Being a member of God’s family is more than just belonging; it’s also an adventure of learning to love each other the way God loves. Fr. Joe Freedy explained this during our first workshop of the afternoon.
For Fr. Joe, that adventure began with learning to love himself. As a young adult, he battled with addiction and anxiety. The different ways in which he was struggling, and also the ways he was trying to prove himself in sports, were really a result of a fundamental need that we all share: the need to be fully seen, fully known, and fully loved.
At the time, he was failing to see his own worth and even projected his faulty self-image onto the way he thought God must feel and think about him. “All I saw were the bad parts of myself, and I projected them onto God. I heard Him say to my heart, ‘Joe, the God you think I am, I’m not. I don’t see you the way you see yourself,'” Fr. Joe explained.
The truth is that God delights in each member of His family, in both the good and challenging times. He loves us when we love well and when we fail to love. When we sin against ourselves or others, our Heavenly Father doesn’t look on us with condemnation; instead He sees our pain and wants to heal it.
The Enemy tries to distort this truth — that we are each a beautiful child of God of inestimable worth — by dividing us against others, against God, and even against ourselves.
Our call — our adventure — is to counter that distortion by proclaiming the truth of love into the world. Fr. Joe encouraged us to follow the examples of St. Oscar Romero and St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa). Both were champions of the poor in their respective countries: El Salvador and India. While Mother Teresa’s story is more well known, Bishop Romero also echoes God’s invitation to love the forgotten in society by challenging those of us “with a voice [to] speak for those without a voice.” In our world today, those without a voice often include the poor, the unborn, the immigrant, the disabled, and the elderly.
Are you ready to begin the adventure to love each person in God’s family?
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