Trusting in God: 5 Methods

With the Easter season in full swing the message of Hope and trust seems to be a constant theme for us. Jesus has risen, so we should have hope in finally conquering a death that keeps us from Christ. We should also trust that a greater plan is coming into fulfillment. The plan of light that is truly able to overpower the darkness or the plan of hope over fear, maybe even trust over worry. It’s that image of finally being able to see what has been hidden in the dark for so long. There are just a few things that have to be done so God’s light can reveal to us what it is we have been seeking the answer to.

                Discernment in the house these past few months has demanded another level of trust and confidence in God’s plan. I say that because of the darkness that’s been presented. It’s rocky and cloudy so I think naturally there is doubt and fear. Just like the Resurrection account we hear in the gospel, there was fear within the community of Apostles because they had no idea what would happen to them. The problem for many of us is learning how to trust God even when we don’t know and can’t see. Here are a few methods that have help me to trust in God’s working under the shadows of fear or worry.

Don’t fear! That’s right you’ve heard it a thousand times from Saints, writings, even in the Old Testament. Do not Fear. God is with you in your struggling and He knows what you are going through. The obligation for us is to turn to God, pray to God asking him for courage because He walks with us and accompanies us wherever we are being sent. He said this to His Apostles, sending them with His Spirit, but accompanying them in their journey. The challenge for us is to recognize that God is with us, seeing the Emmanuel in our lives and using that knowledge to stir up courage.

“God Is Still Good” This is a phrase that has come up in meditation quite often. To me it is being able to believe in the power of God’s love even when things go wrong. God never holds back His love from us, if he did just for a moment than we would cease from existence. This is proof that He loves us! So being able to trust in God even when you understand the consequences of being hurt is real trust. True trust in my opinion is moving forward despite realizing and recognizing those things that can go wrong in our lives. For me it has been a blessing to recognize my faults, to stand up, shake off the dust and say “God Is Still Good” and nothing has changed.

Jesus There is nothing better than taking those things that bog you down to the Eucharist. God brings so much to the table of the Eucharist, why would He not allow us to bring so much to him. Take those worries and fears and present them to Him. Receive Jesus Christ body, blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist. Find out if there is Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at a Church near you. Saint John Paul II says “Jesus Christ, our hope, is a sure compass to guide you on your journey. Look to him and trust in Him, advancing courageously on the path to Holiness.”

Look Where You’ve Been …Imagine your hiking up a mountain. You start becoming more and more exhausted with each step you take. As you look back to see where you have been, it begins to push you because now you realize how much further you need to go. In Saint Paul’s opening letter to the Philippians, he tells them,” I am sure of this, that He who began the good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ.” The good work in us has been started! A big part of trusting in God for me has come through reflecting on recent events or times in my life. We begin to realize that God was with us back then, and so is certainly with us now.

Lastly,  Remember God’s Faithfulness continuously meditate on the faith that God has toward his people, especially in the Old Testament. Countless times we see God always reminding his people that he is with them and that he will never leave them. He was there for the Israelites throughout the whole Exodus; He made it known to Joshua that He is with Him, for him to be strong and courageous in facing those enemies.

With these in mind, let us each place our trust and faith in God that He delivers us from all our fears and worries and place us carefully under his love. May we always work to strive to do your will, for the building up of your kingdom and not our own! Jesus I trust in you!

Called to be Saints

A Saint in the church is someone who is holy, and venerated by the communion of people that make up the Church. Saint, literally means 'to be Holy', these holy people, these holy saints are worthy of our prayers and worthy of our intercessions. They are not perfect people, they are just like us but faithful and obedient to the will of God. Many people speculate about the saints in the church, often asking why we pray to the Saints, why should we pray to them when I can just pray straight to God. The answer is that we need help. The church venerates the saints as intercessors. I like to use the example of a mail-carrier. The Saints for us, are those who hear our intentions and pray for us since they are declared Holy and with Christ in heaven. If I am suffering, lost, broken or in chaos, then I would want all the help I can get. That means from my family here on earth, my friends and even the Saints who are models of faith. All of these people can pray for us in our suffering and God can offer us His mercy and grace. The fact is that we are all called to sainthood, by our baptism as infants, we share in the goodness of God's love and therefore have an initial invitation to holiness. In our call to holiness not only do we need to know God and love God, but we also should know 5 key principles that can help us obtain true holiness. These I explained during the Junior Rally workshop I gave this past weekend:

The First is HUMILITY:
We should be humble in life and know that we are creatures of God and we need his mercy more then our pride. We should be humble when we do things, we should not let our pride get to us. Humility is about abandoning our pride and understanding our weaknesses. I just graduated with my Bachelors in Theology so it would be weird for me to go into a career of teaching mathematics. One, because I'm not good at it, and two, because that is not my field. Humility is about not thinking of ourselves less, but thinking less of ourselves, as G.K Chesterton once put it. When we are humble, we know and understand that it is not all about ourselves, but about God who sustains and holds everything about us in place.

The second is FAITHFULNESS:
Faithfulness is about trust. Sure, it's good to trust in ourselves having confidence in what we can do. But faithfulness in this case is about trusting in God it is about having confidence in the character of God. Sometimes it is rejecting that notion of 'I am the center of attention' and the problem with the common notionof faithfulness is that the focus many times is on me. Faith is realizing that God is good, deserving of our trust and knowing that God sees what we can't. Faithfulness is recognizing that God is the better driver and he is able to control our lives toward the greater good better then we can because that is what he wants after all! We see in the Old Testament when God commissioned Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses in his fear, was not faithful or trusting in God's divine promise. He gave God five excuses and said he couldn't do, I am not fit for this job, he said, pick somebody else. After placing his trust in God, Moses succeeded and led God's people out of Egypt just before he would die. Prior to his death, God would commission Joshua as the successor to Moses. I will touch on him more later. So, we can see that faithfulness requires a trust in God and faith in his divine will.

The third is PRAYER:
Prayer is the most fundamental aspect in the lives of the Saints. What prayer is, is the communication and the bond they had between the Father and themselves. Without prayer there can be no relationship. Think about a common relationship, dating or marriage, in that relationship that has to be a fundamental level of communication, without communication then the relationship either won't exist or if it does already, goes haywire all because of a lack of communication. It is the same with a relationship with God, if we don't have that prayer and communication with God then how can God reveal himself to us, and how can we learn to know and love God. God made us to be holy, He made us so that we can be happy with him. This means that He wants us to pray to him, because He wants that relationship and He wants to reward us because of it. If we look in the New Testament with Jesus and his Father, Jesus was made known the will of the Father because of his Prayer to him. Yes, the Church teaches that Jesus and God are one in the same, however, Jesus still had that human nature and by his prayers to the Father He set an example that we should pray to God so that our will can be made in union with the will of the Father; this is exactly what Jesus did when he said "Let your will be done, not mine" So prayer to the Father, is a fundamental part in our call to holiness.

The fourth is COURAGE:
Going back to the commissioning of Joshua after Moses' death, God told Joshua to be strong and courageous more then any other person in the bible. He instilled in Joshua and reminded him to be strong and be courageous, because I will be with you wherever you go. So I think there is a message even for us, that we should be courageous, we should be bold. This means strong and courageous in our faith, in our prayer lives, we should stand up for what is right and against what is wrong. Who cares if we are young, who cares if we are weak, we should be strong and courageous in everything we do. One message from Saint John Paul II that I see alot is "Do not be afraid" There is a message that we should be strong and remember that God will accompany us always. Many times we might feel like were sent with no direction on where to go, but God is not a clockmaker where he creates us and lets us run on our own. Rather, he creates us, sends us out and accompanies us even after he sends us. So we should be strong and remember Joshua 1:9, "be strong and courageous".

The final is OBEDIENCE:
Obedience being our offering and our giving in to the reality that God is King and Ruler of our lives, yet still allows us to do our own thing. Obedience is us just listening and paying attention. How can we listen to what is going on if we are loud in our lives. Loud with sin and loud with our actions. We are called to obey God, be obedient to him and mindful of who He is. So many times listening is about shutting up and just staying still, even for me I have a hard time just being quiet that I miss what is going on. Psalm 46:10 tells us "be still and know that I am God." When we obey God that is us professing in our hearts that we are trusting and surrendering to the very goodness of God's will. The perfect example of obedience is the Blessed Mother, in her youth she obeyed God, placed her trust in him and surrendered her body as the vessel that would bring Jesus into the world. She is a model for us all and we should pray through her for the same obedience, humility, faith and courage as she. One thing I touched on during my presentation is that obedience starts now, in our homes and with our families. If we cannot be obedient to our families on earth then how can we be obedient to God who is in Heaven. So it starts now.

By our baptism, we are all called to sainthood, we are all called to holiness and to achieve true holiness we should be mindful of God in humility, trusting in him with faith, we should call upon him in prayer, stand up with him in Courage and surrender to him with obedience.

World Youth Day 2013 -- Don't be Afraid

Once again, my experience inside a country besides my own has placed within me my worth and my duty as a Catholic. In 2008 it was Honduras, now five years later in Brazil. For two weeks, I've been apart of a pilgrimage and journey that has moved me by compassion and grace, and by it a fire has been placed inside of me. This fire is a spiritual desire, a yearn and motivation to answer one of the many invitations that Christ offers. The invitation to Be not afraid, the invitation to Be strong and to have courage. It is not the invitation that is tough, it is the response and a lot of times this is what I lack in life. I lack strength and courage, I even lack the move to do something and stand up for what is right. This week I was brought back to the book of Joshua, where God constantly tells him to be strong, and be courageous, to not be afraid. I was reminded in my weakness and my shamefulness to break my doubts and to Rise up because Christ is always with us no matter what. In the final mass Christ worked through the Pope and delivered the same message to 3 million people. We were all reminded to not be Afraid, to Go, and then serve. I was amazed at how God works.

 In our faith there comes a calling for each person and I think whatever the calling may be there is that natural instinctive of hesitation, doubt and then confusion. It was through the humility of the Pope that helped deliver what would be a reminder for the youth of the world to not be afraid. The Pope referenced the story of Jeremiah, and how God called him to go and proclaim the gospel, but Jeremiah feared and doubted the hand of God because of his youth. I thought boy, that sure does sound like me, a clumsy young adult who is afraid of his own youth. Easily enough, Pope Francis reminds us to not be afraid because Christ never leaves us alone, he says that Christ always accompanies us. What better assurance can we have that God will truly be with us as he was with the first twelve he sent? The comfort is that the Pope who is the most revered man on earth in his humility is delivering a message from God Most High to us; his servants. After so many years of building up this still-weak faith how can I not say yes to the will of God and devote my life to him who gave me life. I yearn, and I burn for the fire of faith, 

Be Strong (Joshua's Prayer)

In the book of Joshua, we can find that the Lord instructs Joshua to 'be strong and courageous' a number of times, in fact more than usual. Now Joshua at that time, was Moses' right hand man he went everywhere with Moses and witnessed many things with him. Joshua was a brave soldier, a spy, and a man of prayer. When Moses had died, the Lord appointed Joshua to be his servant and to led his people, the Israelites to the land that the Lord had promised to them as inheritance. Joshua was a brave soldier, but he was discouraged and feared that he would fail. then again who wouldn't right? The reminder in the book of Joshua is to not be afraid, and to take courage. "Have I not commanded you? Be Strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."

For me, there has been an absence of strength and courage, and what I mean by that is an absence to really defend everything that I stand for. Upon reading the book of Joshua, there is a reminder, a prayer and a desire to grow in strength and in courage. I think a lot of times, myself included, we are afraid to speak up against evil, we are scared to make that leap of faith or maybe afraid to go where he wants to lead us. Maybe we are down and out with no strength at all. Well God gives us strength, all we have to do is trust him, be strong and courageous and remember that he will be with us wherever we go, Just like he told Joshua when he was afraid. For me, as I felt this absence of courage, I began thinking of Joshua and how he might of felt the exact same way, felt somewhat powerless and not at all trusting in God and his divine plan for him. I wrote a song and prayed it over and over in my head as many times as I could. To remember the presence of God within me and in each of you. I pictured Joshua crying out to God, praying just as he loved to do and asking for strength and removal of his own pride. This song, for me is a reminder of the strength and courage that we can obtain through God in every circumstance. It is a reminder to be strong, endure and withstand any situation because no matter what God will never leave us and he is always with us.
In realizing the necessity of our own strength and trusting in the strength of God there is joy and a chance for rising an overcoming. As Joshua led the battle of Jericho in strength, so too, we can face our own battles with that same strength. In Psalm 31 we are allowing ourselves to be placed at the foot of the fortress of God, he will protect us, lead us and guide us. God will deliver us, he will rescue us, and he will not abandon us. These two scriptures, Joshua 1:9 and Psalm 31 can be reflected on together. It is in our strength we can overcome anything and any trial.

For the victims of the deadly tornado outbreak in Oklahoma, be strong and courageous for the lord your God will be with you. He has not left you, he will walk with you. Be strong, and trust in his divine plan.

Jesus, grant us courage to rise, strength to endure and everlasting trust in you. Amen.

To Listen go to https://soundcloud.com/vscarrasco/be-strong-joshuas-prayer