Rolling my suitcase behind me, I stopped next to the moving walkway at Skyharbor International Airport in Phoenix and stared at the mountains out the window, my heart struck by wonder for the first time this trip. I had just flown in for FOCUS's Student Leadership Summit (SLS), a five-day conference for Catholic college students. I had felt disappointingly unexcited on the plane, but now that I was on the ground, a thrill rushed through me- I'm in Phoenix.
I prayed as I walked that God would grant me the excitement I wanted so badly to feel about the conference and that my heart would be open to a transformative week. And how beautifully that prayer was answered!
Over the next few days, I heard talks on authentic friendship, healing in Christ, mission, identity in Jesus, and so much more. I talked with so many incredible people about their prayer, their stories, and the beautiful ways God was working in their hearts both that week and that semester. I went to Mass and adoration and confession. I ate at some incredible restaurants and drank a ton of coffee! I heard Matt Maher perform and celebrated the new decade with a balloon drop with thousands of other college students.
And I learned a ton. I could probably write a different post on every single day! But in the interest of keeping it (relatively) brief, I thought I would share some of the incredible ways God worked in my prayer.
We had adoration on Wednesday night, a wonderful time of worship with Jesus in the Eucharist. Before, the speaker, a young nun named Sister Miriam, spoke energetically and with such care and love, and encouraged everyone to pray for God to reveal old wounds hidden deep in our hearts that still caused hurt without us realizing. So I closed my eyes and wondered, Jesus, what is hurting in my heart?
Go back to the garden, He encouraged me. Why did Eve take the apple?
I didn't have my Bible with me at the moment. She was promised to know what God knew, I remembered. And looking back now, here's that passage itself. In Genesis 2:16-17. God makes Adam, brings him to Eden, and tells him, "You are free to eat from any of the trees in the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die."
Then God makes Eve, and later, we're not sure where Adam is. We don't know what he was up to or why he wasn't right by her side supporting her in Genesis 3 when the devil as a serpent came to her and said, "God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil."
In Genesis 3:6 it says that "the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it."
And then the Bible explains that their eyes were opened. They were promised to know what God knew. So why did Eve take the fruit?
She thought God was withholding from her, I realized.
And do you not think the same? He challenged me in prayer.
For all I claim to trust Him, I realized, I did. Just as Eve, there are so many times I think God is withholding from me. So many times where I have the desire to go after things for myself, where I think that if I don't make it happen, it won't. There are so many times I fall into the lie the world tells us that if we just work hard enough we can force anything we want to happen and that that action is the height of success. There are so many moments where I fight and muscle my way through for things I want.
So in that dark conference room, with Jesus before me, present in the Eucharist, I prayed through moments and memories where I felt that something had been withheld from me. That I could have looked completely different than I do, without any flaws I perceive when I look at myself in the mirror. The other colleges I could have gone to or gotten into. The rejection emails when I queried for Colonized before I decided to self-publish. The moments I had started something only to have to leave and believed that I wasn't strong enough to stay- and He showed me how strength is not equal to toughness and that I was strong enough to leave something that wasn't right for me. The difficult moments of this past semester and those before.
Do you not trust me?
And I pictured myself from God's eyes at one of my lowest moments. Someone told me once that the only thing we can claim as our own is our sin. I'm not sure if I agree with that, because I also think we can claim our yes to Jesus and our pursuit of him, and he gives us the graces to continue that pursuit. In that moment, though, I thought of that version of myself in that low moment, a self that is not really who I am made to be, but a crumbled version of this false identity built up. Because that was one thing Sr. Miriam also spoke of: that we each have two selves, one that we curate to be a perfect vision that we think we want and a true self that is so deeply treasured by God but that is so deeply personal to us that we are terrified to let it be seen in case it is hurt. In that moment I saw that false self and how broken I felt in that moment, so distinct from the true person God made me to be.
I haven't lately, I said in prayer. And I prayed for an increase in trust because that isn't even something I can do on my own but a grace I have to ask for! I was struck with so much humility and such an appreciation for the incredible generosity of our God. I was struck with how much I had wanted Jesus lately for the things he could do and to learn more of who I was, but not necessarily for him. I prayed to know him more and pursue him more, and my heart was overwhelmed with love and gratitude. All I could do was sing along with the band and throw my arms out and praise such an incredible God who loves us enough to walk with us, again and again and again as we fall, and to fall for us in the passion on the way to die on the cross. A God who made us, loved us through the disobedience in the garden, and sent his Son to die for us so we can have a relationship with him! And he comes after us always, inviting us constantly into deeper trust and surrender. And there was so much peace in that moment of complete surrender. So much beauty at being so fully known and fully loved. So much amazement at the knowledge that he wants that for each and every one of us. What love, I thought, and it blew my mind.
He loves so well. Throughout the conference my friends modeled that love, and that's the purpose of this conference- to encounter the love of God and learn to lead others in that love. I am so thankful that Jesus invites us not just to be loved but to love others the way he does. That he works through us in ways we could never work. Truly he is good! And I said that on the way back to Dallas as the sky came alive with the fire of sunset. He loves us so so well. He does not withhold. He gives himself completely and loves us just as fully. And in complete surrender we find complete freedom. He brought me on a beautiful journey to Phoenix and on my way home I reflected with a friend on how wonderfully he had worked that week at SLS. And the best we could come up with to explain it: God is so good.
