Growing Up A Young Catholic Missionary
My relationship with God is a tumultuous one. At different points in my life, He has taken many roles and forms. From being a policeman who I felt would watch my every move, waiting to get mad at me for something I might do at any moment, to the cool Dad that you can tell almost everything to but hold back on some of the shameful bits, to the friend that gives you a lot of tough love who tells you “I told you so” with a bottle of vodka (or in this case, wine hehe) in hand. I’d like to point out that Jesus turning water into wine added a lot of cool factor to him and the fact that he probably had those wild carpenter abs from legit work and not the gym.
At one point, when I was about 12 years old, I saw an ad about becoming a young missionary for the Catholic Church. Being an adventurous young person unsure of what I was supposed to do. It was then I found Mission Youth Philippines which I journeyed with spiritually for the next 5 years of my adolescent life. MY is an apostolate of Regnum Cristi Movement that works with bishops and pastors to evangelize by engaging and sending out youth to bear witness to Christ.
Here, I grew a lot both in my faith as a Christian and as a young person waiting to make a difference. When I had entered high school, I was thrust into a secular learning institution for the first time and being in Mission Youth had helped my desire for spiritual guidance. It was a week every Holy Week and a few days of weekends during the school year. It was in many ways, physically and emotionally tiring. We would sleep every from from old retreat houses, unused school classrooms, up mountains, on islands, in places we had electricity and in places we didn’t, on hard beds, on sleeping bags, on floors. Although, there was a year it was a nice sponsored resort by a donor!
It was using a flashlight to find your way to the bathroom with no flush or electricity a walk away, walking up trails in the mountain in the hopes you’ll find a house you’re called to enter and trusting your gut feel that it’s safe, it’s having no signal on your cellphone more than half the time, it’s having to pump the water manually by hand and carrying the pails to where you’re allowed to take a bath, it’s taking a bath outside with your clothes on because there’s no other place to do it.
It’s not knowing if you’re saying the right thing because you’re just a teenager who has barely seen or experienced the world. It’s hearing stories of abandonment, anger or pain that you don’t how to respond to except to cry with them because they have no one else to talk to.It’s trying to figure out when is the time to listen and when is the time to speak. It’s trying to hear God’s voice to tell you what you’re supposed to do when you feel unprepared to deal with how much other people are going through.
I remember a house I went to when I was 14 up the mountains with a single father who said he had two daughters. We had talked about Mama Mary, and how she was like him, a parent struggling while watching her only son suffer. We were talking about how the rosary was designed to be repetitive so we play in our heads the scenes she was experiencing at the time: her son lost at the temple, her son suffering, her son being nailed at the cross. She was the example of a strong woman who through the joys and pains of being a mother had loved so much it hurt. The father began inexplicably crying, and we left not knowing why. A few days later, we found out that he actually had three daughters, one of them recently murdered by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend right before her flight to work abroad that she fought so hard to get so she could give her father and her siblings a better life.
That same year, I met a mother with two young children diagnosed with hydrocephalus and had begged us to ask the priest to come visit them because she didn’t know how long her babies had to live. I’ve met a man on his death bad who had not been to church for 20 years because he was sick and there was only one priest on the island who did not know about him, and who came right before to give him the blessing of the sick before he died.
When I was 17, there came one of the most unexpected encounters. A former street child that I taught catechism to on the first year that I started doing missionary work added me on Facebook and says, “Do you remember me? You were one of the girls who came to teach at our school. I decided to be a missionary like you too.” If there was a moment that made me realize there are no coincidences, it wad that. God was there and he was working through everyone brave enough to have said “yes.” It didn’t matter how young or inexperienced or unschooled in Theology we were. It only mattered that we showed up, that we prayed and that we asked to be used for His purpose.
The experience had brought me out of shyness and asked from me a courage to use my voice because what better reason to finally speak up than to finally have something important to say. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this courage that had awakened in me transcended into many other parts of my life afterwards and the desire to serve transcended my religious life. It has guided the way I chose a lot of the responsibilities I’ve encountered growing up. While my time as a missionary for now is over, I’ve learned that experiences like that changes you for life.
I’ve attended several retreats since then, everything from silent to noisy, relaxed to intense, ordinary to downright life changing. There is no turning back once one person truly experiences God for the first time. It becomes quite to silly to behave as if the divine doesn’t exist when you’ve had a very specific moment of just knowing He does. Perhaps, he comes with different names, at the different through different voices, but I truly believe that everyone gets called to realize there are things much bigger than ourselves at some point in time.
Although, I still go to mass almost every Sunday, have confession every now and then, and enjoy various sacraments like attending weddings, baptisms and first communions, I can honestly say that though my spirituality is now a more personal thing. The time will come when I am called to worship more actively in a community again, and I will come with open arms when it does. For now, I am learning to pray with my life through the small gestures of kindness I can afford to give, using whatever gifts I am given to the best of my abilities and living a life working towards making it better for other people. Admittedly, I am not perfect. There are things I wish i didn’t do and chances to be a good person that I didn’t take and I’m not always pleasant, happy or kind. But at the heart of it, I’m always grateful that I am given much and have the privilege of being asked of much. I’d like to spend my life in the very least, making Him proud. I’m working on it.
