Setting The Family on Fire For God

I was on fire for God the first days after my conversion. I wanted to rock the world and wake it up. I wanted to go to the four corners of the earth to proclaim Christ. In short, I wanted to make a trailblazing globally for God.

In those fiery days, I went from one neighbor to another, one friend to another, one workmate to another talking about God and my conversion. I established prayer groups composed of drug dependents in our barangay whose acronym was SuGod (pronounced as sugood) which means “Surrender to God.” This is an organization that was established in our diocese to respond to the problem of rampant drug addiction in our country. We were able to make some projects like jail visitation, caroling during Christmas, prayer meetings, Bible studies, and house-to-house follow-up for former drug dependents.

I had more well-laid out plans and countless ministries to create a tidal wave impact for God.

Then one day I met a childhood friend whom I had not seen for decades of years, coincidentally (it was actually God’s plan) he got his conversion in those same days of my conversion.

My Plan or God’s?

When he knew my plans, he challenged me with a question, “Does your plan come from God or it’s just plainly from you?” We used to argue, I could not imagine that God would be against my plan to do projects for his glory. But the point of my friend was to make my plans well discerned as a response to the voice of God in my life.

I took his challenge, so I focus more on making God’s voice distinct in my life. I spent more time in prayer while maintaining my spiritual activities.

Every time I pray, I expressed to God my big plans, and God will respond by saying “Slow down…” He was like telling me “You need to eat more sacks of rice.” (A Filipino expression of saying you need to learn more of the basics.)

Deep inside I got so disappointed, I wanted to do it on my own and proceed with my plans but God’s voice turned louder every time I was on my knees.

During the pandemic, I shifted my ministries online sending messages about spiritual matters to friends and colleagues. After some years of discernment, God’s plan slowly unfolded, He let me know my place in the mystical body of Christ.

Today I could not anymore “feel” the fire, no more hyped-up emotionalism. It’s plainly a will that steers my actions in obedience to the voice of God within me.

Family

Let me share some spiritual revelations unraveled after years of searching for my place in the mystical body of Christ. Here it is in a nutshell:

The family is in crisis globally today – if we want to make an impact from the level of the individual, local, or global, we have to do something to restore the spiritual foundation of the family.
“Let’s save the family!” It’s easy to make this as a slogan to shout out in social media or in many areas of expression but all of these is pointless if we don’t start with our own family. Start with your own family. How?
Pray together every day as a family. The rosary is of the highest preference. Never underestimate the power of the rosary and how it affects the spiritual condition of our family especially our kids.
Teach basic Catholic Catechism to our kids. We used to complain to the priests, to church leaders for doing nothing to respond to the spiritual malnutrition and biblical illiteracy in our church these days. But what do we do for our own kids? The family is the domestic church. The parents are supposed to be the first spiritual ministers to their kids. Parents are the parish priests to our family.
Make a concrete program of spiritual formation for our family. We can make this in any way we wanted. Be creative. Watch religious video on you tube together. Post some catholic informative materials in the wall of your house (which includes lives of saints, Marian apparitions, Eucharistic miracles, etc.) and change them periodically. Conduct a Bible study for your kids. Make a schedule to practice mass songs. You may go to confession together as a family or go to religious sites together. We have the church liturgical calendar to follow during ordinary days, feasts, lent and advent.
Create small groups. These days we can have these groups online. Encourage each member in the group to have their family pray together and teach basic Catholic Catechism to their kids. Share and learn from one another in how the spiritual program you and they have created for each family has impacted yours and their kids. I noticed that when small groups are formed, members become active in the parish and leave the spiritual needs of their kids unattended. I’m not against getting active in the parish but please, do the basics first – pray together in the family and teach basic catechism to your kids.
If you have the heart for a ministry if you seriously want to give God the highest glory – attend a mass daily. This is the highest and ultimate ministry. You can choose which hour of the day or what day of the week you attend a mass aside from Sundays. The bottom line is, as parents, we better go to church often and spend more time with our kids. Married life is a vocation. Parenting is our foremost duty as Christians. Again this is not to discourage anyone to become active in the parish. I hold the view that no amount of well-funded parish ministries can underrate the impact of devotion to the Holy Eucharist.
Encourage your kids to become active in the church. When our kids are deeply catechized about the basics of our faith – it’s a step in having them find meaning in participating in church ministries. May our parish activities be widely participated by youth not only by the oldies.

A Spiritual Pandemic

We often hear the clamor for change in the church these days. Sometimes it will result in finger-pointing. We put the blame on anybody – the priests, the church, etc. But as individuals, we can help and do something to respond to these problems at our own level. We may have the assumption that as long as we teach our kids memorize some prayers, send them to Catholic schools, and go to church every Sunday – that will be enough for our kids.

But now we realized something must be terribly wrong going in our times. We are all afflicted by a kind of spiritual pandemic that eroded our spiritual values in different areas and at different levels. Ultimately, this is the consequence for loosening our grasp of the basics of our Catholic faith. The worst part is when many of us do not realize and even deny the fact that we are all part of the problem and have the serious responsibility to respond to these socio-spiritual illnesses that plagued us these days.

If we really love our family, if we truly care for our kids – we must do something in our own little way. We have to start with our own family.

Personal Ministry

Now let me share some specifics which I find crucial in how and what can we contribute to our church for this third millennium. We often hear that every Christian has a serious duty to evangelize to others. Not necessarily to become a preacher but a person who brings others back to Christ in his church. Here are some most common options we can make:

Invite somebody to attend a mass with you.
Discuss spiritual matters with someone continuously until he gets converted to Christ by God’s grace. This could be done online or by any means we could communicate to him.
Give somebody a Bible or a religious book for him to get converted to Christ.

Personally I have done this three. But I have to add the fourth action here which is very important, without it, all three choices mentioned above would fail. This is prayer and fasting. To pray for the conversion of others is good, but fasting is a concretized expression of love. Love without sacrifice is impotent, incapable of saving others. It is only when love bleeds that it is capable of atonement for others. When you fast, you bleed.

Machinery for Conversion

In number six of “Personal Revelations” above, I included having a small group as dynamic machinery for conversion. A lot of things can happen in a small group. We can insert basic Catholic Catechism or apologetics, or anything that we deemed important for the members. The most important is to let the members open up and share their problems and struggles in life. Developing charismatic gifts is not optional but an essential element of the group in order to grow. There are important things to discuss the importance of small groups, but we don’t have enough words to include it here. I just want to stress the following:

Eliminate all criteria for membership. Most religious organizations I encountered have their own criteria for membership. They have valid reasons for that. But I find it more helpful to the spiritually lost if they are free to join anytime regardless of their status: married, single, divorced, separated, non-Catholic, gay, lesbian, mentally retarded, etc.
Eliminate all processes for membership. Most organizations want us to attend a whole day seminar to become a member of the group. To some people, it becomes a hindrance in joining the group. If we intend of giving basic Christian principles to the members, we can insert it in our weekly gathering in a step-by-step process. There’s no point in hurrying the process with a whole-day seminar.
Developing spiritual gifts is essential for the group to grow. The practice of Charismatic Movement is still relevant today because the workings of the Holy Spirit wouldn’t become obsolete. Today’s generation is still open to concrete manifestations of God’s Spirit in their lives.
Help the members who are financially in need. Early Christians shared their pockets as an essential part of a brotherhood. It’s a given possibility that anyone would abuse and take advantage. We have to be open to this vulnerability. Exercise prudence but love is reckless.
Focus on the family. The unmarried, the single, the youth, the separated, the divorced, the couple, even those who don’t have kids, all belong to a family. The campaign to pray together as one family is applicable to anyone even to those who are living alone in a boarding house. The bottom line is to encourage the members to pray the rosary together with the significant people in their lives. I highly recommend the rosary – I am a witness to the impact of the rosary on the lives of many people including my own life.

Our actions done for the love of our family is ultimately something that we do for the church. We are generating spiritual healing for the mystical body, in our society and in our nation that is welling up from the cellular level, the basic unit which is the family.

Passing the Fire to the Future Generation

The stormy fire that hit me in those first days of conversion has now set my family ablaze. I’ll see it more vividly on my death bed – I have passed it on to my kids, to their kids, to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and so on and on, from one generation to another, and to another…