
Since having received the sacrament of Confirmation in my late 20s, all the way through to my early 40s, I was a fallen away Catholic man who got seduced by all the glamor of this world’s sexual temptations and sins. I turned my back on God and thought that I was fully capable of creating my own dream life without Him. I ended up in the vicious circle of serving the Satan through compulsive flirting with and seducing random women wherever I’d go for years. Like many other men who get trapped in the same trouble, I thought that pursuing such glamorous lifestyle where I’d be having sex with countless women for the rest of my life would just be a lot of fun.
What I thought would be a lot of fun, unexpectedly turned into a nightmare. One day, when I was putting my shoes on to go out and complete a couple of my daily errands, I suddenly started to feel an abnormally high and severe anxiety after having spent most of the day rehearsing many different openers and pick-up lines that I’d use when randomly meeting women.
To cut a long story short, I ended up suffering from two most common and most dangerous mental disorders characteristic of men who are overly obsessed with seducing and having sex with random women: borderline personality disorder (BPD) and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
Not only did I get on the verge of completely losing my overall mental health and well-being, but also was I a financially broke opportunity seeker desperately wanting to strike it rich online while never achieving any success.
As I started to feel more and more helpless and weak while not being able to find the way out of all my out-of-control, compulsive sexual behaviors, God was about to get involved in all the dirt and mess of my life.
While queuing up to get a free meal at the public kitchen of the local Caritas organization in my hometown one afternoon, the volunteers there invited me to visit the church and attend the Mass meant to celebrate the anniversary of the functioning of the public kitchen since its foundation.
A few days later I entered the Church after about 15 years of my absence.
I could feel God’s merciful calling and saying to me: “Bruno, it’s high time for you to change.”
As the Mass started to slowly progress, I could feel God’s warmly touching my heart and inviting me to enter a brand new life fully redeemed. But I couldn’t quite clearly hear His calling for my change until the very moment of actually hearing His words and His direct message for me through that day’s Gospel of Matthew 7:21, 24-27, that’s the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders also known as the House on the Rock:
“Follow Jesus’ teaching, like a wise man who built his house on rock.”
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell — and great was its fall!”
As I was carefully listening to this Gospel reading, I was almost shivering with fear, and my tears, one by one, started slowly dropping down my cheeks.
I could feel my entire soul hurt and slowly heal as I was sincerely repenting of all my sins piled up over the years.
Jesus’ words in this Gospel renewed my fear of God because I could immediately recognize myself as that foolish builder and knew that if I didn’t decide to change and be the wise man, I could easily have God furiously punish me by letting me end up in hell forever.
This was the day when I not only gave up the evil and the foolishness of all my anomalous, self destructive, compulsive sexual behaviors around meeting random women but also I firmly decided to follow Jesus’ teachings for the rest of my life.