Waking up from a life-long slumber and searching for God
Photo from Unsplash.
All of us are seeking the same things in this life in one way or another. We want to love and to be loved, to be happy, to have peace, and to know the truth. However, all of us are living in the midst of a fallen world; it can be felt in the echoes of everything around us, creating a deep chasm between us and the people we were meant to be. Despite our social, political and technological progress, most of us are not at peace, we're unhappy, and increasingly finding ourselves feeling alone, isolated and unloved.
Wounded as we are by our culture, technology, other people, and even ourselves, the longing to step out of the darkness of this era into the light of eternal truth became overwhelming for me.
Somewhere towards the end of 2020 I had reached a real low point in my life. My wife and I were living in lock-down, far away from our home and family after moving for my career. My daughter was only a year old, and we were already racing towards the birth of my son by the close of that year. As a new parent in a pandemic-stricken world with supply shortages, face masks, telework, and no family to rely on, to say that things were rough would be an understatement. I know there are millions of people who had it harder, but for me it felt like my well-being was increasingly deteriorating. Like sinking further and further down into a hole that I just couldn't get out of. Yet, in retrospect I'm actually thankful for that time. Not the suffering, and the hardships that were met out to people throughout the world, but for the time at home that forced me to confront myself. For having everything that was distracting me taken away.
The Beginnings of the Journey
I was never raised in the Christian faith. There was a children's' Bible lying around my childhood home, but I rarely read it. My parents had taken my sister and I to non-denominational Christian churches a handful of times while we were growing up, usually around the holidays, but never for regular Sunday worship. I never really had an opinion about God, or thought much about religion. My family never prayed over meals, and rarely discussed God or faith.
As I got older, let's say late teens through early twenties, I had this distinct feeling that there was a God. However, I was usually too overly focused on my own personal suffering to spend time exploring this notion. There was the usual teenage suffering, but there were also other sources of mental anguish that left me with the wounds of depression, which took years to heal. After college, out of sheer financial desperation I took a job that ultimately placed me in a life-threatening circumstance, and I found myself ready to talk to God! I walked away from that conversation with this overwhelming feeling that if I would be willing to believe that God would take care of me, and risk what little money I had managed to save by moving across the country to pursue the career I had actually wanted, that I would succeed and live. However, if I chose to reject this calling, and remained on my current path, the only thing that awaited me was death.
Naturally, I chose to trust God! And I swore to God that if He fulfilled His promise to me that I would "come home" to whatever church or religion He would lead me to. To make a long story short, He fulfilled his Promise, and led me home to the Catholic Church. And thought that was all I had to do. Meanwhile I was still completely distracted by the world, by social media, my career, money, and politics. I trusted God, but I still wasn't putting Him first. My life was centered around things that didn't matter, and it was robbing me of my peace. That's what led to my downward spiral in 2020, and I absolutely needed it! God doesn't forget about us, but we certainly forget about Him.
The Origin of the Blog
As I mentioned before, 2020 wasn't a great year for me or my family. There were a lot of external pressures coming down on us, and frankly our house was built on sand. I was tired, anxious, and depressed, and at one point I remember reading something I had written to a friend as a distillation of my outlook, and I thought to myself "I am spiritually unwell, this isn't who I was meant to be!" I realized I needed God's help just as much then as I had needed Him before, that I never stopped needing Him. So for New Years' heading into 2021, my wife and I made the resolution to start taking our faith more seriously. This led me to start actually reading scripture more, and participating more actively in my parish. This is turn resulted in questions, and me employing my skills as a researcher and analyst to answer those questions, which turn has resulted in having a deeper conversion experience that I'm still in the middle of. I started this blog because I want to share that with anyone who might benefit from it. I want to put my skills to work actually serving God, and hopefully helping anyone who might be in the same situation, or even at the beginning of their own journey find their way home too.
A Call to Action
To that end I want to place here a call to action. If there's a topic, a doctrine, or any other question you would like me to research, please contact us! If I have the the ability, I'll dig into it and make a post about it. So please don't hesitate to let us be your guide!
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