Today's Good News Reflection

One day, when I felt weakened by some long-enduring difficulties, I said to God, "I'm tired of being betrayed and attacked and misinterpreted. I need to refocus on what you think of me and get my mind off of what others think of me. Show me something, puleeeease! Show me anything that will re-energize me to get me back into the battle without becoming a casualty of war."

God is constantly communicating with our inner spirits. When we listen, the soul communicates his message through our imaginations, using images, symbols, smells or sounds to interpret for our conscious minds what the inner spirit hears. In answer to my plea, God responded and in my imagination I "saw" a beautiful mansion. It was not beautiful by earthly standards. Indeed, it didn't make sense in earthly terms. It was bathed in a very bright white light, but not like any light we know here on earth. It was pure light. It was God's light, and the mansion represented what Jesus refers to in today's Gospel reading.

This was My Place. It had a very large main section with many add-on extensions of varying sizes and styles of architecture. The main section was me, my life, or rather the part of my life that I will be able to take with me to heaven after everything else has been purged from me during the dying-resurrection process known as purgatory.

Over the front door was a huge gem, like a diamond. It radiated the same light that permeated all of heaven. I asked what it represented. The answer: The Holy Spirit. The explanation: When the Holy Spirit radiates from me, people are attracted to me and want to be part of my life. And when I let them in, my mansion grows (the added-on extensions).

Some of these extensions were large rooms representing people who are filled with God's love. Others had rooms with crooked roofs or shoddy construction because they did a poor job of building their relationships with God. Some had half-finished rooms because they left my life before God wanted them to leave. And each addition had its own unique beauty, reflecting the made-in-God's-image personality of each individual.

You are building a similar heavenly mansion. The size of your mansion is determined by how many additions you allow others to build.

All difficulties in relationships are well worth enduring if we remember that we're building with bricks of Love and if we rely on the Holy Spirit to help us through the hard times. Even when others bang too loudly with their hammers or use warped lumber or buy the wrong materials, they are precious additions to our lives; each new room increases the value of our house.

Whenever we demolish one of these additions because we don't like it, or whenever someone picks up their lumber and leaves, the result is an ugly, gaping hole.

Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He has the ultimate mansion, and our heavenly houses are additions that connect our life to his. If your life radiates the Holy Spirit, you're attracting people to your mansion, and thus you're also attracting people to God's mansion.