• Extending God’s Care to the One in Charge

    Last week at the Lanteri Center for Ignatian Spirituality I completed training to learn how to be a supervisor of spiritual directors.  In spiritual direction, a supervisor is not what you might think, i.e. a ‘boss’ to oversee and critique the spiritual director.  The supervisor is more like another spiritual director, there to help the actual spiritual director explore and deepen his or her awareness of God during a particular spiritual direction session.  Having a supervisor is a ‘best practice’ for all spiritual directors. In the opening remarks, the instructor said something that stuck with me, not only as a spiritual director but as one who spends a lot of…

  • Three reasons God places a stranger in your path

    Occasionally, I experience what I call a ‘random ministerial encounter’.  I think we’ve all had them.  It’s when God places someone in your path, and you realize it’s not a coincidence (as nothing with God ever is).   After these encounters, I wonder, “Why did God place this person in my path?”  I’ve come up with three possibilities: (1) God wanted me to assist this person in some way, (2) God wanted me to learn some valuable lesson from this other person, or (3) God wanted an observer to learn something from the encounter.   I had one such encounter in the check-out line at the Food Lion. I was behind…