“And a voice came from the cloud saying, ‘This is my Son, the Chosen One. Listen to him.'” This comes from today’s Gospel, Luke 9:35. Do you listen? Do you even know when He is speaking to you?

Jesus speaks to us everyday, and all we need to do to hear is to listen. Unfortunately in this day and age there are so many distractions in our world, we can’t always hear. And what I have learned in my life is that many of these distractions come from the Evil One. Last week’s Gospel recounted the story of how after the forty days in the desert Satan tried to tempt Jesus and he couldn’t do it. Satan does the same thing with us, trying to tempt us into sinning. In my past, he was quite successful. Even today, occasionally he still is but not to the severity as in the past.

Jesus talks to us in many ways, sometimes through voice, sometimes through writing, sometimes through visions. I am not saying he uses his own voice or his own handwriting, but we can hear him through others. I know he has done this for me many times, especially when I have prayed about something or asked him for something.   Here is an example, I’ll try to keep it short. My father had an operation and ended up getting a bad infection and going into a coma. I would visit him every day and one day I said to him that I knew my mother was calling him to go to her. I said it would be okay if he went but I had one favor to ask of him before he went. My father had told me he didn’t believe in Heaven, although I am not convinced this was in fact true. So I asked him that if there was an after-life to give me some kind of sign, letting me know. He died soon after this.

Twelve years later I still have not received a sign, although I live in his house and wonder sometimes if he is in fact still here. So I asked Jesus why my father couldn’t give me a sign. Was it because there was in fact no after-life? If that were true then that would mean there was no Heaven, that this whole religious thing was nothing but BS and I was wasting my time believing. Jesus would have none of that, the next day when I was doing my daily reading, I opened up to a random passage, as was my custom. The passage I opened to was Luke 16. starting at verse 19. This is the story of Lazarus and the rich man, where the rich man asks that he be allowed to send a sign to his family so that they may change their ways, He was told he couldn’t do this. I am sure that this works both ways, the rich man couldn’t warn his family about Hell and Lazarus couldn’t tell anyone of Heaven. This was my answer

I asked Jesus a question and he answered me. I didn’t look for that particular story, I just opened my Bible, as I sometimes do to see what it says, and there it was. My answer. I suppose some could argue that this was a coincidence, and maybe if it was the only time something like this had happened but it wasn’t.

The point is we need to listen, and when we do, we’ll hear.