Something Opened

Luke 24:44–49

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• "everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled"
• then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures
• "You are witnesses of these things"
• "stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high"

Applying the Word to My Life:
As a parent, especially when the boys were young, it felt like I was always repeating myself. Even today — I don't say "stop" just once, I repeat it three times because they never seemed to hear and understand the first two. Today's reading makes me feel like Jesus can understand where I'm coming from.

Three years. Every town, every teaching, every miracle. The disciples had been there for all of it. They watched him die and found the tomb empty. And now the risen Christ is standing in front of them, going through it all again — the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, how every word he had spoken was true.

They still don't fully have it.

I don't always have the best patience when I am stuck in that loop. Jesus paints a better picture. He does not reprimand them. He does not ask how they could have missed it after everything they witnessed. He tells them to stay and wait. Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. He knows they have not yet received the Holy Spirit — and he does not expect them to understand without it.

If the risen Christ told the people who had walked with him for three years to wait for the gift of understanding — then my own incomplete grasp of the faith is not a failure. It is simply where I am in the journey.

That is what understanding is in the Catholic tradition. It is not intelligence. It is not the conclusion of good effort. It is the Holy Spirit opening what was always there — helping us see not just that something is true, but why it is beautiful, coherent, and life-giving. The information did not change. Something opened.

When I first became a small group leader I was intimidated by everything I did not know. But I had enough faith in the call to trust that God would not leave me stranded, and it turned out to be true.

The clearest example for me was Theology of the Body. I had tried to work through it on my own more than once and it stayed opaque. Same words every time, but none of it landing. Then I was asked to teach it. I bought another book, worked through the course material, and somewhere in that process — it clicked. Not because I had gotten smarter. The information was identical to what I had been staring at before. But something opened, and I could suddenly see the inner logic and the beauty of it in a way I never had.

I taught the class and they got it too.

Understanding did not arrive when I was studying for myself. It arrived when I was preparing to give what I had to someone else.

That is worth sitting with. The disciples were commissioned as witnesses at the same moment they received the promise of understanding. They were not told to get it right and then go. They were told to go — and to wait for the light that would make it all coherent.

That is not a story about twelve people two thousand years ago. It is the story of anyone who has looked at the faith and wondered, trusted the call anyway, and found the gift arriving at the right moment.

It is okay if we don't understand it all. The question is whether we trust God enough to let Him teach us.

My Response for Today:
Today I will sit with one teaching I have never fully understood — not to figure it out, but to ask the Holy Spirit to open it.