When I was a high school religion teacher, I led a group of students on a mission trip to the small island of Grenada off the coast of South America. We went with Catholic Heart Workcamp, an organization that I worked with for many years as a young man. The hard work in the tropical weather was gratifying, and the people we served had as much effect on us as we had on them. But the defining moment of the trip occurred during Eucharistic adoration.
Each night during the week, CHWC had an evening program that consisted of games, inspirational videos and talks, and a faith experience. I was emcee for the evening and charged with delivering a faith message that would transition the evening from a faith video into adoration. I spoke on my favorite subject, salvation history, and tied it to the presence of our Eucharistic Lord who we were about to encounter.
For the next thirty minutes to an hour nearly 100 of us were jammed into a small upper room on a mountaintop convent in the middle of the Grenadian rainforest, adoring and worshipping our Lord. The movement of the Holy Spirit was palpable, and when everyone exited adoration to the welcome breezy darkness of the evening, I could tell that my students had experienced something.
Seeking seclusion to process what I had just experienced myself, I sat in a gazebo at the edge of the property, overlooking the town below. I was soon joined by a group of my students who started lambasting me with questions about Jesus and our faith. At one point a student said to me, “We know you told us all this in class, but can you tell us again?”
I was floored. I had spent hours, days, and months teaching these students about Jesus and the Catholic faith, but it had never quite sunk in. It took this experience to draw them deeper. God opened their hearts in that upper room, thousands of miles from home in the context of a week of service. I answered as many questions as I could, and then dismissed them to get ready for bed once night time security made their rounds. In the days and months that followed, questions continued to come. Slowly but surely, some of those students formed a relationship with God.
Even now as I reflect on that evening, it is very obvious what God was teaching me at that moment. We can preach and teach someone about our faith until we are blue in the face, but it isn’t until they experience God that hearts are moved. And sometimes that means someone has to be taken out of their comfortable environment, and put in a position to receive Jesus. For the teacher, hopefully they encounter Jesus in your words, disposition, and actions, but often there needs to be a sacramental encounter in which God has an intimate moment with his sons and daughters.
This moment and many others since have reminded me that someone who communicates the faith cannot rely on their own cleverness and knowledge to be an effective evangelist. I have made that mistake too many times to count. Those things are an important part of taking our role as teacher of the faith responsibly, but the only Person(s) who can inspire conversion is Love Himself. The evangelist’s work is in vain if he or she does not foster an encounter with God, because the experience of Him is what we are made for.