While I was driving home tonight, this song came on the Fish.
Like any song that is meant to speak to us, one line stood out to me more than any other. I know this song. I know most of the lyrics, and I sing along every time. I actually quite like the song. This line has never meant anything, nor am I sure that I knew this line before tonight, but when I heard it, it struck a cord.
"Let hope arise and make the darkness hide. My faith is dead, I need a resurrection somehow. Now I'm lost in Your freedom and this world I'll overcome"
"My faith is dead, I need a resurrection somehow"
"My faith is dead."
Cord struck. Ouch.
How easy it is to get wrapped up in the everyday trappings of this life. Wake up, get ready, go to school, go to work, do some homework, go to sleep, then wake up to do it all over again. Then comes that time when you wake up late one morning and forget to say morning prayer because you're in a panicked rush, and before you know it, morning prayer is no longer a part of your morning ritual. Then you have a super long day and you can't wait to lie down in bed and knock out. You're just SO tired that you think your bedtime prayer can wait until morning, after all, God will understand that you're too tired. Even the Apostles fell asleep on Christ, right? Then before you know it, you stop praying before going to sleep.
These little things keep on building up and building up until you end up forgetting how to pray completely. And it's hard to sit in church and focus without prayer. All of a sudden, Mass loses all the meaning it had to you before and you start drifting off, thinking about other things, completely irrelevant things, maybe even sinful things, when you should be focusing 100% on the Eucharist before you. Mass without its meaning becomes unimportant and suddenly you start finding reasons why not to go to church, and when you do... You become a prime example for going through the motions.
And without prayer and Mass, sin becomes so easy, and sometimes it even seems harmless. Once you lose prayer and church and that fire that kept you going for so long, sin is there waiting to take over your life and show you the path straight to Hell. Where there was once a burning passion for my God, there is now a shadow created by the darkness of my sin.
How on earth did I fall this far?
When you fall, you don't notice until you're too deep in to just brush off your scraped knees. You're so deep in that you end up having to claw and fight your way out of the quicksand that the Devil has so cleverly got you trapped in. And the worst part is, when I realized that I fell, I was too exhausted from the fall to try to get back up. Sure I've prayed every blue moon to God to bring me back to Him and to pick me up and reignite my fire, but I didn't do anything about it. I've been sitting here, wallowing in my self-pity that I'm in the dark, asking God to pull me out of it, but I haven't done a single darned thing about it. Asking God to help me is all great and dandy, and it's exactly what we're supposed to do, but how can we expect for Him to guide us towards the light, when our backs are to Him? How did I ever expect Him to fix anything, when I was barely trying to get out and actively working on digging myself a deeper hole?
But the good news is that I have absolutely zero doubt that once I turn around and start actively trying to get out of this pit I'm in, God will be right there to pull me out, brush me off, and bring me back to His Path. And there's no better time for me to start the fight than now. It's during these forty days of Lent that we are all supposed to be growing closer to Christ as we get closer to His Resurrection.
Today's Mass Psalm reading even kind of ties in with it.
Psalm 34:5-7 I sought the Lord, who answered me, delivered me from all my fears. Look to God that you may be radiant with joy and your faces may not blush for shame. In my misfortune I called, the Lord heard and saved me from all distress.
Psalm 34:19 The Lord is close to the broken-hearted, and saves those whose spirit is crushed
In my misfortune I am calling, and I have faith and trust in the Lord, that He will hear me and save me from this distress. All the parts of my life that I now find lacking, I know will all fall back together again, in an enriching and fulfilling way as I turn towards God. No more will I have my back turned against Him, because I want, I desperately want and need that radiant joy that comes from knowing Him and walking in His paths. It's deliverance time. I'm ready to repent, and turn myself over to God once again, to be saved and loved. No more shall I be broken-hearted and crushed, because I'm turning myself over for a true spiritual makeover.
And I'm changing the empty prayer I've been saying for so long now... I am no longer praying to have the faith life I once had again; I'm praying to have an even better and stronger faith life.
So come shake the ground with the sound of revival, because I'm ready to be on fire for God again and overcome this world!
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