Reflection
Counsel is the result of wisdom offering direction. It is the gift that heals, advises and suggests, that points the way. Counsel encourages and cautions. It is practical and real. We receive counsel through our parents, friends, and spiritual advisors. Through counsel, the Spirit speaks to the heart and enlightens us to judge rightly in a particular circumstance. In times of difficulty counsel helps us to act correctly.
Prayer
Lord, give me the gift of wise counselors. Help me to learn from the experience, and knowledge of friends and mentors. Let me be open to your Spirit of wise counsel as I make the daily decisions that weave the fabric of my life into something beautiful and useful.
Action
Listen carefully and openly to the counsel of others and be attentive
in the silence of prayer to the Spirit’s leading.
Suggested Reading
A wise person will hear, and will increase learning; and a person of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:
Proverbs 1:5
Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.
Proverbs 19:20
Hear counsel, receive instruction, and accept correction, that you may be wise in the time to come.
Proverbs 19:20
Counsel is the gift through which the Holy Spirit enables our conscience to make a concrete choice in communion with God, according to the logic of Jesus and his Gospel. In this way, the Spirit makes us grow interiorly, he makes us grow positively, he makes us grow in the community and he helps us not to fall prey to self-centredness and one’s own way of seeing things. Thus the Spirit helps us to grow and also to live in community.
Pope Francis
Each of us has the right and responsibility to assess the roads which lie
ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future looks
ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need
to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step
off the road into another direction.
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey now,
Maya Angelou
Through the gift of counsel the Christian enters into the secret ways of God; unknowingly yet unerringly he will choose, in the practical contingencies of the spiritual life, ways that will lead to eternal salvation.
Anscar Vonier
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
Eckhart Tolle