Praised be Jesus Christ!My summer as a Young Disciple has been my best summer ever by far. Why? Because the Lord has given himself to me as a gift, and he has given me as a gift to others and back unto himself. Self-gift, the requirement of love.
My team of five had a mission: to catechize the youth of North Dakota and Minnesota and proclaim the love of Christ to all we meet. We drove to eight different parishes in a rental van. Each week we put on a Bible camp for grades K - 6 during the day. Half of the summer we also put on a teen mission for the youth in grades 7 - 12 in the evenings.
Each week had its own trials. During the first week I remember feeling so overwhelmed. We had been at the church in Lidgerwood from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM with no breaks. I stayed up past midnight trying to plan lessons and prepare my testimony for teen night. My mind was filled with incoherent thoughts and blurred images of what I wanted to convey the next day. Frustrated, I turned out the lights and went to bed. I set my alarm for 5:30, thinking that would give me more time to plan with my head on straight. I woke up at 4:00 AM and felt like my heart and lungs were clenched inside someone's fist. My pulse was racing and I felt such anxiety like I had never known before. My mind raced, worrying about every little thing I was responsible for the next day. The evil one was definitely attacking me in spirit. He hurled lies at me:
You can't do this; what were you thinking, leaving the comfort of home?; you are totally inadequate; there's no use in trying hard. Thanks be to God for the power of prayer. I resisted these temptations and gave them all to the Lord, and he rescued me from them. The rest of the week was anxiety-free and some of my lessons that received hardly any planning turned out to be my best.
Each week also had its own joys. On the indian reservation there was a boy in my class who seemed "too cool" for Bible camp. On day 1 he spoke little and appeared generally uninterested in the activities. It was hard to not stigmatize him in my mind as a "bad kid." But on day 2 he walked in with a bit more energy. During the first lesson he started raising his hand to answer questions, to the point where he wanted to answer every question, AND he was asking questions of his own! It was incredible to see his heart so receptive to Jesus. He wanted to know everything about the Holy Trinity, Jesus, and Mary. He asked questions during lesson, lunch, and recess. He even asked questions that I had never even considered. In the end he learned so much and had a whole lot of fun at camp. Praise the Lord!
In everything in life, but especially in mission work, we can do nothing unless we pray. And let me tell you, the Young Disciples teams PRAY. After I taught lessons in the classroom, Our Blessed Lord taught me beautiful lessons of his own in times of prayer. The most salient of the many things he showed me were humility, zeal, and poverty.
- Humility. I am a small creature, and my life depends entirely on God's grace. To be humble is to imitate Christ's love for us, even to die on a cross for us. God teaches me humility over and over again. Specifically, he showed me that in many areas of my life where I think I am mature in humility, I actually am not. Sometimes the Lord used my team as his instrument; spending an entire summer with people you just met can cause friction. Thank God our team never had any major blowups, but the Lord humbled me by their holy example, by showing me (and my team) my weaknesses, and probing some wounds in my heart that have not fully healed yet. In a sense, He was saying, "I still have a lot of work to do on you, my son!"
- Zeal. Paul writes to the Romans in the first chapter: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel." I read this one afternoon and 22 years after baptism something different clicked. There is never a day, a minute, a single moment, where the good news of Christ the Messiah can be put on hold. If I really believe what I am teaching these little children, then I must never be afraid to proclaim the love of Christ, the fullness of the Catholic Church, and the call to repentance - even at the expense of my material comforts and my reputation.
- Poverty. I managed to read one book this summer, Blessed Are You Poor by Thomas Dubay. Simply amazing. He shows the radicality of Christ's call to follow him unreservedly by being poor. Being poor, in the sense of the Gospel, does not mean living in destitution and misery. Instead it means a constant renunciation of everything that is superfluous in life, and thus, an obstacle to sainthood. The book is packed with beautiful examples of saints - married, consecrated, and ordained - who lived joyful lives with close to nothing but the bare essentials. I want to live that kind of life, unrestrained by worldly things, continually giving of everything to those who have less, and trusting in the providence of God.
This summer I gave up everything to serve Christ and his Church. And it was a BLAST! Please pray for all the children we were with, their families, and their communities. I am confident in saying that we "competed well, we kept the faith, we finished the race."
And now, I give you über-fun pictures:
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