Knowing Why, Not Just What We Believe

Several years ago, I had the unique opportunity to run for public office. An amazing ride for so many reasons. I was a frustrated ex-business owner. I say ex, because this was in 2010. From late 2007 through 2008, our country saw the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. I watched as my company’s credit lines, on which we were all current, were rescinded without notice. People stopped paying us. Our investments literally halved in value in a matter of months. My wife and I went from having a net worth in the multi-millions to having our gas turned off due to our inability to pay the bill. A test of faith to be sure.

So I did what I could, I prayed. I led my family to a closer relationship with Jesus Christ. He created the world from nothing, raised men from the dead, and opened the gates of Heaven, surely He could take care of this. And take care of us He did. I won’t bore you with the details, but this experience, eventually led me and my wife to the conclusion that He wanted me to run for public office. So run we did.

Now, I would be lying if I didn’t say that I truly believed that God was going to do the miraculous and bring us victory. His direction was clear as any that we had ever received. But you do not run for a state legislature 8 months before the primary with no name recognition and no money and win. Unless the Creator of the Universe is involved. I was convinced this was going to be a story of Biblical proportions and we were all in….ya…I took sixth out of six. Yikes.

Look, I get it on all humanistic accounts that is a butt kickin’. That said, there were so many victories that came in that defeat, I could not even begin to list them here. However, one lesson above all others, serves the purpose that God is placing on my heart as I write.

We all have views and opinions on everything (the idea that we do not and are not called to judge behavior is a lie out of the mouth of the Devil himself), the real question is where do your views come from? You see, I had political views, I had opinions. I knew what I believed. But when I ran for the state legislature and I stood before hundreds of people in a debate setting, I realized very quickly that is was no longer enough to know what I believed, I had to know why I believed it. I could not just state my views, I had to be able to defend those views and convince others to follow.

Too many of us Catholic Christians know the what, but not the why. The Scriptures tell us in 2 Tim 4: 2, “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.” Quite simply, we cannot defend our Faith.

I recently had to go back to California for my uncle’s funeral. I had a flight back at 6:15 on a Saturday morning. By no coincidence, I ran into a man that I knew. He and I had met at a basketball tournament almost two years earlier. I coach the varsity team at St. Anthony’s and he was coaching at a Lutheran school. He was attending seminary. This led me to share that I was a former protestant pastor that had returned to the Catholic Church. His response was what I have come to expect from most protestant pastors, he looked at me like I had three heads.

Now here we are purely by “coincidence” on the same flight two years later. If I am being hones,t I was having the hardest time placing where I even knew the man. So when he intentionally bumped into me, I said a cordial and generic, “Hey buddy”, continued to talk to my wife on the phone and then proceeded to take the first leg of my flight home.

On our brief layover in Dallas, he made a b-line for me. I was still racking my brain on who he even was. He started talking to me about basketball and the ah-hah moment came. We made a little chit-chat and then he hit me with it, he has wanted to talk to me about why I am Catholic. Honestly, it felt more like he wanted to reinforce why Catholicism is wrong, but he is a good guy and quite honestly his heart was sincere. So the next thing I knew, he was asking people on the plane if they can switch seats so he can sit next to me. Here we go. An hour, in a metal tube streaking through the sky at 45,000 feet, buckled to a seat with the fasten seat belt sign never, ever turning off. I was trapped, next to a man, who is being trained in the Bible, wanting to know…why. Why am I Catholic? Our God really does have a sense of humor.

I could have told him about the Saints, they are just weird to him. I could have mentioned the Pope, he doesn’t hold any authority with him. I could have talked about Mary, but let’s be honest, protestants think we worship Mary and unfortunately many Catholics actually do. We Catholics are so hyper focused on these things that we forget what is truly the common thread between all Christians, the Sacred Scriptures. We cite all of the above in lieu of the Scriptures, not in light of them. We want to talk about the echo and don’t even know the source. Our audience is not those who know and understand our faith, it is those that don’t.

So for an hour, I used our Catholic book, the Bible, to explain why I believe what I believe.

When we landed, we exchanged phone numbers and this is the text that I received within an hour of landing. “I enjoyed talking to you. You are the first Catholic that can actually give me some form of an explanation to what they believe.”

Many years ago I went on a journey that God commanded that by all worldly accounts, led me to defeat. But through that journey I came to the Scriptural truth that our Christ deserves more than a cursory glance. If we truly want the miraculous nature of the Holy Spirit in our lives, then we can no longer settle for superficial knowledge of our Faith. We have to study the Bible intimately so that we can be prepared to defend our Faith both in season and out, when convenient or inconvenient. It is not enough to know what we believe, we must know why we believe it.