Wrestling with God is less about a debate, Bishop Kevin Kenney said. He described it as wrestling with oneself, asking how to free oneself to be able to do God’s will.
In an episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show set to air at 9 p.m. June 6 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM, Bishop Kenney told the show’s producer Rachael McCallum, “To be able to align ourselves with God, first of all, we have to trust in the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is the one speaking to us through God, in God.’”
Bishop Kenney referenced Psalm 139, that God knows us inside and God knew us before we were born.
“God knows what’s going to happen in our lives,” Bishop Kenney said. “I think there’s a beginning and an end, and God has a path, but there’s many options in that path on that road that we can take. When we’re in prayer, when we’re discerning, we get back onto that path. It’s just putting that trust in God to be able to think that God knows who we are.”
Bishop Kenney said there is a temptation from the world to seek self-fulfillment.
“The world tells us, ‘You can do something different. You can do something better. You can have this; you can have that. Why do you want to give that all up? Why do you have to empty yourself? You have the potential.’ We might go that way, but then we keep yearning for something more, or we keep hungering for something else. We just don’t reach that satisfaction and we might just settle for something in life.”
Emptying oneself, Bishop Kenney said, is not necessarily about moving in an entirely new direction but enriching the path we’re already on. Prayer helps us better understand God’s will, he said.
“Ask the Lord, ‘OK, help me understand this. Help me accept this and then to open other doors, open other windows or provide some kind of confidence in me to be able to see that this is where you want to go. And to open my ears, to listen to advice that comes in. Unsolicited advice oftentimes is God speaking to us through other people. … That helps us get out of that paralysis of our own self-doubt, our own low self-esteem, perhaps. But to be able to see that there is hope, there is something better, more enriching out there. And how can I be open to that and then trust that if that’s where the Lord wants me to move to, then God will provide?”
To hear more from Bishop Kenney about trusting God while wrestling with his will, tune into “Practicing Catholic,” which repeats at 1 p.m. June 7 and 2 p.m. June 8.
Also on the program, Karen Hastreiter, a parishioner of the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, shares how each vocation is a unique path to holiness. And Bishop Michael Izen explores opportunities to foster faith and connection during the summer months.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, “Practicing Catholic” can be heard after it has aired at archspm.org/faith-and-discipleship/practicing-catholic or choose a streaming platform at Spotify for Podcasters.
