I’ve said it before and will say it again…the path to the Divine is long and winding, and sometimes bizarre. I just want to tell you about a little conversation I had with my HGA. This requires a bit of backstory. It seems like every so often my career is at a crossroads and I have an opportunity to take off in a new direction. Several years ago I had started pursuing a path to join the Unitarian Universalist clergy. It didn’t work out for a number of reasons, but the desire remained. 

It was a desire that first struck me in college. The college I attended also happened to be the largest Benedictine monastery in North America. Thanks to what I’m sure now was celestial intervention, I left there with an opportunity to volunteer, live and work at St. Stanislaus monastery and school in Mississippi. There is much I respect about the values of monastic life, but Catholicism wasn’t for me and I wanted a family so it wasn’t the right fit. 

Fast forward a few decades and I’m a co-host on an occult podcast. Who would’ve thought? But the work we did for that podcast, and the conversations we had preparing for episodes and exploring our spirituality really solidified things for me. 

Again, through what I assume was celestial intervention, I found myself in the position to start a non-profit faith community, this one, and finally put that desire into action. But it wasn’t easy…everything had to be created anew, both in the world and in my soul. Back to the HGA conversation…

So I’m ruminating on this opportunity and asking my angel about parts of it that I didn’t understand. One of the most surprising things to come from that conversation was when I asked “Why didn’t those other opportunities work out? Why did I have to start from scratch?” the answer was “If you hadn’t built the house yourself, would you have wanted to live in it? You only trust that which you have made and so for you this was the only path.”

I find that often some variant of this answer is the one we all get. “You got it because you asked for it” or “This is how you work and so we presented you with things you would understand.” This is a fundamental truth to how angels work with us. They understand us on a very deep level and know how we need to receive information in order to accept it. They know that many of us don’t trust easy answers and so they make us work for it so we feel we’ve earned it, or so that we feel that we found the answer on our own. 

When we feel like we are being taken the long way around instead of being given a shortcut, it’s frustrating. It’s also probably exactly what we needed. In the middle of things it’s difficult to step back and assess the situation objectively to see that’s what’s happening. It might even feel like we’re going nowhere. But know that if you’ve asked for help and guidance, that’s exactly what you’re getting, exactly how and when you need it to be maximally beneficial to you. Now that may not mean that it’s easy or comfortable, but ultimately it is good. 

Here’s a little song I wrote a few years back talking about taking the Long Way Around. Seems fitting…