Amen Brother Paul

~~~I stumbled upon this the other day, and a rush of memories came back.

I grew up in a catholic home, went to a catholic school, went to church every Sunday, and I still had no clue what my faith was. I never felt like my religion was a part of me or had any clue of who I was. Then God gave me this:

When I first started going to adoration, I had no clue how to pass the time. I would try and stretch my rosary out for 30 min. Just to swallow some of the un-ending hour. I was about to graduate from high school, and the gifts from "family friends" that I have never known were pouring in. In one of the packets, there was a small red book called "My daily Life". It was deep reading for back then. ... Well, let's not kid anyone, it's still really deep for me. But I tried to at least get through the first few pages.

~St. Paul gives a good description of this human situation in his letter to the Romans. He writes : "I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate... for though to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want... In fact this seems to be the rule, the every single time I want to do good, it is something evil that comes to hand. In my inmost self I dearly love God's law, but I can see that my body follows a different law that battles the law which my reason dictates."
....WHAT!... back that soul train up... did I read that correctly?... This is SAINT Paul writing here, and it sounds like something I would say (but in a Texas accent). This is not some perfect person telling me about a perfect life, but a sinner who strives for a perfect life with Christ. For the first time, I realized that the bible could relate to me. The bible can still be relevant in 2002 (the year at the time) and is not out of date with our society!

With this new realization, I found the bible and catechism full of relevant info. From marriage, to prayer, to love, to homosexual relations, to masturbation, to how a wife should behave, to how I can be a vessel for Christ, to how I should love my God. And most importantly, it showed me how much he loves me in return. I'm sure St. Paul didn't realize that those words he wrote would lead a girl hundreds of year later closer to Christ, but I'm sure glad he wrote it anyway. Now I see the bible as a personal letter to me, rather than a book written by dead saints.

"So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. " Romans 7