Because I Was There

John 16:12 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14 He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. 

Quote from Jean-Pierre de Caussade: “The duties of each moment are the shadows beneath which hides the divine operation.”

Could I look back and see the reality of the truth Jesus promised in John 16 and the ‘divine operation’ hidden under the shadow of my own duties?  The earliest shadow I remember goes way back to 1963 before I even recognized there was a journey of faith and I wasn’t on it. I was married.  I was a young mother.  I was in church.  I was in a Bible study.  I was ignorant…BUT I was there.  I’d married a preacher’s kid and you were “supposed” to go to church.  It was only a duty but they had free babysitting.  Isn’t that an interesting list of contradictions? 

I wanted to know how you could be an open person when life was teaching you to build a protective shell of “image” around yourself.  I knew about that!  I asked my question in that Bible study not realizing just how much it revealed what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know God would continue to work his divine operation hidden under the shadow of that one duty…because I was there.

I’m grateful for the discovery of that quote from Jean-Pierre de Caussade this week.  It’s true “the duties of each moment are the shadows beneath which hides the divine operation” and more importantly it confirms the truth of Jesus’s words, and the reality of his commitment: “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.  But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”