Maybe There is Something to This God Thing

I’m starting to think there is something to this whole God thing. I admit I have always been skeptical about things and maybe I am just hoping there really is a God and all, which is causing me to read things into events which aren’t there, but when does something become real and not a coincidence?

The latest happened this week. Every night  I think about various spiritual questions and I was thinking about sins and how it is harder to stop the least harmful sins than it is the big sins. (We Catholics call these venial and mortal sins) After all if you commit a mortal thin like murder, chances are you’ll get caught and that will be that. The thing is you know murder is wrong, it is mostly obvious, although all those pro-choice advocates seem to not understand this when they kill babies, but that is a discussion for another day. You know murder is a mortal sin, so if you believe in God, you won’t do it again.

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The lesser sins are harder to stop. I was thinking this is because when you commit them, you can easily convince yourself that they really aren’t sins. For example it is a sin to “covet your neighbors goods”, especially his wife or her husband. Even if you never act on this desire Jesus considered this a sin.

But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.- Matthew 5:28

. But isn’t it easy to look, say as you drive around the city like I do and you see a very attractive woman walking down the street and you start thinking things you shouldn’t think. You justify this by convincing yourself that if God didn’t want me to look He wouldn’t have made her so attractive, therefore it can’t be a sin to just look. After awhile, this is just normal behavior for you, believe me I know.

Anyway, the next day I was listening to the morning mass on the radio, something I have taken to doing lately, after all you can only listen to so much talk radio and music, and the homily was about a passage in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church”, number 1865.

“Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root.”

This is exactly what I was thinking. Okay, I know this wasn’t a sign from God to me, but after this the Priest went on to talk about addiction. He said that when one was addicted to something, whatever the person is addicted to was like another God. For example an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol and that become more important than anything else in the addict’s life. If you think about it, the addict worship’s the alcohol and lives his or her life for it.

Now I have written before how I consider myself a “borderline” alcoholic. I always seemed to be able to stop before I went over the line for which there would be no return. I would almost get to that point and I would wake up, stop drinking for awhile and things would be okay.  Then the cycle would begin again. How is this connected? After the Priest mentioned the Catechism passage, of course I figured this homily was meant to be, and when he talked about addiction I knew. I began to wonder why I never crossed that line. The answer is pretty simple, God wouldn’t let me. He would let me get to the point where he knew I wouldn’t be able to get back and He would wake me up. Only once had I ever asked Him for help, which I have written of before, and He helped me, and kept on helping me although until this week I didn’t realize it.

God didn’t and hasn’t given up on me. The more things happen and the more I look into them I realize that there is something out there that is making these things happen. More and more lately things seem to be getting better for me, since I have really begun to believe. Now, as I said in the first paragraph, is this only because I want to think there is something? I don’t think so, there have been too many things now for it to be just coincidence, there has to be something to it. But even if it isn’t from God, I’m not going to take the chance and stop believing, I’m kind of liking this God thing.