The joy of conversion, Christian community, and the Catholic faith
When you are open to God’s love and surrendered to him, his love overflows from your hearts. The pandemic puts us in a cocoon of vulnerability where God can fill our hearts with his love. Use this time to fill your hearts to overflowing with his love.
Share what God did for you in the last few months. You’re not bragging on your accomplishments, you are giving glory to God for his goodness. And that goodness can come to others if they can detect it among their misery.
Three posts this week: I discovered our joyful duty of passing it on. As Pope Paul VI wrote: Here lies the test of truth, the touchstone of evangelization: it is unthinkable that a person should accept the Word and give himself to the kingdom without becoming a person who bears witness to it and proclaims it in his turn. Then, In Bread Upon the Waters, Deanna Klingel tells the true story of Father Tien Duong, a Catholic priest who grew up in the strife and hardship of Communist Vietnam. The biography is filled with incredible personal stories told to Deanna during her long hours with Fr. Tien. Fr. Bob Hilz teaches us that the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Mass, is the clearest source of God-power in our life. The liturgy, in the scriptures, teaches us how to live a good Godly life on earth and provides us the energy and power to do that.
One beautiful Sunday morning on Jon Leonetti in The Morning, I talked on Iowa Catholic Radio about my hesitancy to evangelize. I had six minutes to share what God did to bring me to become an author and speaker who equips other Catholics to evangelize through their personal witness. Even if you are a movie star, politician or orator, people can refute your logic, but they can’t refute your experience. That’s why stories are so important.
The main thing is to talk about what God has done, not what you’ve done. That’s the mistake a lot of people make. They want to talk about their own accomplishments – that’s the world. We want to talk about what God has done in our lives. That’s where people really will listen.
