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| Image Credit: Unsplash.com, Edward Cisneros |
((I walk out onto a stage on a University campus or conference venue. An enthusiastic MC or college student aged volunteer has just done his or her best to make a short introductory bio sound exciting. There's the applause of a couple hundred teenagers who have just had their adrenaline raised by loud interactive Christian music))
Hi everyone! So happy I could be here!
I'm here to tell you the truth about living out your faith!
Ok, here it is. This is stuff you really need to know if you're going to go out there and be ON FIRE FOR JESUS!! YEAH!!
Ready?
Ok. Here's what you need to know.
There are times when it is really going to SUCK.
There are going to be times when you're the only one in the room who cares enough to say the prayer before meals, and you're going to feel awkward for doing it.
There are going to be times when you're the only person in a group who won't watch a certain movie or go to a strip club.
There are times when people will be polite to you about your religious beliefs, maybe even tell you that they admire you for them-- but they'll keep you at arm's length. They won't invite you to stuff, or confide in you, or treat you like a friend.
There are going to be times when people in the church, people who present themselves as really into their faith and who you thought you could trust, are going to disappoint, abandon, ignore, take advantage of, or hurt you.
There will be times when you find out someone has been using your religious beliefs to manipulate you.
There will be times when you're really struggling, and you reach out to God and you're begging for some relief, and you'll hear and feel... nothing.
Zilch.
Nada.
Just a complete, empty, desolate silence.
You don't hear people talk about it very often, but active adversity often breeds resolve and makes it easier to adhere to your beliefs being attacked-- that's why people become so entrenched and hostile on social media, and it's why cult leaders will often foster the belief that their group is being persecuted and attacked to keep their followers in line.
Believe it or not, in a certain respect, it's not hard to be a Christian when people call you an idiot for being a Christian. When some guy in a YouTube comment thread calls you stupid for having a Bible or praying the Rosary, it can even feel invigorating. You're not following the culture, you're something special, and look at you being all holy while you're being persecuted for your faith!
This isn't the case for everyone, I do want to say that. If you live in a house where you are openly mocked or persecuted for living your faith by people you love, or if you live in a community that completely rejects you because of your faith, that's a real cross. I don't want to ignore that.
But for many of us, the hard part is when you're not facing any active adversity for what you believe, but you're not feeling anything good from it either. It's when the people you're surrounded with or the thoughts in your own mind are just wearing you down little bit by little bit.
It's often when you find yourself inconvenienced, left out, ignored, or hurt in little ways, ways that don't seem that big of a deal to the outside world because you've chosen to live this way, or ways that seem self-inflicted to others, that this is hard.
It's when you know the right thing to do, but you know you're going to suffer or be inconvenienced for doing it, sometimes seemingly for no good reason, and it seems like doing or not doing this thing isn't going to hurt anybody, or fix any damage that's already been done.
Why shouldn't you masturbate if you're the only one affected?
Why should you affiliate yourself with a group of people that have hurt you, and ignored you, and taken advantage of you or others?
Why should you keep going to church if you get nothing out of it, or if it feels like the people there don't want you there?
These are the types of thoughts, temptations and questions that you are going to have if you have not had them already. You need to prepare yourself for that.
So how do you go about doing that?
There are four ways you can prepare yourself.
Number one: Be Honest.
These thoughts and struggles hurt. Sometimes a lot.
They are hard. They're not easy to deal with, and sometimes you have to deal with them for a long time, and it SUCKS.
Jesus is not offended when you admit that to yourself or to Him.
Admit when something sucks, and bring it to God.
Jesus says at one point that we have to be like little children to go to heaven. What does a little child do when they get hurt? Do they just stoically sit through the pain?
I have small children. I can tell you right now, unequivocally, that is NOT what happens. When a child gets hurt, even a little bit, they run to mom or dad and they let you know about it. And you know if they're mad at you too.
They make that ABUNDANTLY clear.
You need to get comfortable enough with Jesus to let Him know when you're pissed at Him for making you go through something. That's essential. You have to be honest, even when you think that's not how you're supposed to be feeling.
He's not going to hate or punish you for it, I promise.
Number two: you absolutely need to pray and receive the Sacraments.
I know everyone says this, but there's a very good reason for that. You need to keep the lines of communication open.
It is going to feel dry, and unfocused, and pointless and no fun sometimes. You have to be ok with not having an emotional connection every time you pray.
There may be times where your friends in the faith talk about how close to God they feel when they pray, or they talk about how beautiful and peaceful their time in adoration was and you're over here remembering that the last time you were in adoration with your youth group you were the only one who didn't cry or have an emotional experience, and you just felt kinda bored and frustrated and wondered if something was wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. Pray anyway.
Prayer is not about having an emotional experience with God. It's about keeping your relationship with Him alive, which is not the same thing.
I have emotional experiences with my husband, but most conversations I have with him aren't really that emotional.
They're things like:
"Hey, how do you feel about tacos for supper?"
"Thanks for unloading the dishwasher, honey."
"Wanna hear the stupid thing the dog did today?"
But these conversations are necessary for us to keep our relationship alive and healthy, even when they feel a little boring. And that relationship is what enables us to have emotional experiences together.
Prayer is something that you can learn to get better at. If a certain type of prayer is just pure pain and agony to get through, it's ok to try something else.
I really stink at praying the entire Rosary, especially by myself. It's impossible for me to focus, and then I focus too much on the individual prayer, and then wonder if I'm saying it with enough focus, and then I realize I'm focusing too much on that instead of praying...it's a mess.
But we say a decade of it every night together as a family, and I've found that's been really fruitful for us. And I've found that the Divine Mercy Chaplet is a good prayer for me. Lectio Divina or reading through a psalm is often good too-- God loves to speak to us through scripture. That's something that our Evangelical brothers and sisters are right about.
There are a ton of fantastic resources out there on different types of prayer. Just make sure that you do SOMETHING. Even if it's just a Hail Mary before you jump out of bed in the morning, start forming a prayer habit.
And GO TO MASS AND CONFESSION. Receiving the Eucharist is the most powerful type of prayer that there is, and visiting Jesus in the Eucharist in adoration or just stopping by a church is good too. Confession is an encounter with Jesus too, where He actively gives you help to get out of the mess your sin made: it's very powerful.
Keep that relationship alive.
Number Three: you need to learn at least some basics on how to research your faith, and find out the whys behind what you believe.
Now, before I continue, I need to qualify this one.
I have heard so many people, including people really well known in the Church, who think that this step alone will keep people Catholic. They think that if people know their faith, that alone will be enough to keep them there.
The truth is that this alone will not keep you in the Church. It just won't. It's an important part, but it's not the whole.
I know more than one person who came from a well educated Catholic background: home schooled or Catholic school, attended CCD, took classes in college about their Catholic faith, you name it, and have since lost their faith. One of these people used to read the unabridged Summa Theologica for fun. Another one spent a couple years attending a Catholic high school run by a very orthodox, devout religious order in the mission field: his parents were volunteering there at the time.
No one could say that these people didn't know their faith, or know how to research their faith.
That alone was not was not enough to keep them Catholic.
You DO need to know your faith. It's very important to know what the Church teaches and why, because you need to understand why she asks you to live the way that she does. You need to understand what you're choosing to live and defend, and why.
There's a reason for pretty much everything that we believe as Christians and as Catholics, and you at least need to know how to find those reasons. You can learn a lot about how much God loves you. There's a tremendous amount of beauty in it, and it's worth doing.
But it's not enough on its own. If you're not rooted in prayer and you don't have a relationship with Jesus Himself, not just a familiarity the teachings of His Church written on a page, it won't be enough.
It can help to know the why behind what the Church teaches when it's hard, but you still have choose to follow it.
Know the what and the why of your faith, but don't ever forget the Who.
Number four is to recognize that God is asking for your will in this moment, no other.
It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. It doesn't matter what you're being asked to do in the future. What matters, and where God gives you the grace to persevere, is what you are doing NOW, in this moment.
You could have been the worst sinner in the world yesterday, but what God cares most about is that you give Him your will and your actions today.
I'll say that again.
What God cares about most is that you give Him your will and your actions today.
The time that truly matters is now. Don't worry about if you'll be able to do God's will in the future, or if you were the worst sinner in the world in the past. You're not in those parts of time. You're in THIS part of time, and it's in THIS part of time that you can choose.
I struggle a lot with looking at my phone too much, especially social media. There are times I'll spend hours a day on it, and I'm crabby with my kids and my husband when I'm on it. It's just not a good idea for me to overindulge.
It's an ongoing struggle, I still fail at it pretty regularly. But the times I'm able to resist the urge to pick up my phone are when I tell myself, "I'll do this later. Right now, I'm not going to do this."
I might fail in the future. I might go in there in a half hour and waste the rest of the afternoon mindlessly scrolling. It's not the time to worry about it. Right now, I said yes. In this moment, right now, I chose the better part. That's where the battle is.
Jesus even says in the Gospel, "sufficient for the day is its own evil." Worry about now.
Moment, by moment, day by day, in the present. That's where the battle is fought and won.
God willing, when you go through struggles there will be a moment in this life when you're able to look back and see that God was working in those circumstances, even if you couldn't see Him at the time.
I can't promise that that moment will happen with every struggle that you have. There are some truly horrible, difficult struggles that I don't think we'll understand Him working through until we're in Heaven.
It comes down to this.
When Jesus says He is the way, the truth, and the life, do we believe Him or not?
Do we trust Him, or not?
Those are the questions that you, and I, have to answer.
Especially when it sucks.
God Bless you.
((A silence fills the hall. I walk offstage.))
Hi everyone! So happy I could be here!
I'm here to tell you the truth about living out your faith!
Ok, here it is. This is stuff you really need to know if you're going to go out there and be ON FIRE FOR JESUS!! YEAH!!
Ready?
Ok. Here's what you need to know.
There are times when it is really going to SUCK.
There are going to be times when you're the only one in the room who cares enough to say the prayer before meals, and you're going to feel awkward for doing it.
There are going to be times when you're the only person in a group who won't watch a certain movie or go to a strip club.
There are times when people will be polite to you about your religious beliefs, maybe even tell you that they admire you for them-- but they'll keep you at arm's length. They won't invite you to stuff, or confide in you, or treat you like a friend.
There are going to be times when people in the church, people who present themselves as really into their faith and who you thought you could trust, are going to disappoint, abandon, ignore, take advantage of, or hurt you.
There will be times when you find out someone has been using your religious beliefs to manipulate you.
There will be times when you're really struggling, and you reach out to God and you're begging for some relief, and you'll hear and feel... nothing.
Zilch.
Nada.
Just a complete, empty, desolate silence.
You don't hear people talk about it very often, but active adversity often breeds resolve and makes it easier to adhere to your beliefs being attacked-- that's why people become so entrenched and hostile on social media, and it's why cult leaders will often foster the belief that their group is being persecuted and attacked to keep their followers in line.
Believe it or not, in a certain respect, it's not hard to be a Christian when people call you an idiot for being a Christian. When some guy in a YouTube comment thread calls you stupid for having a Bible or praying the Rosary, it can even feel invigorating. You're not following the culture, you're something special, and look at you being all holy while you're being persecuted for your faith!
This isn't the case for everyone, I do want to say that. If you live in a house where you are openly mocked or persecuted for living your faith by people you love, or if you live in a community that completely rejects you because of your faith, that's a real cross. I don't want to ignore that.
But for many of us, the hard part is when you're not facing any active adversity for what you believe, but you're not feeling anything good from it either. It's when the people you're surrounded with or the thoughts in your own mind are just wearing you down little bit by little bit.
It's often when you find yourself inconvenienced, left out, ignored, or hurt in little ways, ways that don't seem that big of a deal to the outside world because you've chosen to live this way, or ways that seem self-inflicted to others, that this is hard.
It's when you know the right thing to do, but you know you're going to suffer or be inconvenienced for doing it, sometimes seemingly for no good reason, and it seems like doing or not doing this thing isn't going to hurt anybody, or fix any damage that's already been done.
Why shouldn't you masturbate if you're the only one affected?
Why should you affiliate yourself with a group of people that have hurt you, and ignored you, and taken advantage of you or others?
Why should you keep going to church if you get nothing out of it, or if it feels like the people there don't want you there?
These are the types of thoughts, temptations and questions that you are going to have if you have not had them already. You need to prepare yourself for that.
So how do you go about doing that?
There are four ways you can prepare yourself.
Number one: Be Honest.
These thoughts and struggles hurt. Sometimes a lot.
They are hard. They're not easy to deal with, and sometimes you have to deal with them for a long time, and it SUCKS.
Jesus is not offended when you admit that to yourself or to Him.
Admit when something sucks, and bring it to God.
Jesus says at one point that we have to be like little children to go to heaven. What does a little child do when they get hurt? Do they just stoically sit through the pain?
I have small children. I can tell you right now, unequivocally, that is NOT what happens. When a child gets hurt, even a little bit, they run to mom or dad and they let you know about it. And you know if they're mad at you too.
They make that ABUNDANTLY clear.
You need to get comfortable enough with Jesus to let Him know when you're pissed at Him for making you go through something. That's essential. You have to be honest, even when you think that's not how you're supposed to be feeling.
He's not going to hate or punish you for it, I promise.
Number two: you absolutely need to pray and receive the Sacraments.
I know everyone says this, but there's a very good reason for that. You need to keep the lines of communication open.
It is going to feel dry, and unfocused, and pointless and no fun sometimes. You have to be ok with not having an emotional connection every time you pray.
There may be times where your friends in the faith talk about how close to God they feel when they pray, or they talk about how beautiful and peaceful their time in adoration was and you're over here remembering that the last time you were in adoration with your youth group you were the only one who didn't cry or have an emotional experience, and you just felt kinda bored and frustrated and wondered if something was wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. Pray anyway.
Prayer is not about having an emotional experience with God. It's about keeping your relationship with Him alive, which is not the same thing.
I have emotional experiences with my husband, but most conversations I have with him aren't really that emotional.
They're things like:
"Hey, how do you feel about tacos for supper?"
"Thanks for unloading the dishwasher, honey."
"Wanna hear the stupid thing the dog did today?"
But these conversations are necessary for us to keep our relationship alive and healthy, even when they feel a little boring. And that relationship is what enables us to have emotional experiences together.
Prayer is something that you can learn to get better at. If a certain type of prayer is just pure pain and agony to get through, it's ok to try something else.
I really stink at praying the entire Rosary, especially by myself. It's impossible for me to focus, and then I focus too much on the individual prayer, and then wonder if I'm saying it with enough focus, and then I realize I'm focusing too much on that instead of praying...it's a mess.
But we say a decade of it every night together as a family, and I've found that's been really fruitful for us. And I've found that the Divine Mercy Chaplet is a good prayer for me. Lectio Divina or reading through a psalm is often good too-- God loves to speak to us through scripture. That's something that our Evangelical brothers and sisters are right about.
There are a ton of fantastic resources out there on different types of prayer. Just make sure that you do SOMETHING. Even if it's just a Hail Mary before you jump out of bed in the morning, start forming a prayer habit.
And GO TO MASS AND CONFESSION. Receiving the Eucharist is the most powerful type of prayer that there is, and visiting Jesus in the Eucharist in adoration or just stopping by a church is good too. Confession is an encounter with Jesus too, where He actively gives you help to get out of the mess your sin made: it's very powerful.
Keep that relationship alive.
Number Three: you need to learn at least some basics on how to research your faith, and find out the whys behind what you believe.
Now, before I continue, I need to qualify this one.
I have heard so many people, including people really well known in the Church, who think that this step alone will keep people Catholic. They think that if people know their faith, that alone will be enough to keep them there.
The truth is that this alone will not keep you in the Church. It just won't. It's an important part, but it's not the whole.
I know more than one person who came from a well educated Catholic background: home schooled or Catholic school, attended CCD, took classes in college about their Catholic faith, you name it, and have since lost their faith. One of these people used to read the unabridged Summa Theologica for fun. Another one spent a couple years attending a Catholic high school run by a very orthodox, devout religious order in the mission field: his parents were volunteering there at the time.
No one could say that these people didn't know their faith, or know how to research their faith.
That alone was not was not enough to keep them Catholic.
You DO need to know your faith. It's very important to know what the Church teaches and why, because you need to understand why she asks you to live the way that she does. You need to understand what you're choosing to live and defend, and why.
There's a reason for pretty much everything that we believe as Christians and as Catholics, and you at least need to know how to find those reasons. You can learn a lot about how much God loves you. There's a tremendous amount of beauty in it, and it's worth doing.
But it's not enough on its own. If you're not rooted in prayer and you don't have a relationship with Jesus Himself, not just a familiarity the teachings of His Church written on a page, it won't be enough.
It can help to know the why behind what the Church teaches when it's hard, but you still have choose to follow it.
Know the what and the why of your faith, but don't ever forget the Who.
Number four is to recognize that God is asking for your will in this moment, no other.
It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. It doesn't matter what you're being asked to do in the future. What matters, and where God gives you the grace to persevere, is what you are doing NOW, in this moment.
You could have been the worst sinner in the world yesterday, but what God cares most about is that you give Him your will and your actions today.
I'll say that again.
What God cares about most is that you give Him your will and your actions today.
The time that truly matters is now. Don't worry about if you'll be able to do God's will in the future, or if you were the worst sinner in the world in the past. You're not in those parts of time. You're in THIS part of time, and it's in THIS part of time that you can choose.
I struggle a lot with looking at my phone too much, especially social media. There are times I'll spend hours a day on it, and I'm crabby with my kids and my husband when I'm on it. It's just not a good idea for me to overindulge.
It's an ongoing struggle, I still fail at it pretty regularly. But the times I'm able to resist the urge to pick up my phone are when I tell myself, "I'll do this later. Right now, I'm not going to do this."
I might fail in the future. I might go in there in a half hour and waste the rest of the afternoon mindlessly scrolling. It's not the time to worry about it. Right now, I said yes. In this moment, right now, I chose the better part. That's where the battle is.
Jesus even says in the Gospel, "sufficient for the day is its own evil." Worry about now.
Moment, by moment, day by day, in the present. That's where the battle is fought and won.
God willing, when you go through struggles there will be a moment in this life when you're able to look back and see that God was working in those circumstances, even if you couldn't see Him at the time.
I can't promise that that moment will happen with every struggle that you have. There are some truly horrible, difficult struggles that I don't think we'll understand Him working through until we're in Heaven.
It comes down to this.
When Jesus says He is the way, the truth, and the life, do we believe Him or not?
Do we trust Him, or not?
Those are the questions that you, and I, have to answer.
Especially when it sucks.
God Bless you.
((A silence fills the hall. I walk offstage.))
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