St. Francis is Stalking Me
Do you ever feel like someone is following you? Like they know something you don’t know? And they’ve been dead for 800 years?
The Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…“)has been stalking Jane and I for the last couple weeks. It’s come up on at least 8 occasions in 10 days. At first it was funny. Then odd. Then creepy. Now we’re (finally) wondering if maybe, just maybe, God might be trying to say something to us.
Jane says that she sometimes prays: “Don’t be subtle with me; make it obvious.” Apparently he took us up on the offer.
It reminds us of other significant moments in our lives. Sometimes God speaks very subtly. As we pray and reflect, we see the Spirit moving our hearts one way or another. Other times, subtlety is tossed out the window and we’re beaten over the head with a message. My initial discernment about whether or not to spend a year with NET Canada was spurred on by being suddenly bombarded with a flurry of, “Hey Andy, have you ever thought about going on NET?” I had (and I’d thought “No thanks!”), but after a few more months of prayer I had to admit that it felt God was leading me in that direction.
So now I have to ask: Why is St. Francis (or at least a prayer named after him) stalking me? Honestly, I don’t know.
And so we pray. We ask God to let us know why this is coming into our lives right now. We chat with others. We go over it and see what (if anything) stands out.
And we’re pretty confident that if we don’t figure it out, God will simply shout just a little louder… 🙂
6 Comments
Travis Myrheim
Just got back from Italy. St. Francis heard God say “Go build my church.” You guys are moving into the new Holy Family cathedral which needs to be built. Discernment done. Yup, that’s why I’m a priest, and a pretty wise one obviously.
😉
God bless
Adam
For us less learned folk, what is St. Francis the patron saint of? Does that possibly have something to do with it? Also which Francis isthat anywho. Wikipedia has nine TV st. Francis’s
Adam
That was suppose to be RC, as in Roman Catholic, not TV. Silly spellchecker.
jane
St. Francis of Assisi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Of_Assisi
The prayer, though attributed to him, was not written during his lifetime (it was after). This leads me to look more to the words than the person in terms of what God might be telling us, but it’s definitely a great idea to check out his history. I’ll have to go over his life and see if something stands out.
He is patron saint of…a huge number of things:
against dying alone
against fire
animal welfare societies
animals
birds
ecologists
ecology
environment
environmentalism
environmentalists
families
lace makers
lace workers
merchants
needle workers
peace
tapestry workers
zoos
Catholic Action
Kat
K, so I followed the link to Holy Family Parish’s Blog, and then to Andy Korvemaker’s Blog, and then spent a few seconds trying to figure out why the parish was saying “Hello” to a Holy Family from Japan… have I missed some pretty big news? and why did God choose to make his son an Arab-Jew the first time, and Japanese the second?
Adam
Ooh well its now completely obvious now. He’s trying to tell you that Spencer needs to go to the zoo!!!! Thats the only logical explanation!!!