The Joy of the Apostolate

Wednesday is my favorite day of the week. By all accounts it has no right to be--the day starts with an early wake-up and it is packed full with the kinds of classes that have broken greater men than myself. But late in the evening on Wednesday, deep in the suburbs of Bethesda, I get the opportunity to spend a little over an hour teaching sixth graders at Little Flower Parish about the Catholic faith. And in this unassuming assignment, God revealed to me a real joy I never expected.
 
As a child, I hated CCD. To be clear: I didn’t hate God, or the Catholic Church, or even my teachers. I was simply aware that the lessons were having no real effect on the way I was living. I also had lingering doubts that weren’t being answered. I was disappointed. As a child, I assumed the problem was simply that the things we were talking about were like any obscure subject in school--they needed to be learned, but wouldn’t ultimately be of much use.
 
As an adult, I can recognize that my dissatisfaction was symptomatic of a larger spiritual problem--my faith was not integrated into my being. And the fact that it felt wrong is good because our faith is a  tangible. Our faith should move us. Our love for Christ should change the way we go about  everything in our lives.
 
We have the unbelievable privilege of being created by a  personal God. As a teenager, I struggled to relate that to my experience of a short-lived, impersonal encounter with Catholicism in CCD. So, when I saw the opportunity to teach CCD at Little Flower, I jumped on it with the hope that I could help provide that real, attractive encounter with the faith I had always desired.
 
The Catholic faith is timeless and always has a lasting place in our lives. I see my apostolate at Little Flower as helping my students find that out for themselves.
 
I find a real joy in simply sharing my faith with the young men and women of the Church. Sometimes this joy comes in the sillier moments of class, like when we shared song parodies we wrote about the Four Evangelists (my team won with a freestyle rap). Other times, it comes in the more serious questions: “Why does God never respond to my prayers?"

These questions can be difficult to answer, but they display the wonderful knack many children have for zeroing in on the simple questions. Talking about fundamental difficulties we encounter in our faith has a two-fold purpose: my own faith is strengthened, but more importantly, the students can examine their concerns in the light of true Catholic teaching.
 
The challenges in teaching any class like this seem abundant--many students come to class tired and others come with little interest or background in the subject. But joy comes even from these difficulties. I am forced to be more creative and more personal in teaching. There is a constant motivation in the challenge to reach each student with each lesson. In this process, we as teachers are transformed as our hearts stretch to relate to our students. Through all of this, God allows life to spring up in the children, which then reflects onto me, and in doing so encourages me to share even more of this joyful, life-giving faith with them. This cycle of joy--the life being given by Christ--is truly at the heart of the apostolate.

Come back every Tuesday for the newest Semantic! To read last week's post-- To Human Love--please click here.