When We Feel a “Nudge,” Don’t Push It Aside-It may Be the Message We Need!

No one likes to be pushed around. When we are, we get upset and immediately start pushing back until we are free. God realizes this and never pushes or shoves. God is gentle and has the Holy Spirit to “nudge” us in a certain direction.

During Lent, the Holy Spirit is quite busy nudging Christ’s followers to move in a new direction. Not always because the direction we are in is bad, but because where the Holy Spirit wants us to go is better.

Somebody once asked, what does Jesus mean when he says: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” By this question, Jesus was reminding us that God loves each of us and when we stumble and fall, rather than punish, God forgives and gives us another chance to try again.

It is God’s love and compassion for each of his children that says there’s always room for more. When God forgives us, it is because he sees what we don’t see and wants to give us yet another chance to discover it. For God, that’s what perfection is. It is God nudging us ever closer in perfection’s direction.

These nudges move us from our darkness to light. It is the light that points the way stretching us and making us more capable of achieving a greater and more perfect love and thus more perfect!

Every Lenten season provides us with opportunities for the Holy Spirit’s nudges, asking us to reflect more carefully on where we are heading. And then we can hear Jesus’ whispering: Stop resisting and start listening! When listen, we grow wiser, stronger, and more perfect!

As St. Francis de Sales encourages:

God takes pleasure in seeing us make little steps and, like a good father holding his child's hand, he will conform his steps to ours, quite happy not to go any faster than we can walk.

Laura Makabresku (Polish, 1987–), Lessons of Hearing, 2021, photograph