Favorite: Finding Jesus

John Chomistek (photo by Nancy Ward}

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by John Chomistek

I’ve had fleeting times and moments of contemplating if there is a God. Was there really this Jesus Man-God that walked the earth some two thousand years ago? I have always been able, though, to see those moments of uncertainty as just a passing thought and again concluded that God and Jesus were in fact real.

Sometimes it has taken hard lessons to regain my faith in Jesus. For example, in the winter of my sophomore year at college, I stopped going to church. It was scary. Those three months turned out to be the worst, loneliest, and darkest time in my life, as the glitter of the world displaced God. It was not until I  discovered the gift of the Mass that spring that joy again replaced the darkness.

But it took a life-changing event twenty years ago to truly cement my belief in Jesus as my God and Savior. It is true that God has a purpose and a reason for everyone. I didn’t know what that purpose was or even that God had a purpose in mind for me until I was forty years old.

I will never forget the year 1996. It was the year that God visited me personally, and I was not the same afterward. In the ’50s and ’60s, Archbishop Fulton Sheen had an Emmy award-winning TV show on which he evangelized Americans to spread Jesus’ Good News. In one show, he talked about the Magi’s visit to the Holy Family that first Christmas. He said, “Of course, the Magi took another route home. When one encounters Jesus, one can never go back the same way one came.”

In 1996 I was involved with the Christ Renews His Parish (CHRP) program at my parish in Indianapolis, the same program we have at my current parish in Texas, Our Lady of Angels. I was in my formation period after my first retreat, working with my fellow CRHP brothers preparing the next retreat. We had homework to study between each weekly meeting. One evening, while engrossed in my studies, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. I suddenly had to stop what I was doing to address this feeling.

The call was similar to God’s calling of the Old Testament Prophet Samuel from his deep sleep in 1 Samuel:3. I said, “Yes Lord, I am listening.” In this first encounter, I received one sole message: that God loved me.

In the weeks to follow, the phenomenon happened again. I would feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. I would stop what I was studying and listen. These next four weeks, though, I received a very different message. This message stated, “Something very bad will happen to you and your family.” The end of each message always contained a flowing, total peace that I seemed just to inhale. Peace that I had never received or felt before.

In later visitations, I began to ask, “What will this bad thing be? Will someone from my family be hurt or lost?” Jesus answered this question with, “No, all will be safe and unhurt.”

How great it was not only to hear God speaking to me but actually hold a conversation with him!  Doubts, though, raged through my mind. Was this real? Was I just making this up? Was this really coming from God and not from some other spirit trying to bring harm to me?

The key evidence that this was coming from God was that total feeling of peace. I knew I could not make up something like that. I knew that the Devil could not produce peace, only anger and confusion. Secondly, I probably received at least ten different visitations, so this was more than just a passing thought or daydream.

About four months after these visitations finally ended, and just as God had predicted, the bad thing happened. Early in the morning of July 5, 1996, our home caught fire and burned down. We lost everything we owned.

The Miracle

First, the miracle: God promised that we would all make it out safely. All the elaborate pieces God put together,  the sequence of events to make all this happen, were amazing. First, our family had gone on a cookout the day before, on the Fourth of July. The barbecued food had given my wife heartburn, so that she slept restlessly that night. About two o’clock in the morning my oldest son, then nine years old, woke up to use the bathroom, something that he had never done before. His clattering around in the bathroom woke up my lightly sleeping wife. She then smelled a faint burning odor and woke me up.

I walked through the house hoping to confirm that all was okay so could we could go back to bed. But when

I checked the garage, the ceiling was all bright orange, on fire. I ran upstairs, woke up my wife and three children, and we all left the house, completely unhurt. No one saw even a single flame on the way out, completing God’s promise to me: everyone was okay.

After the firemen came, I was standing with the fire captain watching the firefight when it finally hit me like a two-by-four to the back of the head: this was it! This was the bad thing foretold. First, I realized that the fire was the final piece to prove those visits earlier in the year were in fact from God. The thing foretold had happened, just as predicted in those visitations.

After that, my knees became weak. I felt like Moses witnessing the burning bush, except that my house was definitely being consumed. I felt as if I were standing on holy ground, on a holy quest. I knew then that losing all my possessions in this fire was one part of God’s plan. He had done so much to prepare me for this. I knew that there had to be more.

That “something more” began to happen the next morning. People started coming out of the woodworkto donate things to my family that we had lost and needed: clothes, shoes, toys for the children, sheets, towels. Our neighbors took us in and housed and fed us. Our parish took up a second collection for us at all the Masses the next weekend. God’s plan? Through my family and me, through our house fire, the Holy Spirit was sent to energize the love of our communities surrounding my family. The most awesome gift I received was seeing Jesus in each person who came to generously fill our needs. I saw their eyes light up. Their faces seemed to get brighter with each step taken from their car to the house where we stayed. We had always heard in our religious education classes that Jesus resides in each of us. Well, I am telling you it is true. I saw it!

I tell you, God is real! Jesus is real! I do not have to expound some grand quest of science to prove that God is real. He is real. I interacted with him. He loves me. He told me that. The bad thing he predicted really happened. My family was completely unhurt just as he promised. I saw Jesus in each person who visited us during that year to give us support. I watched Jesus explode out from their eyes. They looked like angels. I have never questioned the reality of God again. How could I?

The best thing is that, of all the billions of people on this earth, God knew me. He knew all about me. He knew how weak I was. He knew I would need to be strengthened to bear his Cross to energize my community.

Even better, Jesus knows each one of you. He loves each one of you infinitely. He wants all of us to be with him for all eternity. All we need to do is say, “Yes.” It doesn’t get any better than that! Amen.

John Chomistek wrote a book about his experience, I Have Come to Set the Earth on Fire. He blogs at House on Fire Publications. At Our Lady of Angels parish in Allen, TX, he serves as an Extraordinary Minister of the Holy Communion and a high school Catechist, as well as in the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, RCIA, Christ Renews His Parish, Right to Life, and That Man Is You.