To Follow Christ

            We have forgotten how to follow Christ, that is why many seem to be losing the battle against evil in the world. Christ said “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to the mountain, move and it would obey you.” One night, I was watching the last remaining scenes to “Ben Hur” and it made me remember. It made me remember exactly what I had forgotten. I had forgotten how to love Christ. What do I mean by this? When I was younger, I remember having so much more strength, and grace from God than I do today. It wasn’t until I saw the ending scenes to Ben-Hur that I realized, it was because I had forgotten how to follow Christ. I no longer really loved him, and instead; I had replaced him with myself.

            I had received so much over the years, answered prayers, a wonderful life, good friends, graces and knowledge beyond measure, and how was I living my life? I had forgotten to put Christ first, by slowly forgetting how to love him. To love someone means to follow that person in one’s heart, mind, and soul, and to assimilate them into yourself, and they become a part of you. By doing that, one acquires wisdom, grace, knowledge, the light of truth, and true strength of the beloved. I was starting to become merely a shadow of who I was, the child who loved God. The world had offered me idols and they slowly took the place of Christ.

            There was a time, when I had the courage to say no to those idols. But Satan plays a cruel war on souls, and slowly, the deceptions he places in front of our souls become idols of worship. The world itself is an idol. Friends, encounters, something as small as conversation, they all become idols without Christ. There was a time when I heard more clearly the voice of God, and it flowed more easily through me. And years later, more often than not, it seems I had but the mere memory of that voice. The life of grace in me had been replaced. It had been replaced by the world, a world that at one time, had obviously offered no sense of truth or life. It did not possess the water that would never make one go thirsty again. That water flows only from Christ. To drink of that water means to follow him.

            To follow Christ, we must love Christ more than anything else. We must love him enough to destroy every idol the world puts before us for love of him. We must follow in the manner that a true Christian follows their God, that is to Golgotha and to the cross, but not with sadness, but with joy because there is no greater strength, no greater wisdom, no greater purpose than to possess God in oneself. We do not follow others, we do not follow music, we do not follow our self, and we do not follow the world. We must stand where Christ stood, walk as Christ walked, looked as Christ looked, think as Christ thought, and give as Christ gave, that is to say, our whole heart. And we should deal with the world the way Christ did, that is with true wisdom and love.       

            I had forgotten that truth, and without it, God's Will would have found no purpose with me. If I was born as an only child, with no siblings, It was because my friends were siblings, and that this was, is, and has always my mission, to tell them to love Christ by reminding them how to love him, and by doing that, showing them the path to his Will. That by loving him, we become like him, and we are able to pick up our crosses and while kissing the wood, say to God, “Father, not my will, but thine be done.”