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Reflections of a Lay Catholic

Reflections of a Lay Catholic

Monthly Archives: November 2013

I Am New – Part 2: The Turning Point

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Jerry Robinson in Renewal

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Faith, Grace, HolySpirit, Love, Prayer, Renewal

(In I Am New – Part 1:  A Product of Secularity, I gave you a brief tour of the first fifty-five years of my life.  I left you hanging at the point where, in order to get my life back on track, I decided to participate in a Christ Renews His Parish retreat weekend at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Lebanon, Ohio, in April 2012.)

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at church that Saturday morning ready to spend the day and night, and then most of Sunday on the retreat.  I found myself throughout the day thinking hard about what I was experiencing, and questioning my long established notions about religion.  As Saturday progressed, I felt a change coming over me.  What I was experiencing was coming from the heart of all these men who were from all walks of life – even scientists, and engineers like me.  They had such conviction.  They had a contagious faith like I had never seen before.   It was pure down to earth sharing on a personal level, witnessing to Christ and sharing their lives and their experiences that had brought them closer to God. 

On Saturday evening we were invited into the chapel for prayer.  I had been worried about this because I didn’t know how to pray.  But, I decided to participate because I had just returned the night before from a visit with my parents, my sister and her family in Missouri.  My sister has a daughter who was 13 at the time and who was born severely mentally and physically handicapped.  Every time I visited I would leave saddened from thinking about their struggles in life.  I was frustrated I didn’t know what to do about it, but yet grateful that my own children were normal.  And so, I asked for help in praying for my niece, my sister, and for myself.  I sat there and, as these men, led by our Deacon, prayed for me, I felt in my heart something happen.  I felt free of the guilt I’d had because my sister’s child was handicapped and mine were not, and I felt released to be able to show more compassion for them instead of hiding from it. 

When they had finished their prayer for my niece, my sister and me, I heard another man, whom I hardly knew, say to God, “I know Jerry is out of his comfort zone this weekend.  Please, Lord, help him to feel Your presence and fill his heart with Your love.  And, Lord, it would be wonderful if you could do it in the next five days.”  Little did I know that this man, who was so bold to give God a deadline, and who I now consider to be one of my dearest friends and confidants, had a direct pipeline to Him.  After they all wore themselves out praying for me I stuck around and participated in the prayers for the others.  It’s difficult to describe the feeling I had other than to say I found a tremendous sense of fulfillment in doing so. 

Ezekiel 36:26 – I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.  I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

That night as I was getting ready for bed I found my friend Eric doing the same.  We fell into a conversation about the day.  He knew I wasn’t Catholic and that I had never been deeply religious.  I confessed to him what an impact the day had had upon me.  I said, “I’m trying, man, I really am.  But I don’t know how.  This is uncharted territory for me.”  I explained how I consciously live my life by trying to incorporate into it Christian principles like:  fidelity, compassion, integrity, self-discipline, respect, and service to others, but yet I’ve never felt the pull to make that leap of faith.  I had been so profoundly affected by what I had witnessed that day, I knew there must be something else – something more that I was missing.  He said, “My friend, you’re basically there already, you’re doing everything the Lord wants you to do and you’re doing it well.  Keep your heart and mind open and let the Lord come to you, don’t try to reason him out of the picture.” 

I headed downstairs to bed but I was on an emotional high.  I thought about what Eric had said.  Call it a revelation, or that the message had sunk in, but I finally accepted that I just needed to stop resisting and make the leap of faith and believe.  I needed to be like Nike and just do it.

Laying there on my cot, I got to thinking more about the praying done earlier in the chapel.  I asked, “What would I pray for if I was praying for myself?”  That answer was easy.  First, that my wife and daughters know how much I love them.  And second, that I get some reinforcement from them that they also love me. 

With my mind spinning out of control from all the emotional stimuli it was trying to digest, I couldn’t lie there any longer.  I then did something so out of the ordinary that I even surprised myself.  I tip-toed back upstairs and I walked through the doors into the church and I took a seat a few rows from the back on Joseph’s side.  I bowed my head and I prayed for those two things.  I asked to get better at expressing my love for my family, and I asked for help to see the signs of their love.  When I looked up I discovered there were two other people also in the church:  one was Eric and the other the wife of a new friend.  What I didn’t know was that they were both praying for me to accept the Holy Spirit’s Gift of Faith.

Matthew 7:7-8 – Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

That Christ Renews His Parish retreat weekend was just five days before my 55th birthday.  In the hours between my prayers that night and my birthday, I received letters from all four daughters and my wife telling me how much they love me, how much they’ve always loved me and, for the icing on the cake, how they have always known my love for them.  I’m telling you, as I read each letter I cried like a baby.  It was like a huge weight had been lifted from my heart.  I had been dreaming of this for years without uttering a word to anyone and all of a sudden I was receiving everything I had dreamed of.  This couldn’t have been coincidence.  Something else was going on, something else that I had never experienced before.  Although I didn’t understand it at the time, from what I had gleaned from the men on the retreat this something else was called the Holy Spirit.

We’ve all heard the saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  I read somewhere that the definition of faith is having the attitude of, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”  All those arguments which, for three decades, had me conflicted just disappeared.  I see it now because I believe it.  I know now that with faith, I don’t need evidence. 

Romans 4:16 – …. it depends on faith, so that it may be a gift, and the promise may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not to those who only adhere to the law but to those who follow the faith of Abraham….

The weekend was also the catalyst I needed to make new friends.  And I made several friendships that I know will last my lifetime.  I needed this.  You know, Jesus had his twelve disciples but he had his three closest friends in Peter, James and John.  With them he shared a deeper and more personal relationship.  We all need this. 

I found the affirmation of love from my daughters for which I had prayed, and I found the new friendships I had been seeking.  But the most important things I found that weekend were not things I came looking for.  I found a relationship with Christ, and I found God’s love for me.  It was truly an awesome discovery!

Near the closing of the weekend we talked about where we would go from there.  After the weekend and after receiving those letters I was on a high like you wouldn’t believe.  I had found the spiritual-ness I had been denying.  I couldn’t let it end there.  The first thing I did was volunteer for the next Giving Team.  I felt I needed to be a disciple and that I needed to give back.  And, then, I made an even bigger decision.  For thirty-one years I had been sitting on the sidelines observing my wife and children go to church.  I decided that what an old friend once told me, that I was “Catholic but just didn’t know it yet”, was true, and that it was time to get in the game.  I signed up for the next RCIA (Right of Christian Initiation for Adults) session as soon as I could.  I was baptized and confirmed into the Church at the Easter Vigil Mass this year.  Since that retreat weekend nineteen months ago I have missed only one Sunday Mass.  I pray every day, usually more than once.  I’m still not great at praying but I think I’m getting better.  I read scripture almost every day.  I can’t imagine not doing these things.  In addition to prayer, I have become active in our parish community.  I participate in the CRHP ministry, I am a member of two committees, and I regularly attend two bible study programs. I’m loving every minute of it!

Ephesians 4:22-24 – …that you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.

I have had so many things happen to me in the last year and a half that continue to convince me that God is present in my life and that Christ is walking the path with me that there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that “the juice has been worth the squeeze”.  Since that weekend, life is different.  It’s better.  Not just marginally, but by orders of magnitude.  I feel at peace more than ever before and it feels good to help other people.  It feels good to pray for them when they are hurting.  I count my blessings every day and I am amazed at what I used to call coincidences.  I now call them God moments and I discover them everywhere.   

I am still learning and growing in my faith.  I pay close attention to several men and women who seem to me to lead extraordinarily spiritual lives.  And, I try to find ways to put my new Christian principles into action.  One particular instance is, I think, worth sharing.  On August 21st of last year my Dad turned eighty years old.  My sibs and I were trying to figure out what to get a guy who has everything he needs.  Then I thought about my weekend experience and that he might like to know that his children love him and that they know he loves them.  I suggested we write him love letters such as I had received from my daughters.  Everyone agreed.  I wrote mine and I cried the whole time I was writing it.  There were a couple decades of saved up “I love you’s” in that three page letter.  He said it was the best birthday present he had ever received.  I didn’t realize, however, that I was giving myself a gift, too, in the realization that I desperately needed to write that letter for my own sake.  As Jesus intended, love isn’t worth much unless you give it away. 

There you have it.  Since I’ve left my old life behind, I sometimes wonder where my new life will take me.  I’m pretty sure I’m finally heading in the right direction.  One thing’s for sure, it feels good to have my family and many new friends helping me down that spiritual path.  And, although I am tremendously humbled by it, it feels good to be asked to help them as well.

Well, I know I accomplished at least the first part of my goal for this post.  I’m fired up even more than I thought I would be about preparing for the next CRHP weekend.  It’s my hope that I have been as successful with the second part of my goal – to bring you closer to God by letting you see how the Holy Spirit changed a non-believer like me, and how, as a result of His Grace and my acceptance of His Gift of Faith, I Am New.

If you have a personal story of conversion, of renewal in Christ, or of how God has touched you that you would like to share, please feel free to comment.  I would love to hear from you.

God Bless You All.

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I Am New – Part 1: A Product of Secularity

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Jerry Robinson in Faith, Renewal

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Renewal

Last week I decided to join some spiritually fired-up men to form the Giving Team for the next St. Francis de Sales Christ Renews His Parish retreat weekend to be held in April 2014.  As I was discerning whether or not to participate on this team I couldn’t help but reflect back to when I was on the Receiving Team at my first Christ Renews retreat in April 2012.  I have casually and vaguely mentioned that retreat weekend in previous posts and alluded to it as a life changing experience for me.  I have shared the experience and the impact it had on my life with my CRHP brothers, and, after much prayer, I’ve decided to share it with you in this and the next post.  It is my hope that, by doing so, it inspires me to become closer to Christ and be the best I can be going forward on this team, and that it inspires you by being a witness to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Since this was truly a life changing experience, I feel you must first have a basic understanding of my life leading up to that weekend in order for you to fully understand the change that took place in me.  This means I will have to condense almost fifty-five years into a few paragraphs.  The whole story is too long for one post so I am going to split it up into two posts:  the first 54 years, 11 months and 25 days will be Part 1 and the next thirty hours will be Part 2.  So, if you’re interested, grab a cup of coffee, settle down into a comfy chair and listen up while I introduce myself to you.  Here goes.

I never know quite what to say when people ask me where I’m from.  I call Dexter, Missouri home because that’s where I graduated from high school and it’s where my parents still live.  But, my current residence near Lebanon, Ohio is the 36th place I’ve lived in my 56 years.  The seven years I’ve lived in this house is almost twice as long as I’ve ever lived in any one house in my life.  I’ve lived in ten states and three cities in the UK.  I went to nine schools before graduating from high school.  

My religious upbringing was minimal.  As a kid growing up we seldom went to church – sometimes at Easter.  My first real experience with religion was when I was in the sixth grade and we moved to England where all the schools are affiliated with the Anglican Church.   I remember we had a few Catholics at school but they didn’t participate in the daily Anglican service.  They waited outside until the service was over and then they came back inside for the Headmaster to give the daily announcements.  These were the first Catholics I had ever met.  They looked like normal people but obviously there was something different about them. 

We lived in England for three years and then we moved back to the States in 1971 in the middle of my freshman year to a drug infested, VD riddled, anti-Vietnam war, hippie population in Southern California.  Fortunately, when my freshman year ended we moved again, this time to my folk’s home town in Missouri.  Talk about some serious culture swings in about six months!  I went from the properness of English prep schools to the Cultural Revolution in California, to the laidback lifestyle of rural Missouri.  In England I had seen how Catholics were treated differently and there in Missouri I observed that Protestants were not all the same, either.  I really didn’t know my aunts, uncles and cousins very well at that point in my life but I learned they were all very religious.  One uncle was a Pentecostal minister, and, if I remember right, the other relatives ran the gamut from Assembly of God, to Church of Christ, First Baptist, Second Baptist, Southern Baptist, and General Baptist.    One of the things I learned as I was invited to go to church with them was that even though they considered themselves all Christians, each denomination had different beliefs, with some differences being slight and others more significant.  And, I learned that some of these differences were so significant that, depending on the denomination of the person you talked to, the people of other denominations might not find salvation because of that belief.  At the time this was a huge contradiction to me, maybe because at my age I was ripe for doubt, so I reasoned they couldn’t all be right and, therefore, they were all wrong and hypocritical.  It soured me on organized religion. 

I graduated from high school and for the next five years of college and two years after college I did what kids my age predominately did – I partied.  Without going into the gory details, let’s just say I had very little moral backbone.  Although my parents always loved me dearly, I know I had to be a disappointment for them.  As the oldest child with two younger sisters and a brother, I didn’t set a very good example for them, either.  And, yes, I even discoed.

But I survived and after graduating and working a couple years, I left Missouri and moved to Houston, Texas where I began working for my current employer.  The first week I was there I met Melinda and a year and eleven days later we were married.  She was the first Catholic I ever really knew.   I went to church with her a few times and I felt okay with it.  There seemed to be a routine about it.  Not routine in a boring sense but routine in the sense of being unchanging.  I’ve always been a history buff and I knew that a Catholic mass was a centuries old ritual based on tradition and meaning instead of like the two hours of free-lance fire and brimstone that had been a turn-off for me at many Protestant services.  (The reader should understand that the comments made above about Protestant faiths were written from a teenager’s/young adult’s perspective.  As a teen and young adult, it was all too difficult for me to understand and accept.  I am now very accepting of the diversity between Christian denominations).  I learned more about what it meant to be Catholic when we went through pre-marriage counseling and I promised to raise my children in the Catholic faith.

So, married life began.  We were like most newlyweds, we had our ups and downs, and we spent as much time together as we could…at least for the first three weeks…because three weeks after saying, “I do”, I was transferred to New Mexico on a project for six months.   Melinda stayed in Houston.  I made it home to see her four times during those six months.  When that project ended I came home and life became a blur for the next six years.  We bought a house and had our first daughter; I spent another four months in New Mexico on another project; we had our second daughter and two weeks later I was transferred to Lake Charles, Louisiana, which resulted in another five months away from family; we had our third daughter; and then I spent the next two and a half years working eighty hour weeks.  I barely saw my family.  I’d had three kids in thirty months and I hardly knew them.  And I hardly knew my wife.  I didn’t have much of a family life.  I’m not sure how we survived other than I know we never stopped loving each other.  While I was working, Melinda would tote three little girls, all in diapers, to church with her and somehow managed to keep her sanity.  She has always been strong in her faith and she prayed a lot for us.  I know my career-induced separation tested her to the max. 

1 Corinthians 7:13-14 – …and if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he is willing to go on living with her, she should not divorce her husband.  For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife ….

People always assumed I was Catholic since Melinda and the girls were.  If asked, I told people I didn’t claim to be anything, and that I had never converted to Catholicism.  And then I would wonder to myself, “Convert?  Convert from what?”  The truth was I wasn’t sure if I was a Christian nor was I sure if I believed in God.  Being an engineer and analytical by nature, I needed proof and no arguments seemed satisfactory.  I remember wanting to believe but I would leave church empty.  It seemed like a waste of my time. 

For 30 years I’d get in some real philosophical discussions and arguments with myself, like: 

“You know, from the beginning of time until 300 years ago, people were in the dark.  They had no scientific proof of anything.  Everything in the world was a mystery and, since they had to attribute it to someone or something, they invented Gods.”

And, “ Jesus may have just been a magician and a darn good mesmerizer.  Maybe people were desperate enough to believe everything he said and did.”

And, “What are Christians today anyway?  Outwardly, they’re people who believe in good and evil.  All of western society is based on Christian beliefs. The world would be chaotic without them.  We need people who believe in these things.  Therefore, there is goodness in Christianity and since I have these same societal beliefs, other than not having faith, I’m really no different than a Christian.  I may not believe in God or Jesus but I definitely believe in Christianity!”

1 Corinthians 1:20 – Where is the wise one?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?

I got a break in 1989 when I was transferred from Lake Charles to Liberal, Kansas where I didn’t travel quite as much.  We had time to reconnect as a family and finally get to know each other.   Melinda and I had been married seven years but had only lived with each other for about half that.  I learned how to be a husband and a dad and how special my wife and children really are.  We started to come together as a family.  Life continued to get better even though we moved three more times and had another daughter in the next seven years.

But creating a comfortable work/ life balance still wasn’t easy and I started to look for ways to become a better manager of my time.  I happened upon the author Stephen Covey and his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  I liked how he said it’s not about how much more you pack into your time, but that your time is spent on the important things in life.  He talked about defining your values, about incorporating principles into your life, and determining the most important roles in your life.  I read and internalized his books.  I came up with my own list of Guiding Principles.  I figured out what the most important roles were in my life.  I developed a vision of what I wanted my life to look like. And, every Sunday morning while Melinda and the girls were at church I would review, reaffirm and plan my week according to them.  It helped me tremendously and for many years kept my life from getting too far out of whack. 

Eventually it dawned on me a few years ago something was still not right.  One thing Covey was adamant about is taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, socially, mentally, and taking time for spiritual renewal.  I did fairly well with the physical and mental aspects, but spiritual renewal – what did that mean?  I didn’t have any spiritual-ness to renew.  I often rationalized that getting out and observing nature, or taking time to re-evaluate my Guiding Principles was enough spiritual renewal.  But, more and more, I was feeling unsatisfied and unfulfilled. 

I felt incomplete on the emotional side of life.  I had Melinda and our youngest daughter, Grace, who was still at home, but it was very hard to keep the closeness I needed with my older daughters.  I wondered if they still knew how much I loved them since they’d been gone from home for a few years.  In 2002 a friend lost his son in a car accident.  His advice to me afterwards was, “Tell your children you love them every chance you get because you never know when you won’t get that chance.”  Ever since then my biggest fear in life has been that one of us will die without knowing how much we love each other.  And, ever since, I never miss a chance to tell them I love them. 

And then, socially, I was feeling like I didn’t have many close friends.  Oh, I had lots of people I could call friends, but few close friends.  Constantly moving and not putting down roots prevented me from making close friends.  What I needed were a few individuals with whom I could share life in a deeper and more personal way. 

In early 2012, after living in Lebanon, Ohio for over five years, I became extremely busy at work and life got crazy again.  I focused hard on my roles, values and mission in life but it didn’t help.  Then one day, Melinda handed me a brochure about the Christ Renews His Parish retreat weekend coming up in April.  She had been on a women’s receiving team and two giving teams, but she had never pushed me to go.  She pointed out that the Giving Team had a couple men on it with whom I had become pretty close, and said that if ever I thought I might want to do this then this would be a good time.  The brochure talked about, among other things, time for reflection, reconnecting with what’s important in life, and about meeting other men in the parish.  These were exactly the things that had been weighing on my mind, and so I signed up.  I needed to do something to get my life back on track. 

Matthew 11:28-29 – Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.

(This ends Part 1.  Don’t stray too far away.  I’m saving the best for last.  Part 2 should be ready to post in a couple days and it’s not quite as long.)

One thing I’ve learned in fifty-six years is that we all get to where we are in life by unique paths.  My story may seem familiar to some of you and totally foreign to others.  If any of my experiences strike a special emotion within you, or cause old memories to be exhumed, and you don’t mind sharing with others for what might be their benefit, please feel free to comment.  I’d love to swap stories.

Good night and God Bless.

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