My story

He lives in Varín. With his wife they have 3 children.

When Marek Nikolov asked me to write about my encounter with God, I confess that I felt a little uneasy. In my life there were no “great or breakthrough events, no burning bushes or thundering voices from Heaven“. When I saw the people who already had their stories published on the website, I felt even more uneasy. I said to myself: what can I offer? I am just a common and unworthy sinner. How can I write about God and about my relation with God? So here is my story – God is the protagonist and I have just a token role.

I am an industrial engineering Professor, sometimes I do lecturing in Germany, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, but my main job is managing the Fraunhofer IPA Slovakia Company. Here is a brief description of my work tasks: entrepreneurial activity, research in the field of innovation and enterprise arrangement, consulting, and couching for entrepreneurs and managers.

My road to God was not straight. In its early stage I was brought up in a Catholic family and was well influenced by my great grandmother and grandfathers in Varín.

Child prayers and child pictures of the Almighty. I didn’t understand how it was possible that in 1968 I had my first Holy Communion and one year later my mum (a teacher) was afraid of signing my application form for religion classes.

The child stage of my relation with God and with the Church was followed by a phase when I thought that I was adult and independent. Do you know that? I don't need a Church that imposes me how I should pray. Where is God, if such evil things happened and keep happening around the world? I won’t go to church where there is a priest, because I don't like it. I won’t go to church.

I would define this period as a period of resistance and blasphemy, rather than a period in which I was searching God. I felt adult and self-confident. Today, I would say I was immature and weak. My road went on through marriage and the birth of our children, Ján, Lucia, and Zuzana. A strong impulse for me was the baptism of our children and responsibility for those things that we promised during the act of the baptism. Today, I think this was the starting point of the third phase of my road to God. Today, when I compare my prayer with the prayers of my childhood and adolescence, I see that phrases like “Oh Lord, do that… I ask You… Please... Change..." were replaced with phrases like “Thank You… Forgive… Have mercy… Preserve…"

I would define my road to God as a silent road in search of God, throughout which I realised that I am looking for something which is inside us and everywhere around us. I began to recognize that when I quiet down and get deeply into prayer or contemplation, then I am able to hear and feel God. I realised that we can meet Jesus Christ every day in other persons. I thought: how can a child give back to his/her parents all he/she got from them. Well, he/she cannot do that. All he/she can do is to give it forward to his/her own children, colleagues, and friends. And that’s exactly what we should do with the gifts we received from our Father God – talents, love, grace, and forgiveness. Let's render all this back to Him, by forwarding it to other persons, by helping other persons discover their talents, by approaching other persons with love and willingness to forgive. For me, being in relation with God is searching and penetrating into mysteries. It is not always a straight road without holes, bumps, and injuries. This road is spangled with my imperfection and sinfulness, doubts, failures, alternation of light and darkness. I am strengthened by the Bible, where I can see that not even the Son of God, Jesus, acted as a superman, but he fell under the strain of the cross and cried loudly "Father, Father, why have you forsaken me“..

Today, I am able to appreciate the beauty of life in the togetherness of the church. Church calendar, the sacrament of Confession, Eucharist, the Holy Mass, as well as other elements of our religion are not limiting me - not at all. We often hear the word "limit” in the mouth of our friends who are behind the borders of our community. On the contrary, all these things give me completion and variegation. I realised that the greatest gift we receive is the following one: being able to hear and listen to God’s voice, the possibility of talking with God and entrusting our life to God's hands. I remember one thing that happened to me.

My daughter Zuzana lamented pain in her legs. The doctors could not find the causes. One day – it was a Friday – we were going to school – she wasn’t even able to go down the stairs. Instead of school we went to see the doctor and Zuzana was not even able to walk a few metres. She was quite rapidly loosing control over her movements and coordination. She could hardly control the mimicry of her face. On the afternoon she was lying paralyzed at the intensive care unit, but nobody knew why.

On that day my father turned 70 and my daughter Zuzana underwent a brain scan examination. We were waiting for the response from the hospital. I called a friend of mine, a priest, who was going to celebrate a Mass to the convent of Bethlehem Sisters in Kinderalm close to the city of Sankt Veit. “Don’t worry, the sisters will pray for Zuzana and for her healing. Their prayers are much stronger than those of many of us“, my friend Lacko said.

Eventually there was nothing wrong with her brain and the cause of the disease was ascertained on the next day – borreliosis. Together with my wife we spent long hours close to our daughter in the hospital. We were taking turns. Then I realised that I was probably having a message from above – I must slow down and spend more time with my family than in my business.

I intensively understood the importance and the pleasure of being together. Zuzana regained her health and I went to the convent to thank the sisters. They welcome me with a silent smile that contained these words “don’t thank us, but Him“. I remained a few days in a small convent cell, surrounded by wonderful nature. From the morning until night I was immersed in silence and could pray and talk with the Lord. It was another factor that pushed me forward in the road to God. I remember when I said goodbye to a sister who told me “Be careful down there“. I try to be careful "down here", but it would be quite hard without being linked with energy from "up there". I understood that the meaning of life is not just living, surviving, and having good time, but something much deeper — something that you can keep discovering even for the whole duration of your life. It is worth a try. Don’t surrender.

I understood that the meaning of business cannot be only gain and money, but something more – deeper meaning, aid to people and to this world suffering from strong moral and ecological wounds.

In my opinion, despite the fact that we are sinful, tiny, insignificant, and weak (compared to God's creation), we still can and must endeavour to observe the goodness and the will of our Lord. I am convinced that inside us we have much more energy and strength than we think. We only have to learn to listen to God’s voice. I am convinced that we should not necessarily search God in exotic places or in exoteric books, but we can meet God and talk to Him everyday exactly in the place where we are.

So this is my story. A common story, like for many of you. But also an extraordinary story, because God’s light entered it. Without such light I would be wandering without aims. I am not at the end of the road. There are still things that are not clear. I keep falling and standing up. I take commitments, but then I don’t fulfil them. I repent, but then I repeatedly commit mistakes and sins. Sometimes I feel that God is keeping me by His hand; sometimes I helplessly ask where He is hidden. I am not perfect. I am not a 100% Catholic. I am not a smart professor – but I believe that the Lord loves us the way we are. My story with God is getting closer to a phase that short time ago Archbishop Bezák defined as the phase “in which we already see the goal“.

The older I am, the more I feel that I have a lot of questions and just a few answers. Nevertheless, I am calm and don’t get nervous at all, because it is better to have questions than to have an answer to everything

Especially when we have God with Whom we can discuss about these questions. And this is what I consider as the most beautiful thing in the final phase of our road in quest of God and of the meaning of our life.