Greetings from Indianapolis, Indiana! I am reporting to you at a national Catholic young adult conference called SEEK. This conference is put on by FOCUS--the Fellowship of Catholic University Students.
I am one of over 17,000 (mostly) young people gathered here to praise God, learn about Him and His Church, encounter Jesus, grow in fellowship with other young people, and to discover my personal God-given purpose and identity in life. Why is this conference worthy of an episode of Unexpected Church Members? It isn't the conference. It's the people attending. Now, the common perception is that the young people in our modern world are... You fill in the blank. Young people are____________________________. Here is what I personally gathered as the most common perceptions: Modern young people are lazy. Modern young people are self-absorbed. Modern young people are materialistic. Modern young people are faithless. Granted, there is surely a reason for filling in lazy, self-absorbed, materialistic, and faithless in the blank. Such descriptions have to come from somewhere, be it the reflection of television, social media, the news, celebrities, decreased or minimal church attendance, or decreased or minimal church participation and activity. With our viewpoint of young people being those negative blank, blank, and blank, we have a shadowed view of the world because we are focusing on the sins young people commit. One speaker at SEEK, Mallory Smyth, explained on Friday that our level of joy connects with how we view the world. For example, if I view the world through my own eyes--say, what I see in the mirror in my bathroom--my joy can be crushed because I have a bad hair day. Yet, if I look away from that mirror and look at what St. Clare of Assisi calls the "mirror of eternity," my joy is not relative to my looks or my success, or the approval of others. Instead, it is a constant joy as the mirror of eternity reveals what one of the songs played at SEEK described, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). This is the eternal Jesus Who is Truth! In truth, it is without a doubt that I, as a young woman, am of the image and likeness of God. Through Baptism, I have become an adopted daughter of the Eternal Father. I am the Beloved of Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High. I am rushed with love by Love Itself. The truth is also that I fail. I act lazy. I have attitudes and actions of self-absorption. I choose materialism. And I admit, I tend to live faithlessly. I just mentioned two parts of Truth. The truth that I am a daughter of the Eternal Father and also the truth that I fail. The first is a state of identity and being. The second is my own sinful actions. I am not laziness itself--that is not my identity! My identity is not sin and evil and bad choices. My identity is that rushing of love by Love Itself! My identity is goodness because God is good and saw that I was good. To make up for all of those bad choices and sin, Jesus Christ redeems me. Every young person is good; made in the good image of God. So, we young people are an interesting lot. We act lazy because we seek rest. We act self-absorbed because we seek absorption in the One Who made us like Himself. We live materialistically because we seek satisfaction. The last one is a bit different. We live faithlessly because we are not seeking. If we do not seek God, we live without faith. And here is the blessed hope in which I write today in Indianapolis. At SEEK 2019, we young people are seeking God. We seek rest, absorption in Him, satisfaction, and we know we can only find that in Him. We young people are seekers and as the faithful know, when we seek, we find (Jeremiah 29:13; Matthew 7:7). Let us break that mirror image that reflects mere shadows; that image that shows sin as our conqueror and identity. "Place your mind before the mirror of eternity" (St. Clare of Assisi). That eternal mirror reveals passionate youth who desire to be saints, who need your intercession and example to act heroic and selfless, who are willing missionaries because they have experienced Eternal Love and are ready to share Him, and who are active seekers who find Jesus Christ in their lives each and every day. Pray for us unexpected Church members.
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AuthorJacqueline St. Clare: I spent six months in a cloistered convent, and now I'm a college student! Archives
April 2021
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