GPS Loses Its Signal

Summer is here! With school being out, it is also vacation time for many families. Family vacations, while they can be stressful to plan and start, they can provide some wonderful memories. I have had some fun and interesting times on vacation, from beautiful churches, to incredible views of nature, to experiences that while challenging at the time, we laugh at now. One of the interesting things that happened to myself and a friend while traveling was a particular time that we got way off our path. My friend was navigating us with his GPS before the time of phone GPS. We were trying to get from Mount Rushmore to Devil’s Tower and do it by back roads, well… we found a really back road by accident. The road started off as a paved road, went to two lane gravel, to a one lane dirt path and no way to turn around on it. We had strayed from the road, even though we ended up making it, we were on the wrong path, and ended up taking much longer than we had planned.

The trip of our spiritual life is kind of the same. We know where our final destination is – Home or Heaven, but we do not always know the path that we are going to take to get there. Sometimes in our faith journey we have the straight and easy roads, sometimes we have a few twists and bumps, and sometimes we run into roadblocks and we have to turn around, but the good thing is that we are not alone, we have help. The journey can be confusing, it can be difficult, it can be exciting, and we sometimes even get a little lost because our GPS loses its signal, but we need to keep going towards that destination.

One of the great blessings is that we have roadmaps (the Church, prayer, Holy Scripture, spiritual books, etc.) but most importantly we have been given a guide. God the Father did not want us to get lost. He sent His Son to be that guide for us, we simply need to follow. The journey of our physical life and that of spiritual life go together, one feeds off of the other. When we feed ourselves spiritually, it helps us physically and it gives us the energy we need to continue down the path of our lives, and when we feed ourselves physically it gives us the strength to keep moving.

Something also, that I would recommend is to find a local parish to attend Mass at. I remember when I was a child (long before cell phones, GPS, and internet access) where we would drive around to the different parishes where we were at to find the Mass times. One of the great things now, is that we do have the ability to pull up our phones and find the Mass times quickly. In fact, there are a couple of apps that we can download or go to the website masstimes.org and find the closest parish to where we are at.

God bless,
Fr. Ken