We occasionally meet someone who has clearly become the person they were meant to be. I know such a person right now – aspiring to be like them helps push me forward in living my faith, to put faith concepts into practice.
Truly being a person of faith isn’t merely about sitting in a pew on Sundays.
Certainly, sitting in a pew is part of “showing up.” The pews are part of where we learn – a gateway into faith, so to speak.
Whether we are truly living our faith is about whether we engage when attending church combined with what we do outside of church.
This was articulated well by Bishop Frank Schuster (Seattle): “God doesn’t want to be an app that we pull up occasionally. Rather, God wants to be our operating system that runs our lives.”
What does it mean to have God be the operating system that runs our lives? Simply put, God is only going to be the operating system that runs our lives when we assent to allow this.
Assenting to allow God be our operating system means:
- Learning about God and faith, to the limited degree that we can (another Seattle-area priest, Fr. Tim Clark, verbally observed that our efforts to understand God and describe God really only “get around the edges…. Think of God as a circle, with our efforts to understand God and describe God as sometimes touching some parts of that circle).
- Assenting that it’s God who is the ultimate reality, that we are junior parties to a relationship with God, that we are meant to follow God’s lead.
- Developing a prayer-centered relationship with God. Just as our relationships with people require communication and social interaction, having a relationship with God requires communication and social interaction – which happens in prayer. More on prayer here.
- Truly letting God into our hearts. “It is no longer I, but God who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). We often don’t do such a great job of transforming our lives on our own. Allowing God to shape us is crucial to becoming the people we are meant to be.
- Loving the people around us. Christ was asked, which of the commandments is greatest? He responded in Matthew 22:34-40: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
- “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Galatians 16:14). There’s a lot to unpack here. If we hold up everything we think and do to this standard, we can spend our entire lives getting closer to living the loving lives we are meant to live.
Interested in an improved prayer life? Reminder: faith sharing groups about our prayer lives are starting on Zoom with A Parish Catechist on Saturday, July 20 (8:00 am, Pacific Time). More info here (including a Zoom link) – we would love to have you join in!
Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). Also, your support ($$) to help sustain this blog is welcome.
