God Moments

“Make a list of your God moments, you’re going to need them some day.”

These words still echo through my mind constantly, despite the fact that Katie sagely delivered them on Kairos nearly six years ago.

Heeding this advice has gotten me through some rough times. The moments where God’s existence seems impossible given the pain and hurt I felt and witnessed around me. The moments where nothing was going my way, nor did it seem like it ever would again. And particularly the moments where I desperately begged God for one thing, and he gave me the opposite.

Katie’s words were absolutely right. I did need them over the past six years, and I will continue to need them for the rest of my life.

However, I think Katie was probably suggesting you’d only need those moments when things were rough, when you seemed to no longer find God anywhere. And in many ways, that is the logical foregone conclusion. I don't find the advice any less true, however I would suggest that God moments are perhaps even more valuable when things are going great.

Not because I forget God in those moments. But because by remembering other sacramental moments during a happy experience, it only increases my wonder and awe for God. That He would choose to give me multiple moments of intense happiness is even more miraculous a thought to me.

It’s similar - and perhaps these people even belong on my God moment list- to how I often feel there is absolutely no way I will ever make another close friend, someone who really gets me and makes my life even better by challenging me to become a better version of myself. I think that and then BOOM I live with random roommates over a summer BOOM I get an internship on Cap Hill BOOM I get placed with a kid I “hated” for 9 ams Monday mornings BOOM I live in the ghetto with boys I’ve never met before BOOM A random meeting of acquaintances propels a friendship BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Each of these moments is associated with the experience of making a friend I never in my wildest dreams could have thought up. And each of these people changed me tremendously, for the better and for good.

In reflection on the first day of finals, as I sit here watching kids take tests (in utter boredom) all I can really think about is how much I hate the word ‘final.’ It’s so definite, so concrete, so... final. But the ones we love never truly leave us, they’re always in our hearts. So it is with God, even when it doesn’t seem that way. And even the things you think you’re done with in life, always find a way of coming back to you.

It breaks my heart to think about leaving MUHS. Though most moments I didn’t actually think I was happy, looking back I know I was. And it’s not the nostalgia typing. It was where I was meant to be. God never steered me wrong before, I have God moments as proof of that. It broke my heart to leave grade school, to stop playing the violin, to say good bye to harlequins, to move out of Michigan, to graduate from Mercy, to leave DC, and mostly to graduate from Marquette. But all of those experiences ended up giving way to at least equally great (and usually even better) ones.

So I’m waiting, in hope, for my next God moment. It could happen today, maybe it won’t happen for years. But in the meantime, I have a ton of memories that prove God’s existence and, more importantly, his love.