Alright, so this blog is a bit of a story, but it's got a good moral to it. This happened only about three years ago. I was struggling big time in my prayer life. I felt like I just couldn't pray to God. I was discouraged and didn't know what to do. I felt like I was abandoned by God, which is ridiculous! But I just couldn't get out of this rut. But one day God showed me a way out.
The March for Life
I went to Washington D.C. for the March for Life, and the day after the March, my group and I got to go to museums and Churches in the area, which was lit. We went to the St John Paul II museum and as we were going through, there were some sisters of Divine Mercy. The nuns were handing out pieces of paper kind of like
fortune cookie papers. When they handed you a paper they would say, "Messages from Jesus". I received my paper and I read it. Man, all I can say is this was straight facts; a message from Jesus, this is what it read: "Speak to me as you would a friend". Boom! Literally I was trying to figure out how to pray and I felt discouraged and abandoned. It turned out that all I needed to do was talk to Jesus as though I were talking to one of my friends. God wanted to let me know that there was a way to communicate with Him, and I didn’t have to recite thousands of prayers. What I needed to do was simply ask Him how His day is going.
Why This Stuck Out to Me
It's really funny how it took me a while before I was able to understand this fully. My older brother helped me understand when he explained something very important to me. Before Christ came into the world as a human, those who were faithful to God could only view God as a supreme being. They could only see God as a creator and not a friend. But when Christ became human, what happened was that we could relate to Christ on a human level and thus be friends with Him. Jesus Christ gave us a way to see Him and love Him in another way. If Christ had never come into the world, we would never be able to "speak to Him as a friend". Something one of my chums said that was very true is that our religion, the Catholic Faith, is the only religion that is about your personal relationship with God. In other words, our faith is about that oneness with God, and the best way to get that is by being friends with Him. It's pretty wild to think about it, right?
My Point
The point that I want to get across is that although we are sinful creatures and God is the Awesome Creator, God still desires to be friends with us. God wishes that we come to Him with our struggles. That we come to Him when we are down in the dumps. God loves us and a way we can show our love to Him is by simply speaking with God as a friend. God Bless peeps!
Photo Credits:
https://unsplash.com/photos/5CsiB93tQZI
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