Christ is risen!

Yea, I know the Catholic Church teaches that, but how can that be? It’s all stories right. Go ahead, list your reasons why you don’t believe, why you’re not sure, why it doesn’t matter to you, why you don’t feel like thinking about it. Add in your ill feelings toward the Catholic Church and what they teach, how they are out of step with the world and how they have to catch up with reality. Yes. I completely understand. Because that’s what I thought.I relate in my reversion story how I finally succumbed to the urging, that longing in my heart and returned to Mass and week after week would ask the same question over and over. “There has got to be more to this than this.” Yes, I listened to the readings at Mass. Here are just a few of many. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter speaks his eyewitness testimony of the risen Lord. How Jesus appeared in the locked room, how He ate with them and told Thomas to put his finger in his wounds. The Apostle Paul  who enjoyed his hobby of persecuting Christians before his conversion to Christianity, spoke of 500 eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, many who were still alive at that time. Peter relates his experience in 2nd Peter, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

After Jesus’s crucifixion, where were the apostles? Hiding in a locked room afraid they were next on the chopping block. What person in their right mind, after seeing who they believed was the son of God get whipped to a bloody pulp, paraded through the streets in ridicule, then nailed to a cross to die, who would, after all that, go out and preach, to their death, that Jesus is the son of God? Unless they were completely nuts, no one. There had to be something incredible happen to get them to transform their cowardly fear into bold fearless action. Something so supernatural, that the apostles without a doubt, would know that Jesus is the son of God, the redeemer of the world. And that something, is the resurrection.

There it was in black and white. Eye witness testimony and I just didn’t get it. As they say in the Old Testament, I was hard hearted and stiff necked. And, I would like to add, I was boneheaded. My ego kept me from seeing the Truth. That is, until my supernatural encounter with The Holy Spirit. My something. I urge you to read my reversion story which was recently published in Shalom Tidings magazine. That is where every question, every doubt I had about Jesus, about the Catholic Church was answered in the most incredible way. As I say, if someone told me my story before the Holy Spirit entered my inner most being, I would not have believed them. But it did. It happen to me. I encountered the Truth. Jesus is who He says He is. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Jesus is the son of God. Jesus is the risen Christ, the redeemer of the world.  And now that I was awakened by the Holy Spirit and my heart, my mind and my eyes are open, I must follow Jesus, the Christ. I must follow His Church, the Catholic Church. I must proclaim the risen Christ.

Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!