Hello everyone, I’m Trina, a Year 2 student studying Biological Sciences. A few weeks ago in MTR, you may have heard me share about living a radical life for Christ. You may also have heard my mini-testimony during the session itself, but today I come bearing a longer testimony about getting used to different.
I ended the previous semester of school in a bad place. I was extremely jaded with everything; school, community and parish work, and I had chosen to cut God out of my life at that point. Sure, He still inhabited a part of my mind everyday, but I deliberately refused to communicate with Him and tried so hard to convince myself that despite how far I had come in my faith journey previously, that this was the end of it, and the faith just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t the first time I had felt that way. Since I’ve returned to the faith, a long standing struggle of mine has always been with being chosen to have the gift of this faith, because to me, it’s so easy to desire the faith for you, to desire your salvation and your good, but it’s so hard to desire the same for myself. Last year, I was back at the point of convincing myself that as much as I desire for others to be a part of the kingdom, the Lord just didn’t have the same plan for me. An image I kept seeing was of myself as a gatekeeper, at the kingdom’s entrance, welcoming His children home, but never really being welcomed in myself.
But grace went out of His way to come and catch me. I found myself at CUR21, sitting in one of the sessions, as jaded as I was, when the topic of being lost came about. The speaker mentioned how when we get lost, we always revert to asking, “where are you, Lord?”, but she proposed another way of asking: Where am I, Lord? Please take me home, I have wandered from your love.” That moment felt like a blast of cold air right in my face, as I wrote that one line down in my journal. Upon further reflection, the Lord revealed to me how far I had wandered from His love, to the point of believing that I had lost it. He was never the God that shut the gates of heaven on me, but I had chosen to stand outside the open gates. He revealed to me this yearning, in the depths of my heart to be home with Him, because nothing else could even satisfy this immense emptiness that I had been feeling. He reminded me of how I knew, deep down, that there was really no other cure, no antidote to this restlessness, this jadedness and this hunger that I had been trying to suppress, nothing else solved the problems but Him.
With this knowledge, I tried to pick myself up and dust myself off to carry on my journey towards Heaven. Still, I struggled. It felt impossible, having been stuck in my habits and grown attuned to my lies again, I felt like everything I tried to get my prayer life and my relationship with God back on track didn’t work. In the midst of my struggle, my sisters in community approached me with a preposition: a spiritual exercise, Nineveh90. (Quick disclaimer: I am not sponsored) My first reaction, very naturally, was “hard pass”, because I had heard of the “intensity and rigour” of this exercise and was frankly quite terrified of even embarking on the journey. But the point of Nineveh is that it teaches you to live differently, to be free from the worldly things that distract us from the cross. In this “different lifestyle”, I found myself beginning the day with prayer at a lovely 6am to say the Angelus and Lauds, and closing the day with my Holy Hour and Compline. And while it has not been a roaring success, because there have been days where I really do not hear my alarm, or I straight up fall asleep in the middle of our discord calls to pray at 6am–the exercise has challenged me to reorder my life around the things that truly matter. My day begins and ends with prayer, I find time within the day to attend mass, to say my rosary and receive spiritual nourishment. With these “requirements”, I naturally had to give up some elements of my old lifestyle, so that these new habits could have space to form. This living differently pushed me to return to the basics: building habits to prioritise my relationship with God.
As much as this living differently, with waking up early and disciplining myself not to snack or have sweet drinks, seems to be a personal effort, it would truly be a lie if I were to try and tell you that. There were so many times where I wanted to give up, to give in to temptation and to return to my old habits. But the Lord Himself comes to remind me why this is worth it, why He is worth it. As I spend more time with Him, I realise I now have the space to truly sit with Him and receive the things He chooses to reveal to me. I have the time to wrestle with Him, to cry with Him and to actually have a relationship with Him. In His abundance of love and mercy, He continues to teach me new lessons everyday, and the lesson of the season has been God-reliance. He teaches me that when I trip and fall, there is no shame in asking those who love me to help me, and there is definitely no room for shame when it comes to asking Him. As He continues to challenge me in this season, I am learning to get used to this difference: of not being self-reliant, not having it all figured out, not needing to be strong all the time.
Maybe the concept of living differently is still a bit hazy to you now. The easiest way to put it would be that living differently is living like a child in this world that is so fixated on growing up. Living differently is living like a child that has full confidence in the Father, to provide everything that they need. This Father has provided for me at every turn, at every point. His only ask of me is that I live differently for Him, live like a child that waits on the Father. So brothers and sisters, will you wait on the Father today? Because in the Father’s arms, you are nothing more than a child, and He is more than willing to hold you.
Living differently is living like a child that has full confidence in the Father, to provide everything that they need.