C
CompSciGuy
Guest
Hi all,
I often will post here to express difficulties I find in my spiritual walk, and often I fear that it sounds like I am whining or complaining. Actually when I post about my difficulties in faith it is because very often people will reply to my thread and provide helpful and encouraging replies with spiritual wisdom that get me back on my feet.
Right now I have been dealing with spiritual discouragement. There are two main sources of spiritual discouragement for me lately, one of them is that I have had some once close friends leave the church and/or lose faith. One of them in particular used to be involved in the Catholic student center where I went to college and then moved back to his hometown, which happened to be the same city that I moved to after college (it was not my hometown) and was in one of our young adult groups, he and I would hang out a lot and talk about faith-related stuff. He was a strong Catholic and involved in the pro-life movement. Last year he landed a job a couple of states away and seemed to be much happier there but had begun doubting everything he believes in as a Catholic because he says that everything he knows or has heard about God has been “through the grapevine” and that he doesn’t believe that he can be sure that God cares about His creation, etc. It really hit me hard to hear him saying these things. I kept my cool and did my best to answer why I believe in God but I still felt depressed a lot after that. I have had other friends, both Catholics and evangelical Christians, lose their faith over the past few years and it really kinda weighs on me a bit. I do not doubt God’s existence or even the Catholic Church, but I sometimes have difficulty trusting in God and when I see my friends “dropping like flies” so to speak, in my own mind it creates this sense that the general population is seeing Christianity as something increasingly irrelevant, and when I am around my anti-Catholic coworkers it is hard to feel like I am able to make any kind of difference anywhere: where I live, where I work, etc. because I am always faced with people who think that my faith is a joke, and I don’t always know the best way to articulate a response to some of their objections.
The second thing that weighs me down is sin. I feel constantly burdened by my own sin. This past Easter I went to the vigil on Saturday night, which usually is a place of tremendous joy to me. However when I was there, I was completely filled with this sense of disgust over my own sins, for example, being unsympathetic toward my pregnant wife, remembering things that I had said and done that were selfish, completely neglecting prayer and instead working all day on household projects, harboring sinful thoughts, and others. These sins are killing me and many of them are sins that I have been continually repeating in spite of confessing them. Often when I get out of confession I feel very hopeful about continuing on and avoiding the sins, and growing in virtue. But that particular night I felt completely bogged down, and began wondering if I would ever move past these sins that keep weighing me down. I wanted to go to confession before Easter but couldn’t because of my work schedule; I tried to go to one of the confession marathons but the church was so packed that I wasn’t going to be able to get my confession done in time.
I guess what I would like really are prayers and potentially wisdom from others who experience discouragement and how you handled it.
I often will post here to express difficulties I find in my spiritual walk, and often I fear that it sounds like I am whining or complaining. Actually when I post about my difficulties in faith it is because very often people will reply to my thread and provide helpful and encouraging replies with spiritual wisdom that get me back on my feet.
Right now I have been dealing with spiritual discouragement. There are two main sources of spiritual discouragement for me lately, one of them is that I have had some once close friends leave the church and/or lose faith. One of them in particular used to be involved in the Catholic student center where I went to college and then moved back to his hometown, which happened to be the same city that I moved to after college (it was not my hometown) and was in one of our young adult groups, he and I would hang out a lot and talk about faith-related stuff. He was a strong Catholic and involved in the pro-life movement. Last year he landed a job a couple of states away and seemed to be much happier there but had begun doubting everything he believes in as a Catholic because he says that everything he knows or has heard about God has been “through the grapevine” and that he doesn’t believe that he can be sure that God cares about His creation, etc. It really hit me hard to hear him saying these things. I kept my cool and did my best to answer why I believe in God but I still felt depressed a lot after that. I have had other friends, both Catholics and evangelical Christians, lose their faith over the past few years and it really kinda weighs on me a bit. I do not doubt God’s existence or even the Catholic Church, but I sometimes have difficulty trusting in God and when I see my friends “dropping like flies” so to speak, in my own mind it creates this sense that the general population is seeing Christianity as something increasingly irrelevant, and when I am around my anti-Catholic coworkers it is hard to feel like I am able to make any kind of difference anywhere: where I live, where I work, etc. because I am always faced with people who think that my faith is a joke, and I don’t always know the best way to articulate a response to some of their objections.
The second thing that weighs me down is sin. I feel constantly burdened by my own sin. This past Easter I went to the vigil on Saturday night, which usually is a place of tremendous joy to me. However when I was there, I was completely filled with this sense of disgust over my own sins, for example, being unsympathetic toward my pregnant wife, remembering things that I had said and done that were selfish, completely neglecting prayer and instead working all day on household projects, harboring sinful thoughts, and others. These sins are killing me and many of them are sins that I have been continually repeating in spite of confessing them. Often when I get out of confession I feel very hopeful about continuing on and avoiding the sins, and growing in virtue. But that particular night I felt completely bogged down, and began wondering if I would ever move past these sins that keep weighing me down. I wanted to go to confession before Easter but couldn’t because of my work schedule; I tried to go to one of the confession marathons but the church was so packed that I wasn’t going to be able to get my confession done in time.
I guess what I would like really are prayers and potentially wisdom from others who experience discouragement and how you handled it.