christ, into relationships that teach us to love as Jesus loved and to build the Kingdom as Jesus did, being servants of one another.