How do you ask God for a sign?

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white_jasmine

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I would like to know how you ask God for a sign. Before, I asked Him for some signs to give me clearer answers. However, I became superstitious about signs and I am afraid that the devil would give me a sign. That’s why I stopped asking Him for a sign.

Also, how do you differentiate if it is God’s answer or the devil is just fooling you?
 
A sign for what? I’d be very cautious with the notion that you either need a sign from God or, worse, that you’re owed one in the first place.
 
I would say, whenever you receive a sign; always ask yourself: Is this what God would say? And back check with Sacred Scripture.
 
Thank you for your advice on this, @Michael16
 
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I think that God doesn’t actually give “signs”.

I think that what happens is that we might be faced with something momentous and what we get is something less momentous than our original need.

One day, I was out of work, running out of money, and had holes in my shoes. And I was very very depressed.

I walked past the Cathedral at Christmas, there were festive crowds everywhere, but I was not very festive.

So I went inside to pray. But there were huge noisy crowds everywhere.

So, I walked down to where I was away from the crowds and to where I could see the tabernacle.

And I knelt in the pew … and I couldn’t think of what to pray for … so overwhelmed.

And so, I said, “I don’t know what to pray for but right now this second more than anything I would like to get rid of this depression” …

And I couldn’t think of anything else to pray for or about.

And … nothing happened … I was sort of hoping that there would be a celestial choir and a celestial spot light shining down on me … but nothing happened.

So I got up and left the building.

BUT, there were these enormous crowds of people filling up the vestibule of the building … so I got on a line to make my way to the door to get out of the building.

And I just sank deeper and deeper.

Ever so slowly the line moved …

Finally when my line was about three people from the door I could see what was happening.

People were reaching the door, but it wouldn’t open. And they were leaving the door and exiting a different way.

And then I was at the door. Big door. Eight feet high. Massively built.

So I put my hands flat on the door, turned to the person behind me in the long line, and said, “If you want to get out you have to PUSH the door”.

And I gave the door a shove.

It popped open.

And there was a “pop” in my brain.

And the depression went away.
 
At the time it was “something else”.

A whole series of “something else’s”.

What happens to your mind, when something like that happens?

It changes everything.

You still have to “do the work”.
 
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I felt something similar when I felt peace from God in Adoration. Just a quiet little, " hey there it is " thing.
 
The last time I asked God for a sign was when my friend went missing and we got word after a day that he probably threw himself in the river and wasn’t expected to be found alive.

I immediately went to Adoration to pray that he would be okay either way - “saved” if dead, or else found if alive though that was a tiny chance in view of the circumstances. I was very upset and asked God to please make me just open the Missal to a reading that God would like me to read to deal with this and know what was going on with my friend, and I opened it at complete random.

The reading that came up was “In my Father’s house there are many mansions” which was my late dad’s favorite Bible passage (he used to speculate about what kind of mansion he would get in heaven) and was read at his funeral. It is also one of my favorites. This reading was for a future Mass and I didn’t even know it was in the cycle or in the Missal. It seemed very clear to me what it meant. I cried. They found my friend’s body about a month later.
 
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It’s not often that there are threads about signs. This one is, and there was another one I think a couple of weeks back.

I can relate because I do not normally ask God for signs, but I did several days before I saw that thread about signs.

I did not receive what I asked for as a sign. I thought, nah it probably won’t again. It didn’t.

But I got something else. I asked for thr sign on a Friday and gave a deadline for ten days.

That Sunday in the homily, the parish priest told a story of a dying woman of cancer who asked for signs that she would see Jesus soon. She received what she asked for. It is the 1st time I have heard this priest talk about asking for signs.

A few days later, I saw the thread about the same topic.

I was like, I think I get it.
 
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It’s not good to ask for signs, because you’ll go crazy trying to figure them out. (Ask me how I know…)

Sometimes, God sends little messages in the ordinary, though.

For example-- I remember when JPII was ill and about to pass away. I worked across the street from the cathedral at the time, so I remember going in over lunch to pray for him. I often went to lunchtime Mass, and I always sat in the same little pew. And so I went to the same little place I had sat over a hundred times before and prayed-- for JPII, for the Church, for his successor, for the Cardinals, for the Conclave, for everything. But mostly for him and the Church, because as the second-longest-reigning Pope, we had all gotten pretty used to having him around, right?

So, while I knelt there on my kneeler, I happened to look down at my hands. And, perfectly reflected in the flat surface of my engagement ring, was a stained glass window over the sacristy door that I had never paid attention to. It was a chalice with the eucharist over it. And basically, the message I got for my prayer was, “Popes may come and go with their time, but Jesus is always present in the Eucharist, and the Church is the Body of Christ, and it won’t be abandoned.”

Which was a pretty cool message to get.

I would never have asked, “Hey, God, I’m gonna pray to you about something, and I want you to tell me what to do.” But it was a nice little gesture, and I appreciated it.
 
One of our priests was assigned at the time to a large parish church and he had to celebrate many Masses.

One Sunday, someone came over from the hospital across the street and said that a patient was dying.

So, immediately after Mass, he ran across the street and visited with the patient.

She was unconscious … and when he touched her arm, she was sort of … cold … but barely warm.

So, as an act of faith, he anointed her and then he had to run back across the street to do another Mass.

Afterwards, he walked over to the hospital to visit again, but the patient was not in the ER. He assumed she had died and had been transported to the morgue.

As he slowly walked back to his church, he commented to one of the ER workers, and was told to walk down the hall.

And the patient was sitting up in bed chatting with family.

When she noticed the priest, she greeted him pleasantly, thanked him and recounted to him every thing he done and said on his earlier visit when he anointed her.
 
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Thank you very much to everyone who gave their different thoughts about my question. But I believe that it is not wrong to ask a sign from God as it is not testing Him or as if He owes us something. As I have previously mentioned that I avoided asking signs as I became superstitious about it. Although, I had received a rose several months after I prayed novena to St. Therese which was totally unexpected and I forgot about the novena. Then, I asked God signs like “God, if it will rain today means Your answer is yes.” so on and so forth. Then, it made more confused.
 
white_jasmine said:
Then, I asked God signs like “God, if it will rain today means Your answer is yes.” so on and so forth. Then, it made more confused.
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Yeah, God is not a magic 8 ball. We should only ask for a sign when we really need it or it is something big, is my take. And then be prepared for no answer.
 
I asked the Lord for a sign about something once, years ago. I forget what it was, but I asked that if the answer was yes that I would get a letter from out of state, and that if it was no that I would only get letters from in state. For the next week I received no letters whatsoever, which had never happened for years before,
My take on it was that, as others have said, God is not a magician or a crystal ball, he wants us to relate to him as a person, not as a magician. He doesn’t often do signs.
 
God works in mysterious ways, and when we are given signs, I believe it comes at a time when we are willing to give something back to God. We should also remember to give thanks to God for all that he does.

My mum went into a coma and was taken to hospital, her breathing was a horrible gurgling sound; the doctors said she had days to live so we called a priest, none of us had a faith at the time, but we just thought it was what you should do. As the priest prayed my mums breathing became more normal. About ten minutes after the priest walked out the door, mum came round and started to speak, she lived another ten years.

None of us had asked for this sign, but it came at a time when I was searching for God. My brother in law said at the time, if you are searching for God, then you have to do something, and these words still challenge me twenty years later.
 
I don’t know if this counts as a “sign” in the way you’ve asked, but when my mother was ill, I was at daily mass (and the homily was about healing). I was staring up at the cross, crying, and I heard very clearly a voice n my “she’ll be healed”. IAnd a warm feeling came over me. From that moment on, the anxiety of losing my mother that had crippled me, left me. I walked out with a huge weight lifted off of me and a complete feeling that God was in control.
 
You don’t.

God has provided us with a Church to help us. When you do not have confidence about an idea or situation, you ask yourself “is this thing going to help me get to heaven or is it going to hinder my path to heaven?” The positive or negative answer makes your decision for you. We do things that help us get to heaven, we avoid things that will keep us from heaven. Should the thing come out to be morally neutral, then, the decision is up to you.

It is a very good idea to seek spiritual direction from the Church.
 
A story.

I read about a group of church people who were on a bus trip. Out in the middle of nowhere, the bus broke down … the drive shaft somehow disconnected itself.

The church people dismounted and formed a circle and began praying … THANKING GOD FOR THIS ADVERSITY.

The bus driver was busy smoking cigarettes and worrying … anyway, as he paced back and forth, he happened to see a bolt that was pressed into the asphalt pavement and had been there for many years.

Out of curiosity?, he used his pocket knife to pry the bolt out of the asphalt and cleaned the tar out of the bolt’s threads … very curious … and he looked and found that it fit the drive shaft.

And in a few minutes of wrench-turning he got the drive shaft to reconnect, and the group was on its way again.

FAST FORWARD many years.

I was building my own business … haltingly … and also attending grad school … when I got a phone call saying that a temp job was available. No benefits. I said thank you but passed. The next day, I got another phone call, saying that for bureaucratic reasons my home business was eliminated and the biggie client would only retain ginormous companies and that I was out. All the blood drained out of my face; I thought I would pass out. I called my friend back to see if that temp job was still available. Then I went over to church to visit Jesus in the Tabernacle and to say “THANK YOU FOR THIS ADVERSITY”.

So, … on the same joyous day that my masters degree friends graduated, I was scheduled for an interview for the temp job for which I was grossly over-age … and I got the job … and held that job through thick and thin for eleven years.
 
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