New Facebook Group: Your Catholic Story
Limpopo River, Mozambique by Cary Humphries (National Archives, public domain)
Your Catholic Story invites you to share what God is doing in your life.
All of us have a unique story that no one except God fully knows. Our experiences of conversion, renewal and healing make up our faith story. God writes our faith story day-by-day, event-by-event, and decision-by-decision as we respond to that divine spark of his life that he created within us.
Your Catholic faith story is a first-person account of the facts, experiences and relationships in your life, centered on your intimate friendship with God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Your story focuses on what God does. It runs like a winding river through your life as a testament to God’s loving care to transform you into the Catholic Christian he created you to become to express his love.
Called to evangelize
Yes, God writes your story on your heart, and the Holy Spirit reveals your story, gives you spiritual gifts to understand and express it and prompts you to evangelize others by sharing it.
Whether you realize it fully or not, you, yes you, like every baptized Christian is called to evangelize. Evangelii Nuntiandi states,
Above all the Gospel must be proclaimed by witness. . . . All Christians are called to this witness, and in this way they can be real evangelizers. (EN 21)
Saint John Paul II taught that the most effective way to evangelize is through our personal witness — that’s because that’s what we have available to us.
If we are meant to be evangelists, how do we start?
‘The new evangelization’
Saint John Paul II coined the term “the new evangelization.” In reiterating this call in his Papal Letter on the Church’s Missionary Mandate, he wrote,
The new evangelization needs new witnesses, . . . people who have experienced an area of change in their lives because of their contact with Jesus Christ, and who are capable of passing on that experience to others.
And whether you realize it or not, you, like every baptized Christian, has a story in your heart of what God has done to transform your life. Your story is meant to reach specific people and impart God’s love to them, giving them hope. You alone are capable of reaching these particular people because your unique story connects to theirs and because the Holy Spirit is already opening their hearts to the message they can only hear from you.
Yes, everyone has a story to tell, and the best stories for about what God has done in our lives. Share your story today on Facebook’s Your Catholic Story.
What incident in your faith life are you ready to share?
Read more about how you can evangelize through your personal story in Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story: Tools, Tips, and Testimonies, by Nancy HC Ward, available on Amazon.com.
