God's Messengers: Are We Listening?

In today's first reading, Gen 28: 10-22a, Jacob leaves Beer-sheba and proceeds toward Haran. He comes upon a shrine there and stops for the night. He has a dream: "a stairway rested on the ground, with its top reaching to the heavens; and God's messengers [angels] were going up and down on it. And there was the Lord standing beside him and saying: 'I, the Lord, am the God of your forefather Abraham [and foremother Sarah] and the God of Isaac [and Rebecca]; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. These shall be as plentiful as the dust on the earth, and through them you shall spread  out east and west, north and south. In you and your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing. Know that I am with you; I will protect you wherever you go, and bring you back to this land. I will never leave you until I have done what I have promised.'"

To this very day, I believe, that angels continue to descend and ascend from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven, bringing messages to us from God and from us to God, as well! Are we listening? Are we tuned into heaven or too busy with messages from our iPods, iPhones, Internet, and other electronic devices to hear God speaking to us through His messengers?  Quietly, the angels instruct us to make that phone call, to do this or not do that, to close the iPad, to shut down the iPod, to turn off the TV or radio or the Internet and become quiet.  Only then will we be prepared to hear the Holy Spirit or one of God's messengers revealing God's will to us.

"Know that I am with you," God says to Jacob and to us. God is also with us, standing beside us, walking on our  left and our right!  God never leaves us anymore than He left His chosen people as of old. His promises to us--as shared with us through His Son Jesus and written down by the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John--God will never break!

Those are my beliefs! What are yours?