For quite sometime now I have been casually wearing a light gray round-neck t-shirt.
I like its soft cotton cloth that fits me just perfectly and the general comfort I feel every time I wear it.
But going unnoticed to me for quite some time already was the ostensive printing in front that says “Property of JESUS eternally”.
Oops.
As soon as I became aware of this print-content, I immediately became consciously worried about the times I have worn it, hopefully not on occasions when my behavior would have not been fit nor even was a tiny bit representative of its message. It is a shame to be in that ironic position. It would have been like an environmentalist seen throwing trashes into a living river or a police in uniform red-handedly caught committing a crime. My bad.
Come to think of it. More than what we can visually bannered ourselves to be, it is what we believe ourselves to be that will eventually be seen and recognized by those people around us. We can profess ourselves to be Christians but if Christ is not really inside us, then we are only fooling ourselves. If we declare that we love others yet hardly lift a finger, spare a minute, or even affirmed other persons in need, then who are we kidding? We can hang a make-believe halo over our head to be seen by all, but only the hidden halo over our good deeds gets the merit of grace in heaven.
I am a Catholic and it gives me embarrassment in myself that, in the not so distant past, I was questioning some Catholic doctrines and traditions without really exerting effort to research, read and comprehend them. I just based my opinions on my uninformed understanding and on flippant hearsays and that was it. Yes, I was a typical bumper-sticker Catholic before and only the grace of God keeps shaking me back to a deep longing to discover the depth and richness of Catholicism. Just like most Catholics, I have a long, long and really long way to go and I will most certainly not finish them all during my lifetime. But if this transitional spiritual venture means learning to appreciate more the beauty of being in the one, holy, catholic (meaning “universal”) and apostolic church of God (CCC 811-848), then I will embrace it wholeheartedly and practice it with piety and fortitude, full of hope and energized by prayer.
We simply can not afford to be a nominal Catholic anymore, that is a Catholic by name alone.
Because not like my t-shirt printing, our faith has been printed by God in each one of our hearts.
We must learn to respond to its calling, to learn it, to live it, to love it and to share it to others as well.
God bless.
