What is love? Love is willing the good of the other. There’s an element of desire and an element of choice. I must desire good things for the other person. I must be willing to choose (to do) good things for the other person. To fulfill both things, I must know what is good for the other person.
The ultimate good is God. What does God say is good? This was the crux of my deeper conversion. When I really pondered that question, just after moving to Minnesota, the Lord was there, ready to explain the answers to me.
I confronted the toughest questions about our faith and finally found satisfactory answers (there is not a question that a thorough Google search cannot answer), answers that hit me at my core and inspired me to be incredibly cognizant of my actions. Being intentional of even my smallest action showed me how every decision and action leads to or away from the Lord. The Lord clearly tells us what is good through Scripture, which is then clearly explained in the fullness of the Catholic Church. No other denomination or religion has the fullness of the truth. The more I asked these questions, and the more I paid attention to the Lord’s responses and saw his answers in my experiences, the closer I grew to him.
I asked all these questions in prayer, every day. Prayer became not just petitions to the Lord, but time to converse with him, the way I would converse with a close friend. It was even more intimate because I began to tell the Lord things in my heart that I would never be comfortable telling a friend first. Even after being married to my wife, who understands the reality of God deeply, and with whom I share more than anyone else, my relationship with the Lord is the most intimate. The best part of conversing is listening, and half of prayer is listening to the Lord — or at least trying to quiet my mind enough to listen to the Lord.
Every day, the Lord is speaking to me, inviting me to know new things about him, to love the people in my life in a different way, and to see the world anew. He is speaking directly to me through the daily readings, perhaps the clearest way he speaks, and through my interactions with people, during walks outside, during time in adoration, and in other ways throughout my day.
In the end, I am Catholic because the Lord made me. I sought the Lord, and he let me find him. And finding him opened an entirely new beginning.
Tom Kirsh, 30, is a parishioner at St. Lawrence Catholic Church and Newman Center. He is a data scientist/statistical programmer in the medical industry and a part of the St. Lawrence Young Adults leadership team. He enjoys adventuring with his wife, MaryPat, reading, cooking, playing cello, rooting for his hometown Chicago sports teams, and playing softball with MaryPat in the Catholic Softball Group.
