"I never really had faith" my mother's friend said to me at a memorial service for a dear neighbor the week before.
The woman who was speaking was in her late seventies, a founding member of the church in which we now gathered. She had been a light for me when she wished me "God Speed" as I headed off to college thirty five years before.
How could it be that a pillar of our community in Northwestern Raleigh--who petitioned the Catholic Church's bishop to build his new church in our backyards--had only found Jesus years after raising her family and sending them off to live lives of their own. How could it be that she had found God not in the community in which she worshiped, but in the ecumenical bible study held down the street?
"Do YOU have faith?" she asked me as she turned to me with interest.
"Yes, I have faith!" I answered with a force born out of conviction. In my mind I recalled how my father's Melanoma diagnosis and early death five years later had compelled me to seek answers to the most important questions in life when I was only nineteen and a sophomore in college.
What is the point of loving someone so much that losing them would mean my own near demise? I was the apple of my father's eye and he was all that I strived to be. Losing him shook my sense of safety in the world, my confidence in a God who cares about what happens to us, and my faith in being able to provide for my own children should I be given them one day. How can a good and loving God allow us to die one by one when we need each other so much to survive and to thrive? Why would God give us the ability to love one another even beyond the bonds of life if He did not also plan to reunite us one day?
After years of experiencing a searing grief as I searched for what had become of my father, I had an intense experience of the God who made us and loves us and brings us home. At a simple request for healing from the grief of losing my dad, I had a sudden infilling of the Holy Spirit, my head became hot, my hands shook, and tears streamed down my face as two fellow Catholics and I held hands and prayed for my Baptism in the Holy Spirit. (There is a stained glass window in St. Peter's Basilica that depicts this pretty well:)
With a sudden and powerful physical manifestation of God, I suddenly KNEW, without any doubt at all, that God is Real. He Lives. And He Cares. And He wants to bring us home.
When that realization was mine, I became flooded with Joy. I suddenly had Hope in the resurrection of Christ and true relief in knowing that the death of my father was not the final word. And immediately I was healed of the agonizing grief that had been with me since the illness and death of my dad.
Yes, it was true, I had the gift of faith.
The woman who was speaking was in her late seventies, a founding member of the church in which we now gathered. She had been a light for me when she wished me "God Speed" as I headed off to college thirty five years before.
How could it be that a pillar of our community in Northwestern Raleigh--who petitioned the Catholic Church's bishop to build his new church in our backyards--had only found Jesus years after raising her family and sending them off to live lives of their own. How could it be that she had found God not in the community in which she worshiped, but in the ecumenical bible study held down the street?
"Do YOU have faith?" she asked me as she turned to me with interest.
"Yes, I have faith!" I answered with a force born out of conviction. In my mind I recalled how my father's Melanoma diagnosis and early death five years later had compelled me to seek answers to the most important questions in life when I was only nineteen and a sophomore in college.
What is the point of loving someone so much that losing them would mean my own near demise? I was the apple of my father's eye and he was all that I strived to be. Losing him shook my sense of safety in the world, my confidence in a God who cares about what happens to us, and my faith in being able to provide for my own children should I be given them one day. How can a good and loving God allow us to die one by one when we need each other so much to survive and to thrive? Why would God give us the ability to love one another even beyond the bonds of life if He did not also plan to reunite us one day?
After years of experiencing a searing grief as I searched for what had become of my father, I had an intense experience of the God who made us and loves us and brings us home. At a simple request for healing from the grief of losing my dad, I had a sudden infilling of the Holy Spirit, my head became hot, my hands shook, and tears streamed down my face as two fellow Catholics and I held hands and prayed for my Baptism in the Holy Spirit. (There is a stained glass window in St. Peter's Basilica that depicts this pretty well:)
With a sudden and powerful physical manifestation of God, I suddenly KNEW, without any doubt at all, that God is Real. He Lives. And He Cares. And He wants to bring us home.
When that realization was mine, I became flooded with Joy. I suddenly had Hope in the resurrection of Christ and true relief in knowing that the death of my father was not the final word. And immediately I was healed of the agonizing grief that had been with me since the illness and death of my dad.
Yes, it was true, I had the gift of faith.
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