“If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.’”

(From Psalm 95)

 I rarely offer a daily reflection for Mass based on the psalm response.  Today’s words, however, always challenge me.  For many years, the words from Psalm 95, included above, confused me. I would often say to myself, “How could hearing God’s voice result in a hardened heart?”  Then, not too many years ago, it hit me.  Sometimes we’re just not ready to hear what God has to say to us. I think of the words of my departed friend, Dr. Larry Ferachi.  He was a good friend and mentor to me, right up until cancer overcame him.  Any time I found myself sharing with him a dilemma or a difficult decision that I was facing, Larry would always say, “Well, my experience is, nine times out of ten, you know what you need to do.”

I have always remembered Larry’s words and found them to be true.  There are times in our relationship with God and in our prayer when we do indeed have a sense of something but are not necessarily ready to hear it.  Maybe it’s something about ourselves that we need to address and perhaps work on.  Maybe we’re resisting a change going on in our life, when it is in fact a necessary change. Maybe someone hurt us—maybe deeply—and we need to let go but we don’t. And so on. 

If we truly come to the point of sensing what’s going on in us and what we really need to do, then God will give us more than the awareness of that.  God will give us what we need to do it—to courageously face it, perhaps discuss it with someone we trust, and work through it to a newer, happier self.