Fr. Mike Schmitz

You know, like the sense of like, I didn't find that to ever be to be the case.

What about my life, Lord?

Jesus wept.

But in that, over the course of time realizing, just because I wasn't getting an answer to that specific question in the specific way that I wanted,

Every time I went back to the word of God, God was calling me forward.

Not just like, here's another thing to know, but here is my voice.

And gosh, and you've taught me so much about this, but in so many ways, you know, Jesus says, I know my sheep and they know me and they recognize my voice and they do not recognize the voice of strangers, but they do recognize my voice.

And the more and more I think that we expose ourselves to God's word, the more and more we know like, oh, this is the voice of God versus no, that is the voice of a counterfeit or that's the voice of the destroyer or the thief, the liar.

And yeah, I think so many of us can be really held hostage

by those false voices.

I think too many of us maybe are held hostage by the voice of the thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

And too few of us know how to really, really, truly identify the voice of our Lord, the voice of the shepherd, who calls us to, obviously, repentance, but calls us to freedom, calls us to life, and reminds us, like your mother-in-law had said, Jeff, here is what God wants to say about you, about how he sees you and his love for you.

So I prefer to underline and to bracket in my Bible.

I will write in the front and I'll write in the back.

So you mentioned how you have some dates, some key moments in your life.

I have on some of the pages, intro pages, I have things like...

some things that the Lord spoke to me through his word and through other people that I just like, here is these images.

And they're almost a little bit too close.

I don't know if I can say them out loud.

And so I do write, but I don't necessarily always write little notes in the margin.