Ironically this story does not begin when I was born, nor does it begin when I was baptized into The Catholic Church as a baby.
This story actually starts when I was in the tenth grade. I had been going through a really difficult time, and my everyday friend group from school was not the best influence on me. My parents picked up on that rather quickly and suggested (rather told me, thank God) that I start to get more involved in our local parish. I was hesitant at first but you know, the curiosity of a teenager takes over sometimes. I began to get more involved with my parish's youth group called LifeTeen.
This was the start of a new me, and I didn't even know it yet.
LifeTeen's motto is "Leading teens closer to Christ". This is part A of what happened to me during the end of the fall of my sophomore year of high school. I was lead, by amazing people, closer to Christ. In a nutshell, everything became about finding out more. I wanted to know more about my faith more than every before. The thing was, I didn't quite understand that there is a difference between knowledge of Christ and actually knowing Christ, of course until a very faithful person told me.
That was when I decided to apply for a LifeTeen retreat. Little did I know, God had big plans for me.
Fast forward a couple weeks or so. I was on the retreat. Not by any coincidence at all the theme of the retreat was "Drop your nets and follow me". This is referring to "And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. Then He said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men." They immediately left their nets and followed Him." - Matthew 4:18-20
This is part B of what happened to me. A monstrance was on display with Jesus in it. Jesus was present, as Catholics believe. As I type this, I am to this day stumped on how to describe such wonderful beauty. The only amount of words that I can really think of here is, I fell in love with someone who at that point I finally knew loved me back. I fell in love so much to the point where I dropped my net and decided to follow Jesus.
All of this is not as simple as it may seem in this writing, however I do believe very firmly that Jesus Christ exists and the love is definitely mutual. It is a daily commitment to drop my net and I do fall short of that at times. I am just like anyone else trying to find their identity in this world, I struggle with things just like everyone and I get back up and ask God for his help.
God is so good.
