...and sometimes he speaks to me that way.
There have been times I’ve seen people ask online if God has a sense of humor, and my emphatic answer to that questions is: Yes!
There have been multiple times through my life when God has shown his hand in it that made me laugh, but one particular instance sticks in my mind because it was such a “loud” message to me from it. It took place one night in the midst of an adoration hour I signed up for during a 4-day silent retreat.
Before I begin, there’s a secondary background story that I have to tell. It’s short, so stick with me.
Shortly before I went on my retreat, I was chatting with a co-worker
about something that startled him one evening. He had been in his
kitchen with the lights off since he was just grabbing a glass of water.
While at his sink he hear a noise come from his back patio area and he
looked over to the glass doors that led out there to see what was going
on. He said his heart jumped into his throat as he saw a face peering
through the glass with hands on either side. After the initial panic of
thinking a person was sneaking around outside his house and looking in
the back door, his brain caught on to the fact that the “person” was
super low to the ground and was in fact a raccoon just looking into his
kitchen.
See, I promised it would be short.
As I was saying, this encounter with the Lord speaking to me through humor happened while I was attending a 4-day silent retreat. There was one night when we were all supposed to sign up for an hour at Eucharistic adoration. I got to the sign-up sheet late enough that all the early hours and all the “late” hours (aka: they just had to wake up a couple hours earlier than they wanted) were taken. So, I got the 2-3AM time slot.
When I arrived, all the lights except for one on the altar in the retreat house chapel were off. The floor plan of the chapel was pretty standard. Small room. Two columns of pews. Altar up front. Emergency exit door (with a top window looking out towards the woods) on the right-hand wall.
I sat down on the third pew from the front on the right-hand side of the chapel and settled in. I was making my way through the Office of Readings for the day until it happened. My brain started remembering that coworker’s story and spinning off all kinds of stories of what I would see if I just looked over at that exit door window. (A deer, a person, just glowing eyes, etc. the whole gamut.) I knew I was getting distracted and refocused myself. I finished up the Office of Readings and was attempting to sit in silent adoration when the stories of that door’s window started up again. I must’ve been struggling for a good 20 minutes to actually focus on adoring our Lord who was right in front of me, before he apparently had enough.
Roughly 20 minutes into my hour I heard it: banging on the entrance door right outside the main chapel doors. To say I was calm as could be would be a lie. At first I brushed off the banging as some form of severe temptation to distraction and to get me to leave adoring our Lord. I mean, I had never had such a hard time focusing in adoration as I was that night. Nothing was going like normal. Except the banging kept going on and on.
Eventually I got up and walked to the back to just peek out at the retreat house entrance, and…
As I looked out, the banging happened on the door and in the right side window was the face of a woman pressed to it with her hands cupped on either side peering in. I wasn’t even scared at that point. I just sent a, “Really, Lord?! 😂” to him and walked out to see what the woman needed. In reality it was two ladies who had arrived on a red-eye for the retreat that started the next day and had arranged to stay early with the retreat house coordinators. They had failed to inform me that the two women would be arriving, but their names were listed on the sign-in sheet for the next retreat and there was a note about their arrival on the page. So I let them in out of the cold and pointed them to where they were supposed to go, and went back into the chapel.
I settled back into my pew and told the Lord, “Message received. I’ll focus now.” I’ve always fondly looked back on that because I guess the Lord decided if I was going to panic over a window and the potential for people looking in the door (something that shouldn’t have been even a possibility where the retreat house was), then he was just going to make it happen and show me that it wasn’t as awful as I was allowing it to be in my mind. I’ve actually had a couple times in life since then when I’ll be thinking about the worst case scenarios for things to the point of not even wanting to start something, but then I remember that when I really was confronted with “the worst” I handled it just fine.
