A
AssisiFollower
Guest
Hello and thank you for taking your time to help me with this.
I have a friend who is an agnostic but was raised in a Christmas/Easter Catholic household.
Recently we were having a discussion about Catholicism and he asked me to give him my reasons for having faith and having converted. I had been hoping for a while that he would want to talk about it, but I felt like I was caught off guard when it came up and wasn’t sure of what exactly would be most helpful to say. I just started with a somewhat general “sometimes God just comes into your life and you stop right where you are…” This is a truthful explanation but he felt it was very general, and said “Everyone is always just trying to tell me about having faith and theyre not giving me any reasons. What really would make me want to have faith is if someone told me, ‘I prayed for my terminally ill grandfather not to die and then he lived.’”
So, influenced by this in the moment and because I really, really wanted to help him in his conversion by whatever reasoning I could give him, I think I made a really big mistake in explaining to him why someone should come to faith. Instead of first expanding upon faith and truth, I (without thinking it over) started telling him about all of the things in my life that buttress my faith – those “and then this happened, and I knew it was Saint so-and-so interceding for me in response to my prayers” types of examples. I knew that the thing he was looking for in that statement was, in a sense, cheap grace. And I am afraid that I went along with it and gave him the wrong idea of what grace really is.
He really listened to everything that I had told him and a few days later told me that he had still been thinking about what I had said. But then I realized that if I didn’t make faith the most important approach, and instead tried to give him more concrete examples that he didn’t have to make any personal strivings to understand, I most likely hurt him much more than I helped him.
I keep thinking about Christ’s parable of the seeds that fell into rocky soil, how they shoot up fast but then have no deep soil to grow in, and so die young. I am feeling really worried that I gave my friend a more ‘shallow’ approach and I didn’t encourage him to develop the ‘deep soil,’ which is faith and trust in God…
I have been texting him long messages like mad the last few days, trying to make him understand the context that I had left out, but I feel like it’s too late to try to explain it away…
So what should I do in this situation to rectify it as best as I can?
Thank you and please pray for him and for his conversion.
I have a friend who is an agnostic but was raised in a Christmas/Easter Catholic household.
Recently we were having a discussion about Catholicism and he asked me to give him my reasons for having faith and having converted. I had been hoping for a while that he would want to talk about it, but I felt like I was caught off guard when it came up and wasn’t sure of what exactly would be most helpful to say. I just started with a somewhat general “sometimes God just comes into your life and you stop right where you are…” This is a truthful explanation but he felt it was very general, and said “Everyone is always just trying to tell me about having faith and theyre not giving me any reasons. What really would make me want to have faith is if someone told me, ‘I prayed for my terminally ill grandfather not to die and then he lived.’”
So, influenced by this in the moment and because I really, really wanted to help him in his conversion by whatever reasoning I could give him, I think I made a really big mistake in explaining to him why someone should come to faith. Instead of first expanding upon faith and truth, I (without thinking it over) started telling him about all of the things in my life that buttress my faith – those “and then this happened, and I knew it was Saint so-and-so interceding for me in response to my prayers” types of examples. I knew that the thing he was looking for in that statement was, in a sense, cheap grace. And I am afraid that I went along with it and gave him the wrong idea of what grace really is.
He really listened to everything that I had told him and a few days later told me that he had still been thinking about what I had said. But then I realized that if I didn’t make faith the most important approach, and instead tried to give him more concrete examples that he didn’t have to make any personal strivings to understand, I most likely hurt him much more than I helped him.
I keep thinking about Christ’s parable of the seeds that fell into rocky soil, how they shoot up fast but then have no deep soil to grow in, and so die young. I am feeling really worried that I gave my friend a more ‘shallow’ approach and I didn’t encourage him to develop the ‘deep soil,’ which is faith and trust in God…
I have been texting him long messages like mad the last few days, trying to make him understand the context that I had left out, but I feel like it’s too late to try to explain it away…
So what should I do in this situation to rectify it as best as I can?
Thank you and please pray for him and for his conversion.
