Inevitably, conversion brings change. God rarely shares with us the endgame strategy. We simply couldn’t take it.
It’s tough enough to open one’s heart to the beauty of the Catholic Church. The totality of conversion comes slowly. This renewing of one’s mind is not an easy or simplistic thing.
The phrase “rightly ordered” has begun to have practical meaning. I find myself wanting to help the poor. At first, it was some high ideal, but then it started to hit me in real ways. I couldn’t justify eating out four to six times a week when those I cared about never have that luxury.
I’ve started having doubts about things I assumed were right, like the death penalty.
I’ve become more compassionate in my thinking about illegal immigrants, which so often is lost in the rhetoric against illegal immigration. It is almost as though Our Lady of Guadalupe is teaching my soul something my mind can’t quite explain yet.
My position on artificial contraception and in vitro fertilization has changed 180 degrees.
I have become passionately pro-life. The thought of even one unborn child dying needlessly really disturbs me.
I quit charging for freelance articles. Sure, I can think of a thousand ways to spend the compensation, and sometimes a paper will pay me even though I don’t ask for money. But it’s the asking that seems wrong. God knows what I need.
Everything is being scooped up and rendered.
Life doesn’t fit in a neat little box anymore. And even that seems to be the byproduct of becoming rightly ordered. I don’t fit anywhere perfectly – except in the arms of Mother Church.
The one thing I must remember is that, while change can be a very good thing, I can’t look back once I put my hand to the plow. In short, I must be malleable in His Hands, but once something in me is well-formed, I must hold tight to what I have learned.
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