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Hi everybody! My name is Jerushah and I’ve been going to St. Charles for a little over a year. I was raised in a Protestant household and believed in God as a child but became an atheist by about middle school due to many circumstances in life. Eventually, I couldn’t escape that emptiness that only God can fill. My searching to fill this emptiness led me to the Bible, which I realized was true, causing me to join a Protestant church because that’s what I knew. After a long series of events, I found myself wandering between churches and was seriously evaluating where God was calling me to be. I had never really considered Catholicism because somewhere along the line I absorbed that anti-Catholic bias that many Protestants have. However, God brought a series of challenges to my assumptions and I slowly realized that many things I believed about the Catholic Church were false, and actually the Catholic faith held up to scrutiny.
St. Charles wasn’t the first parish I wandered into, but it ended up being the one where I found an amazing community through. Fr. John enthusiastically introducing me to the Young Adults group. Long story short, I ended up in RCIA/OCIA and was just confirmed and had my first communion this past Easter.
After falling deeper into the rhythm of the community at St. Charles, I was laid off from my job unexpectedly in August. It hit me hard. It’s easy to forget how much of your identity is wrapped up in what you do for a living and how much your feeling of security is tied to a paycheck. God was really calling on me to trust Him. And I don’t know that I could have trusted Him as much as I do now without the community of St. Charles around me and the many ways as Catholics we can tangibly experience God in our lives through receiving Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, sitting with Jesus in adoration, praying the rosary, etc.
My roots in Christ and his church through the community at St. Charles have been keeping me steady as He grows me in this season of deep uncertainty. I can finally see the light at end of this months long job search and I’m realizing that my self-esteem is no longer as fixed on earning a paycheck as it once was. I can feel that God has used this turbulent time in my life to take my sense of security away from being rooted in the things of this world and deepen my faith and hope in Him instead. God has been leading me through a rough path to take away all the things that I need to let go of to be truly reliant on Him. And there is no greater peace than fully relying on God.
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