Lent 20 ~ At the Right Time

At the right time the path will open before you, and you will have a great joy in following it. Everything will be clear, because all will have been prepared in advance by the foresight of My merciful love and by the interventions of My most holy Mother. On that day you will have nothing to fear. ~ In Sinu Jesu, page 10

          Just before Lent, I began to sense a call to use In Sinu Jesu, When Heart Speaks to Heart again during this Lent. The book is a compilation of journal entries by a Benedictine monk who believed Jesus was speaking to him. My journey with this book began a few years ago and has often been miraculous. I say often and not always because there have been long stretches when the words in the book did not speak to my heart, when they were not meant for me for the time, words for the priest, not Jesus’ words to me.

          On the First Saturday of this March, on a day when I try to consecrate my hours to Our Lady, I said a prayer to Jesus just before sunset Mass that day. Tracing the Sign of the Cross over both my ears, I asked Jesus to let me hear His voice. Even if it was to be a rebuke for my sins, I wanted to hear my Lord. Just before Mass began, I opened my copy of In Sinu Jesu. To my chagrin, I realised that since I had been reading the pdf version of the book, I had not bookmarked my physical copy in tandem to my pdf progress. So, I didn’t know where I had last stopped. Just about to go in search, a thought came to me that maybe I should just trust and read the page I had opened to. Maybe Jesus had a reason for all of this.

          My eyes falling on the page I had opened to, I saw the entry was written on the vigil of the anniversary of the Great Fatima Miracle. This being the first Saturday of the month, the reference to Our Lady was for me a sign that it was indeed the page to be read for the day. The next sign came in answer to my prayer: to have my sin drawn up before me. And it came through the exhortation to recite the Rosary with attention and love, a very gentle chiding for the occasions when I had recited the prayer rather carelessly. Resolving to mend my ways, I was even more certain that the page of the book was meant for today’s reading.

          Then, came the unexpected.

At the right time the path will open before you, and you will have a great joy in following it. Everything will be clear, because all will have been prepared in advance by the foresight of My merciful love and by the interventions of My most holy Mother. On that day you will have nothing to fear.

          On this special day, Jesus had come to tell me that our days ahead have been ordained and, set in its place and in its special time by our Lord Himself and His beloved Mother. In my reading for this Lent, I have definitely read these words before and gone way ahead. Yet, on this day when rains descend unexpectedly, on Mother Mary’s day of the 1st Saturday of the month of blooms, the month when spring signals its coming, I am returned to this page, to these words, to a hope for the future I cannot see.

Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God… ~ 1 John 4:1

Naturally, as wonderful as the words were, I needed to make sure they were for me. Almost instantly, yet another little sign was given. Where once before I had almost constantly wondered about my husband’s and my future, about the increasing struggles to remain in our jobs and if we would ever leave this town, now, the moment my thoughts returned to those concerns, I sensed a deep, deep sense of security. A profound sense of certainty that everything was being taken care of, in quiet and in gentleness, in a way no one on earth could.

        I knew then, in a way different to before, that Jesus and Mother Mary were indeed already in our future, way, way ahead of us, waiting for when it would be right to reveal all.