The Footprints of Our Life’s Journey

Every footstep we take is in the shadow of a surrounding presence. The footprints of our life’s journey are awash in the worlds of physical or spiritual presence. Are you ready to exit from your Internet highway of presence and begin cruising up the entrance ramp onto your spiritual highway of presence?

We obviously will need a certain key to unlock our journey. Our mode of transportation moves between both our physical and spiritual realms.

First, drive over to Ancestry.com’s highway. The Ancestry site is so wonderful in that it connects you with your past relatives. My great, great grandfather’s physical description came alive in his Civil War service records: There he was, with his brown hair and blue eyes, along with his rank in the Army. Although I don’t have a physical picture of him, I certainly now have a mental one. This gives us a real sense of connection to our past family members.

Your religious tree resides on the spiritual highway of Jesus’ presence, found in reading the Bible and in our own lifelong relationship with Him. The Bible, in a way, is our modern-day Ancestry.com. In a sense, we get to trace some periods of Jesus’ own life. We can read about His ancestral lineage. His own character is reflected in the way He treated people. We discover His trade as a carpenter, for example.

We see that He was not afraid to speak out when others were not being treated fairly. How refreshing it is to see someone who acted decisively to correct a situation or effect a positive change of some sort. A real go-to, down-to-earth guy. What’s not to like about Jesus?

What might this ever-changing companion of presence reveal to you? Suddenly, you notice that this spiritual highway is totally different from the Internet highway. With no directional coordinates to follow, you are left with no sense of physical direction. Also, visibly missing are any signs or mile markings. A heightened sense of unfamiliarity looms over this journey. With the Internet nonexistent on this highway, it truly is up to you to navigate the seemingly unknown. Although you do possess a sense of direction residing in an interior spiritual compass called your conscience. You alone can operate this particular compass.

You might find this difficult at first, since the worldly compass of the Internet functions from analytical measurement, while one’s heart guides one’s conscience. Once you become accustomed to this particular compass, it will afford you the opportunity to uncover as well as experience insights on a level surpassing anything from which the worldly compass operates.

In those times in our life when our worldly navigation compass is out of sync, it is comforting to know that we can exit from the Internet highway and tool over to the spiritual highway of our interior being. You might feel a bit hesitant if you have never tried this before. Or perhaps your thought is, “I don’t know Jesus, I have no connection to Him.” If it is not Jesus, then whoever you believe in – this is how you begin.

So how do we actually start this new journey of personal presence with Jesus? The same way as any worldly relationship begins: You meet that person and engage with them, thus learning more about them. You probably come into Jesus’ presence with your own worldly concerns of loss, separation, disease, loneliness and so on. This encounter, slowly and over time with its reality coming in our daily give-and-take with Him, unfolds in our life.

Let’s face it, if your daily encounter with someone is not a real, genuine life-affirming one, it will not continue. But even if there is a real connection to the spiritual realm, when we personally face a real loss, we can still stumble away from that relationship with Jesus. If one can’t come to terms with that loss, it is exactly at this type of juncture in one’s life, where you are on a quest for either answers or some type of meaning to what has just happened to you. At many times, there are no answers to our questions, but we still have Jesus’ overriding presence there to grab onto, to move us forward in the darkest moments of our lives.

People using the Internet become fascinated with reviewing so many diverse records, literally at your fingertips, and being immediately rewarded. That one click of the mouse takes us on a journey into another lifetime. This is the familiarity and speed of the Internet highway. Conversely, on Jesus’ spiritual highway, we are transported on a journey into another lifetime. Here, one immediately senses the worldly absence of either physical records or the factor of speed. How ironic that this highway’s roots existed literally centuries before the Internet was even a blip on the screen. Yet for many in our present-day time, it is either completely forgotten or never traveled. Is it because we are so accustomed to our learning and discovery coming from only the physical world? Perhaps that saying about how we are creatures of habit says it all. So really, what will it take to motivate you to explore this other highway’s realm?

For those Catholics who already have a daily connection with Jesus, they will certainly be reaching out to Him to find some sort of solace from the present-day upheaval surrounding the inaction of the hierarchy of our Church.

Whether it is the ever-growing priest shortage with its resultant effect on your parishes being closed, to the new Communion service, the replacement of the actual Liturgy of the Eucharist at times, it is indeed a huge change to our Church’s everyday landscape. If this in and of itself was not enough, how as the laity of the Church can we ever accept the hierarchy not even acknowledging their own Church’s history of women priests? Really, doesn’t any Catholic today deserve so much better than the continuous centuries-old deception of outright lies to the laity?