Hey fellas, happy feast of St. John Bosco. You know why we use his image here? Because he took care of young lads everyone else thought were unsalvageable losers. Hmm, unsalvageable losers…does that description match anybody we know? Maybe better to ask whether it fails to match anyone we know, amrite?
Now, we gotta examine ourselves without giving in to despair, but also without being prideful. It’s important to remember you are not a saint yet. It’s probably a bad idea to spend too much time interacting with habitual grave sinners if you can avoid it, because you will start to think you are some kind of shining pillar of the Church just because you don’t sleep around or skip Sunday Mass- these kinds of things are not impressive, they are the bare minimum to avoid killing the grace which God places in our hearts to help us grow. That others fail to do them is something sorrowful; it should not be a source of self-satisfaction. If you can’t see somebody’s posts without thinking “smh this thot at it again” then you need to mute them or unfollow them until you can kill the root of pride within yourself, which you are only going to do through the cultivation of humility.
If circumstances require you to deal with this person regularly (and I mean real circumstances, not ‘oh I am sure if I just message them enough they’ll come around’- part of humility is accepting that you are not going to be the one to personally convert everyone you meet) you need to realize that you are possibly one of the only ways this person sees Christ– as a member of His Church, you are part of His Body. This means you need to become a role model: you need to show this person that you are living rightly, seeking to know and love God, and pursuing the natural virtues of temperance, justice, fortitude and prudence, as well as the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Does that sound hard? It should. You’re not going to do it yourself-you need to be praying regularly that God will give you what you need to serve others and to live rightly yourself. Don’t expect the person to care how you think they should behave if you can’t behave yourself.
But dude, you may be thinking, I can’t live rightly, I am actually a loser! I gently lean towards your ear and whisper, I know you are. But just because you are a loser right now doesn’t mean you will be one forever. God didn’t bring you this far, to knowing about and caring about the faith, just to leave you a sorry sap. He is not finished with you yet! But you must learn where you are starting from before you can move in the right direction. And you need to start moving, even if it doesn’t seem like it’s getting you anywhere yet.
What do I mean by that? I mean you need to do things. But doing things is hard; before you can do things, you need to do a thing. Every day this month, I want you to set yourself exactly one goal of something you need to do or should do. One task. Do a load of laundry. Read a chapter of a book. Write 300 words of a term paper. Something, anything that is beneficial or necessary. And only pick one a day. Write it down in the morning, and check it off when you have done it. If you need to put it in a .txt document and write “DONE” next to it. Ask God to help you do it, and thank Him for His help after you have done it. At first it might seem silly, or you might come to a day where you decide to blow it off. It is not silly, and you’d better not blow it off- but if for some reason you are unable to do it one day, don’t sweat it; just get up the next day and get right back at it. And make sure you are picking something you can do in a day- if it turns out to be too big, scale back and just do part of it, but do part of it!
We have to prove ourselves trustworthy in small things, so that we can be ready for large ones. St. John Bosco, ora pro nobis.
Apologia Bro Vita Sua 