My story

Being a gift for God

 

I really long for God our Lord. After I loved Him, I served Him, and I knew Him. In the past I didn't really long for God....

I was grown up in a good Catholic family and I am immensely thankful for the fact that my parents educated me according to the faith and preserved me in a relatively religious way of living. I always believed, but not always fully. A more profound awakening of my faith came during a Christian camp, in which I initially didn’t even mean to participate. I was seventeen years old. Then I directly felt that God is a living being, close to us. Back then, God, our Lord, clearly and expressly intervened into my life. He completely changed it. I became another person.

Today, I make efforts in order to live as good a life as possible and in order to be as connected as possible to Christ. I want to be a genuine witness of the faith. I don’t want to scandalize other people, but I try to be an example for them. I am progressively preparing to be a father and a husband. In this direction I feel above all the desire of leading my children towards a joyful and solid faith in God; and I want to walk to Heaven together with my future wife.

Among the books I read, there was one publication that really got stuck in my memory. It was a book by Tomáš Halík: ">Vzdáleným nablízku" ((Patience with God)).

In this book the author looks for bridges between faith and lack of faith, between believers and atheists. While reading this book, I understood that I believe, but my faith is manifested especially in patience (e.g. when sometimes God does not answer - or in other words: I don't hear Him - I remain patient and try to hear His voice; and I wait until He comes). Halík describes the atheists as inpatient people who believe that God does not exist, because they don’t hear His voice. That’s why in one of my articles I wrote: Faith is not linear; it doesn’t have a smooth and unproblematic course. The life of a believer is not continuously enlightened and warmed by sunshine. Faith does need our time; it needs to grow and get mature.

“Even the faith – if it is a living faith – has its breathing in and breathing out, its days and nights; God doesn’t speak only with His word, but also through His silence; He doesn’t talk to people only by being close to them, but also by being far from them,“ “
Halík wrote.

Being patient with God (regardless of the fact if He is close or far away) is a duty of Christians (of those Christians who are incessantly searching and asking questions). This is the real Christian approach: to help. Teach the atheist to be patient.

Maybe the most attractive thing for me is being conscious of the fact that God is love. I don’t want anything else but sincere love. I don’t know anything better than life full of love - when I love, when I am loved. I feel that God loves me – He protects me; He gives me calm and joy; He teaches me to be a better person; He is always with me, side by side, as a loving friend.

If I weren’t trying to discover God and His will, my life would be practically meaningless. I would just carry out certain indispensable tasks for surviving, but nothing more than that. If I were not a believer, my characteristics would be so dominating in me that I would become one of the most lazy person in the world: I would try to make everything easy, I wouldn’t care too much about anything, and – if need be – I would also lie. I believe that my faith makes me a better person. It goes through prayer, the Eucharist, the sacraments, friendship, example of others, culture, work, and also rest. I care about my relation with God and with people. Faith is for me above all a relation – a relation between a human being and God. People are searching God. God behave in such a way that it is possible to find Him. It works bilaterally.

I think that during my life I didn’t experience crises or deceptions in relation to God. Of course, there were doubts, but I forgot about them. Today, I feel that I am experiencing a sort of vocational crisis. When I say vocation, I mean the main activity of a person during his/her own life. I have plenty of questions in my mind. I don’t know if my current doubts and questions are only obstacles I have to overcome, or if they are signals of a new vocation waiting for me. For the moment, I don’t know...

I think that during my life I didn’t experience crises or deceptions in relation to God. Of course, there were doubts, but I forgot about them. Today, I feel that I am experiencing a sort of vocational crisis. When I say vocation, I mean the main activity of a person during his/her own life. I have plenty of questions in my mind. I don’t know if my current doubts and questions are only obstacles I have to overcome, or if they are signals of a new vocation waiting for me. For the moment, I don’t know...

Recently, I had an interesting trip abroad. I had the possibility of listening to the homily of a Catholic priest from Canada. He expressed a wonderful thought:

“What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God“

I really like this sentence. I consider it a huge challenge: to become a gift for God, our Lord. To be the person He wants me to be. This is symbolized also by my name, deriving from the Hebrew Mattihjah, i.e. “gift from God Yahweh”. I just have to be consistent along this road: to discover Love every day and to be a gift for other people and for God.