God Works In Mysterious Ways
Thursday in the First Week of Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couple:
Sometimes God makes his will quite evident. Let me use the example of today’s gospel:
As Jesus and his entourage were hiking along on their way to the next town a leper approached him and asked for a cure. After Jesus took care of the man word spread around about what had happened and we are told, “It was no longer possible for him to enter a town openly.” And so, Jesus and his friends “stayed in desert places.” That didn’t help to give them the privacy they apparently wanted. We’re told the “people kept coming to him from all sides.”
Suppose his Father was trying to tell him something?
Though we assume Jesus always knew his Father’s will, maybe he really didn’t, not all the time anyhow. Maybe he often learned it from reading the situations in which he found himself. And this was one of those situations. Jesus wanted to be alone with his friends - to talk to them maybe. But that isn’t what God his Father had in mind at the time.
And to get that across to Jesus he moved people to keep looking for Jesus and to keep bugging him for a cure. That consistent bothering of him, so to speak, opened his eyes to what his Father’s will was. God was saying, “No, don’t do that, do this!”
And so, Jesus got the message, changed his plans and cured those people. Cod sometimes reveals his will to us that way. With persistence he keeps bugging us with some-thing until only a blind person could miss it. We must read the situations in our lives. God might be trying to reveal his will.
