Desiring His Very Best
By Mike Wagner
I have suffered from chronic allergies all my life. I started taking allergy shots by the time I was four years old. After a while the shots no longer seemed to help, and all the doctors could do was manage the symptoms and hope that I would grow out of them. Instead of growing out of them, by the time I went to college, I was just miserable all the time and that misery became my normal.
After I graduated, I was told that there were new medications for my allergies that could really make a difference. I went to the doctor, and he put me the new medications, and suddenly I started to feel better. It wasn’t until after I had been on the new medications for a while that I suddenly realized one day how very badly I had been feeling. I was just beginning to realize what really feeling “good” felt like.
That’s is the difference that these book studies have made in my prayer time and relationship with God. I didn’t realize how unfruitful my prayer time had become until I read Time for God and was inspired to really renew the frequency and quality of time that I spent with the Lord in prayer. It has awakened and refreshed my relationship with him and given me a path to grow deeper in love with God. I am a big fan of Fr. Jacques Philippe’s book and his book that we are starting today, In the School of the Holy Spirit. Time for God was all about getting us into an authentic relationship with God. This book focuses on discerning our mission and purpose.
Fr. Philippe, reminds us at the beginning of the book that holiness is the work of the Holy Spirit. He poses this question: how well are we plugging into what the Holy Spirit is wanting to do with us? We know that God creates every person for his loving plan and purpose. He promises that his plan for us is that our “joy will be complete” as we fall in love with him in this life and that we live forever in love with him in the next. His loving purpose for us is to become fully the unique person that he created us to be for by doing so we too will bring life to the world.
Holiness in life comes from discovering, accepting, and pursuing Jesus' loving plan and purpose for our lives. Fortunately, Jesus did not leave us as orphans to try to figure this out on our own. Fr. Philippe teaches us that we have been given the Holy Spirit to lead us into the fullness of God’s purpose and plan for our lives if we will learn to hear his voice and resolve to follow his lead.
This is the path to holiness. Things become holy as they fully become what they were created to be. So it is with us also. The degree to which our lives align with God’s unique purpose and plan for which he created us is the degree to which we experience the holiness for which we were created. Holiness is not about what others think that we should do or not do, or what we achieve or don’t achieve. It's not about what we acquire, our prestige, our education, our power, or all the other things that the world promotes as our ultimate purpose. It's about authentically and completely being the real person who God created us to be and entering into that reality by following the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
In the pursuit of holiness
Chapter one reminds us that this pursuit of holiness is impossible to do alone. We all know this; it’s why we are all here today. We are also reminded that we each have a unique path that God has prepared for us and that only God knows each person’s path. It’s easy enough to think we know our potential, but let’s face it, we have no idea what our true potential is. Only the Lord can know that since he created us, and he’ll often ask us to go beyond our self-defined potential because he knows we are capable of so much more.
This is where discernment is necessary. We need to know and understand the voice of the Holy Spirit and the ways in which the Lord speaks to us. We need to listen to his voice when he does speak in order to follow the right path and meet our true potential, and ultimately, holiness. Jacques Philippe then goes on to say that our faithfulness to grace brings down further grace. He explains that the more we say “yes” to the Lord, the bigger our “yeses” become and the more grace he pours out on us. This gradual increase in the size of our “yes” and the amount of grace received with each one teaches us how to give our “yeses” more and more wholeheartedly and trustfully.
In the prayer meeting today, the Lord spoke to us about the Holy Spirit coming down and being a sign to us of Jesus as the Messiah. Every time we give Jesus our “yeses," we allow the Holy Spirit to fill us with grace. We become a sign of Jesus as the Messiah to the world. If we let the Holy Spirit permeate, renew and make us wholly into the person that God created us to be, imagine the life we could lead. A life unafraid of facing a messy world with no use for discouragement, fear, anxiety, depression – all because we know our future is not our own and that the one who holds our future has a far better plan for it than we could ever imagine. We don’t have to live in the things that are driving our culture crazy today. We are called to live in the light of Christ, to know that he has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light and that he always desires to give us his very best through the Holy Spirit.
Discerning my unique path
In August of 2016, I shared in my wrap-up of the prayer meeting about I had finally been able to authentically pray from the heart, “Lord, I’ve done everything that I really wanted to do in my life. I’ve known you and I have loved you, I’ve raised some good kids; I’ve traveled to places that I wanted to go, I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve in my career. I want to follow your plan for my life.” A few weeks later we started reading and practicing the teachings contained in Time for God, I was inspired to pray “Lord, I believe that I have not achieved all that you created me to be and I am ready to give you my life totally to you and follow your plan for my life and I trust you to lead me into the purpose for which you created me.” Promptly 60 days later, I was laid off from my job. That is how the Lord works, right? He answers prayers.
The company was struggling and my situation at work had not been great for a while. So, I was not shocked, but I was surprised to be laid off. Interestingly, I had a certain peace about the entire episode, I seemed to know that the Lord was in all of this. I began to ask in my prayer, “Okay, Lord, what are you doing?”
Two days later, a colleague referred me to a firm who needed someone with my professional skills. Within a day or two, we met and I had a job offer, but the position was in Austin. The offer came as a relief, obviously, but the move to Austin was a problem. I just wasn’t sure that the Lord was calling my family and me to move to Austin.
As I prayed about this and discussed it with my wife, I felt the Holy Spirit was saying, “You can go to Austin or continue your career with someone local and I will take care of you and continue to bless you and your family if that is what you want, or you can trust me.” I have come to realize that I don’t know what will make me happy, but I have also come to trust that the Lord does. So instead of praying “Lord, give me the job,” or “Lord, tell me what I should do,” I just prayed, “Lord, I just want your very best for me and my family. Whatever that is, I just want your very best. I trust in you.”
I was sincerely ready to give everything over to the Lord. If he called me to missionary life in Cucamonga, I would have started packing. Just like the prophesy we heard tonight, “I ask you to do what you cannot do. I send you where you do not want to go. But if you ask me, I will take you into my very heart and I will lead you where you cannot go, and I will help you do what you cannot do.” I knew that all I wanted was the Lord’s very best in my life.
As I continued to meet the Lord in prayer about this the Holy Spirit began to inspire me about starting my own consulting firm. Then praying in Mass one day after communion, I felt the Holy Spirit say, “If you trust me, I will take care of you and as a sign, I will heal you of your allergies.” As I said earlier, I have suffered from severe allergies since I was a young child. But as I was sitting there, I could feel my sinuses begin to open up. Since that day in October 2016, I have not had any trouble with my sinuses and have been completely off all of my daily allergy medications. I felt like the Lord gave me this healing as a concrete sign in my flesh to hold on to as I pursued starting my own business.
A few days later I was walking and listening to a Fr. Mike Schmitz podcast, and I heard the Holy Spirit say, “1 Kings 17.” Now, the Lord knows I’m Catholic and that I don’t know 1 Kings 17 by heart. So, I said, “Lord, if this is you, remind me to look this scripture up when I get home.” Later that night as I was getting ready for bed, the Holy Spirit reminded me again of the Bible verse. I looked it up and found that it was the story of Elijah the prophet when he was kicked out of Israel after proclaiming a drought.
He didn’t know what he is going to do. But in verses 2-4, it says, “The word of the LORD came to Elijah: Leave here, go east and hide in the Wadi Cherith, east of the Jordan. You shall drink of the wadi, and I have commanded ravens to feed you there. So, he left and did as the LORD had commanded. He left and remained by the Wadi Cherith, east of the Jordan. Ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the wadi.”
As I continued to read, Elijah’s wadi ran dry because of the drought and the Lord told him in verse 9 to “Arise, go to Zarephath of Sidon and stay there. I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” When he got there, the woman only had enough food for one more meal for herself and her son before they would starve to death. Elijah promised her that the Lord would provide for her if only she gave him what little they had left.
The chapter ends with the woman’s son dying and the Lord raising him from the dead through Elijah. As I read this, the Holy Spirit seemed to confirm to me again and again that the Lord would provide for me if only I trusted him to lead me and that it was he who was leading me to start my own business.
Up to this point, my wife, Sue, knew nothing of what I was experiencing in prayer. To be honest, I was afraid to tell her because I thought she would think that I was crazy. After all, who would start a new business with two children at home and in private school as well as another in his first semester in college. We were still paying off our daughter’s wedding earlier that year. I knew she would think was too risky.
When I finally struck up the courage to share all of this with her, I was amazed at her response. She said, “Yes! This is exactly what we are supposed to do!” Once again a testimony to the Holy Spirit making clear our paths, if we but trust him.
The grace received when we say “Yes!”
I shared this story with you to show that just like with my allergies when I realized how crummy I felt when I thought I was feeling good, I didn’t realize how hard I was working in my career and how much I was missing out on so many opportunities to love, and to serve, and to enjoy my family and others. I had slowly and over time, let the demands of work negatively impact the amount of energy I had for my family and for my brothers and sisters in the Community.
It wasn’t until the Holy Spirit allowed me take a step back and I let him to take over, that my eyes were opened to a world full of joy and potential that I may have never realized because I was so focused on living within my self-defined potential.
Tomorrow I turn 55 years old, which means I have now been living in this Community for forty some years, and still the Holy Spirit is doing things to surprise me. He is always laying out before me God’s purpose and plan for my life, so that by his grace I may become a sign of Jesus as the Messiah to the world.
I encourage you to not only follow along with us in reading this book, but also take it with you to your prayer and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you and show you how to give your life over to his inspirations. The Holy Spirit is moving in this Community, and I believe this book will help us all to discern that movement and prepare our hearts to say “yes” to wherever he may lead us. We may not always know where the Lord is taking us, but we know that the Holy Spirit is our faithful advocate and guide. Let us enter the School of the Holy Spirit together. Amen.
Community Gathering, January 15, 2017