We here in America seem to love labels. No matter what you “are” you can’t just be a plain old anything.
I spend a lot of time driving around in a truck listening to talk radio and Catholic Talk radio. On the Catholic shows, people always identify themselves as some type of Catholic, either cradle Catholic, born-again Catholic, returning Catholic, Wayward Catholic, (okay, I am the only one I know of who call themselves a Wayward Catholic) or Catholic convert. Whatever happened to just being a plain old Catholic?
The other thing I’ve noticed is that most of the people who are either hosts or guests on these shows have a story about how they either came back to church or were converted from another religion or atheism to the Catholic faith. They can usually point to a certain moment or incident in their lives which caused them to either return or convert to Catholicism. Of course this is probably why they are hosts and guests huh?
I don’t have such a story. Well not really. I can’t say it was one thing which brought me back, more like a bunch of things. A light didn’t go on, I didn’t receive a vision, there was no epiphany(I don’t know what it means either but it sounds Catholic), I just knew it was right. I knew it was time to come back. I knew it was the right thing to do.
I wish I had never left, I wish I had made different choices thirty or so years ago, but maybe it wasn’t right then. Maybe I needed to go down the road I did in order to get where I am. Maybe this is part of the plan. Who knows? Well God knows but He’s real good at keeping secrets.
The point is, I have come back and I am glad I have. Life has become so much clearer to me now. I see things I never saw before, in ways I never had before. No, I can’t go back, I can only go forward. Although I am still a Wayward Catholic, at least now I see the way.
Lovely post. I think that sometimes we too hung up on our past that we forget to look towards the future. God will always take us where we are to be, we just need to be willing to go. God Bless.