A Catholic’s Testimony: I Regained the Joy of Being With God Finally!（Part-1）
By Shunfu, the United States
My aunt is a Catholic. When I was eight or nine years old, together with my family, I believed in Catholicism with my aunt. At that time, I particularly liked to hear my aunt talk about the miracles performed by the Lord Jesus, such as: feeding five thousand with five loaves of bread and two fish, making the blind see, walking on the sea, and so on.
Through my aunt’s interpretation, I knew that this one true God is the Lord Jesus: He not only rules over all things in the universe, but also dominates and arranges the fate of all mankind. And I knew that after our ancestors Adam and Eve, because of not keeping God’s words, were enticed by the devil and ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, then mankind began to sin. After being corrupted by Satan, mankind became more and more degenerate, lived under Satan’s influence, and suffered its affliction. God didn’t want to see us being abused by Satan, so He personally became flesh on earth and took on humanity’s sin through crucifixion. God’s love is so great. I was moved by the great love of God, and determined to be a person who likes what God likes and hates what God hates.
At the age of thirteen, before being baptized, a nun explained to me what the ten commandments are, what the seven deadly sins are, what the big and small sins are, what can be done and what can’t, what the purgatory is, what hell is, how many persons the one God contains, why we believe in God, and other aspects of knowledge, but she talked little about the Bible. However, I still believed in God devoutly: I went to church for Mass on Sundays, said daily Morning and Evening Prayers, and said rosary after rosary every day, observed abstinence and fasting, did not eat meat on Fridays, worshiped the way of the Cross (reading scriptures and worshiping Jesus on bended knees), and did things to suffer and discipline my own body. In addition, I often went to other churches for Mass together with some pious church friends, especially when the grand Mass to worship the Holy Sacrament took place, such as Ash Wednesday, Easter, and Christmas Day. Meanwhile, I also offered my Mass and said rosary to the departed souls (my relatives and my benefactors) in purgatory, hoping that they could have their sins mitigated by rosary and could earlier ascend into the Celestial Regions. I believed that as long as I kept doing so, I could please God and could go to heaven in the future.
After many years, my whole family immigrated to America. I still went to church services, recited scriptures, and said prayers and confessed to priest every day. Near my house, there was a foreign Catholic church, in which there were two Masses every morning: first and second Mass. And I went to attend at least one Mass every day no matter the weather. As a result, I rarely went to the former overseas Chinese church, except for the annual confession in celebration of Christmas Day.
On a Sunday in December, 2014, when I went to my original church, I saw that there were some joss-sticks, which were used for offering sacrifices to ancestors, in an incense burner, and some paintings and lanterns hanging on the walls; the church looked like a theater. I was very puzzled: “Why do these things appear in the church?” After finishing Mass and confession, I went home and felt very frustrated and heavy-hearted. One Sunday in December, 2015, I went to the church for confession again. I hadn’t been there for a year, and when I got there I felt the church had a sense of creepiness. I didn’t know why the church gave me such a feeling. I looked around, and saw many seats in the hall were vacant; people there were mostly the old; the kids were running about and making loud uproars with no one stopping them, and some people were even on their phones. The church seemed to be their place of amusement. In the past, when we went into the church, we dressed up properly and were forbidden from making noise, because it was a holy place — the home of God. I couldn’t understand why the church became this way. On that day, the priest happened to give baptism and he actually asked the baptized for red envelopes (a fee). I was astonished: “Should a priest do that? Unbelievable!” If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. I was astounded and sorrowful, because I had admired priests very much all along. I thought they were the nearest to God: If we Catholics sinned, we must confess to the priests, who then directly passed our confession to God. But why did the priest become so greedy? Could such priests still serve God selflessly and listen to our confession? Could such a church still be the home of God? At that moment, I felt cold within and somehow shed tears. I also prayed in my heart: “O God, why has the church become like this? Even what the priest did goes against Your will; what on earth is the reason for all this?”
Since then, every time I went to church to receive holy communion and pray, I felt a strange emptiness in my heart, and felt the same way in the foreign church. I felt there was something missing from my heart, but I just couldn’t figure it out. I was depressed and weak, and this feeling became increasingly stronger. In the past, when I prayed, especially when I received holy communion after I confessed, I could always quiet myself before God, and could feel God was hearing my prayer, so I was very secure and peaceful in my heart. But now, when I prayed to God, I felt He was far away from me and that my spirit was dry. I felt afraid — afraid that I might have been forsaken by the Lord Jesus. I kept crying to God in my heart when I was in agony, but I didn’t know what to do. …
To be continue…
Source from: find the shepherd.
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