Listening to Guidance

How would you like to have a fool proof source for guidance in every instance of life? How much would you be willing to pay for something like that? What if I told you it is free? What if I told you that every single Catholic has it, but only a small percentage of them actually ever use it. What if I told you that "source" is the Holy Spirit?

Our Lord promises that He will always show us the right path to holiness and how to obey Him, and He promises that this will come through the Holy Spirit. This the Holy Spirit's job: to point us in the right direction and to help us to see the right direction. This activity of the Holy Spirit is begun at our Baptism, and then deepened at our Confirmation.

Why then, you may ask, do so few Catholics today take advantage of this great gift? Because they choose instead to seek counsel from people who generally should not be trusted to give godly advice (actors, athletes, politicians, etc.) and then make decisions based on their own personal opinions. I cannot remember the last time that I heard a Catholic say to me that he sought information in the Scriptures, and then asked the Holy Spirit to help him know how to appy those truths. It may seem like a simplistic methodology, but this is what God has laid out for us.

The Holy Spirit really is "fool proof", but we are not. This means that we have to be spending time in Scripture and prayer so that we can hear the voice of the Holy Spirit when He does point us to the right path. He speaks to each of us every day, but we are often too caught up in our own world to listen to Him. I am not speaking about "acting on a whim" and calling it the Spirit. He will never direct us to do something contradictory to the Word of God (either written or spoken). We just need to know the Scritures well enough to understand when He does speak to us!