For six years, I “taught Confirmation” to high school sophomores. Congratulate me, I took six years off of my time in Purgatory.
Saying this with all of the love in my heart, those six years were a challenge.
While I was blessed to assist many fine young people on their faith journeys, I also had to deal with the stresses of connecting with people younger than me and being a witness to the faith for them.
Not only was I between the ages of 27 to 33 while performing this service, and therefore slightly older than them, I had also been active in my faith longer than most of them and felt quite separated and divided from them at times.
During conversations with others, I described these challenges as two parallel phenomena — “the teens see me as someone they don’t think they can be” or “they see me as someone they don’t want to be”.
I learned to accept that someone in those precious and fragile years of growth has other dreams and aspirations for their futures than wanting to emulate someone like me that says “I pray and try to read the Bible every day” or “I go to Mass every weekend”.
Upon witnessing the recent efforts by our diocese to get all of us to “Go Make Disciples,” I started to think more about this realization and pondered if it isn’t the case for a lot of people.
No matter where we are in our faith lives, if we have room to grow, we can easily look at others as people we can’t be or people we don’t want to be.
Those are walls and barriers that can be quite damaging to us reaching our full potential of knowing, loving, and serving God.
No matter which side of this divider you’re on, there are ways to get past it.
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to refer to these two roles as “student” and “teacher”.
If you’re a ‘student’
If you’re someone who wants to grow in your faith, learn more about the Church, or just be a better Catholic, thank you for coming this far.
When you hear the stories of others, I get how frustrating it can be.
You see these energetic speakers as someone who has it all together. You probably even see them as perfect. They’re not.
Remember two things going forward: God loves you and you’re allowed to be yourself.
Yes, you should be practicing the Holy Habits as emphasized by Bishop Hying on many occasions: Reclaiming Sunday — making time for God (Holy Mass), family, and community; daily prayer — at least 15 minutes; regular mortification — starting with penance on Fridays; and frequent Confession — at least once a month, but there are numerous blessed and holy ways to accomplish these.
You can pray however you feel called to pray: A Rosary, reading the Bible, silent meditative prayer, and so on.
The “good Catholics” you know found their ways to pray. You can find yours.
Don’t feel like you have to live up to any grand expectations other than those God has for you. Be holy. Be yourself.
If you’re a ‘teacher’
It’s easy to forget where you came from sometimes, isn’t it?
There was a time when you were outside of the Church, a very “minimalist” Catholic, or just very lost in your faith.
It took time, effort, and the grace of God to get you where you are now. Thank you for your witness and for giving back to the Church which has blessed you so richly.
That all being said, as you’re doing the good work of spreading the Good News, it is totally fine if someone doesn’t get there the same way that you did.
As the imperfect beings that we are, we did not become disciple-makers by being perfect.
If someone doesn’t 100 percent emulate our imperfect path to hopeful holiness, that’s probably for the best.
The best we can do is share the truth. We do our part as best as we can as beings on this Earth and leave the rest to the disciple and the Holy Spirit.
In our humility, if we can share that we are imperfect examples and we thrive on our faith, hope, and love, and let God handle the rest, that’s the best we can do.
Let’s pray for those who we will evangelize.
Coming together
We’re all in the place in our journeys where God wants us right now.
If all of us, as both future disciples and disciple-makers, can understand each other a little more and know that we’re all trying to get to the same place, we can get there together.
Let us know we are all created in His image, but we are wonderfully made, each of us unique, special, and loved.
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.