Author: Fred Balce

This past Saturday, I attended the SFC CLP in Tri-Cities. The talk for this session was on Repentence and Faith,
The brother who gave the talk mentioned something that I’ve heard before, but needed reminders for over and over throughout my faith journey, and still do need!

Being a Catholic is more than feeling spiritually ablazed; it’s about continuing to pray even when your passion is empty.

Being faithful to God is more than just believing in Him because everything in your life is going right; it’s about believing in God even when you’re encountering obstacle after obstacle and you’ve hit rock bottom.

Being repentant is more than confessing your wrongdoings because you fear the consequences; it’s about choosing to fill your life with good deeds instead of simply avoiding doing bad deeds.

If all we did was “feel” like being a Catholic only when it’s convenient then how can we ever truly journey with Christ? How can we say that we want to be with God and want to go to heaven if we only take action when it’s easy for us? Feelings are fleeting; they’re temporary and change all the time. We must not base our faith on something so unstable and ever changing.

Believing in God is something so simple, but it is not by any means easy. Whether happy, sad, content or angry, we must make the conscious decision to always CHOOSE to be a follower of Christ, ESPECIALLY when it’s hard. It’s easy to give our all to the Lord when we’re feeling good and we’re in a good point in our lives, but our true devotion, love and obedience is tested when we’re in a bad point in our lives.

Like Peter who declares he does love the Lord, how are we going to show our conviction of love to him? What is the Lord asking you to do to prove your love for Him?

The past few weeks has been quite something for myself. Like, ALOT of things were going on at the same time and I found myself overwhelmed by all of it. I had no idea how to handle it, and I felt very congested in my life; like something needed to be released in order for me to finally breathe (so I guess that was a stuffed nose analogy).

How often do we find ourselves in these positions? How often do we feel like we’re holding too many things in our hands and we have to think about what to drop?

Well, being the bozo that I am sometimes, I decided to do just that. I decided to let go. I decluttered things in my life, and at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. But the moment I did that, I wasn’t happy with what I had left in my hands.

I let the difficulty of life get the better of me, and I’d say I made some pretty quick and thoughtless decisions. Yes, I was trying to do so many things, but I decluttered the wrong things. I decluttered the things in my life that actually helped me, made me productive and gave me purpose. I decided to hold onto complacency, apathy, laziness, and other things I didn’t need with me. I thought that if I couldn’t handle the good things in my life, then I didn’t deserve the good things.

But one visit to Adoration changed all that. After praying the Rosary (s/o to all the #QueensMen) my eyes were finally opened, which is kind of funny because when they opened, I was crying so much haha.

For whatever reason, my first instinct amidst my stress was to let go of God first (like, how dare I do that?!). From there, of course my priorities were out of whack. I saw my struggles as burdensome and took the easy way out. But my struggles were blessings in disguises because they were opportunities to draw even closer to Him. Amidst all the things I had to do, the one thing, and I’d even say the only thing I needed to keep doing was trust in Him, and the rest would be taken care of. So now, in my times of doubt, stress and I feel like giving up on things, I just pray quickly :

Jesus I trust in you
Jesus I trust in you
Jesus I trust in you

P. S. If anyone wants to do their  Consecration to Mary, the start date for the 33 days is October 19 for the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary 😀

You know that feeling when you lie in bed, and you just have this urge to move your legs? Apparently, the term is called “Restless Leg Syndrome” but a good friend of mine describes it as, “Your legs being constipated” which I still chuckle at to this day. How is the constipation analogy relevant? I’m not sure, I try to keep things entertaining sometimes.

I bring this up because that’s the state our souls should be in every single day of our lives (and no I don’t mean constipated, for all you wise guys out there). We should always be wanting to be spiritually active, and we should never feel rested that we just simply stop moving. Fundamentally, there is something missing in our lives. We are always yearning for something whether it be tangible or not. We yearn for air, food, new clothes, more money, social status, respect, identity, approval, love from others, and so on. But even if all those wants & needs are met, we still feel so unsatisfied. There is a God-shaped hole in our hearts that none of those things can fulfill permanently. We can try our best, but it’ll never be enough because we’ll always want more. Luckily, God is infinite and easily attainable. His Love is endless and when we finally acknowledge that He is what we should be filling ourselves with, then everything else just doesn’t matter as much anymore. We don’t occupy ourselves with what fills us temporarily, but turn towards what is already in us and nurture it.

“Our hearts are made restless, until they rest in You”

St. Augustine

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending and serving HSB’s (my mission area) School Volunteer Training to go camping in Sunshine Coast, BC. I was serving as music min for the entire four days.

If any of you really know me, guitar isn’t my strongest instrument to play, and I definitely need plenty of time to really get a song down to play it comfortably. But this weekend was a test of kindness and patience for myself.

A week before the training, I was asked to play and naturally I said yes cause I’d consider myself always mission ready. But after thinking more about it, I actually knew I wasn’t ready. I tried my best to learn as many songs as possible but it just wasn’t enough time. When we were finally at the campgrounds, I already had this sinking feeling in my chest like I was about to perform in front of the whole world.

I managed to make it through the first few days, and it was excruciating to struggle while playing. I just had in mind “please get this over with” and “I’m almost finished”. I hated the fact that I was almost butchering worship and I really wished someone more experienced would just take the lead, but there was no one else. I was really dragging my feet through what my service role was for the weekend and was so focused on just how bad it was.

But a very dear sister said something that weekend that helped me remember why I was still doing it. She was sharing a struggle she had and went to adoration looking to Christ on the cross and she saw Him saying, “Do I not look tired?” That put things into perspective for me. It reminded me that the Lord must’ve dragged His cross all that way to Calvary. The Lord must’ve hated every moment of that suffering and wished it would stop. The Lord must’ve been so tired emotionally, spiritually and especially physically.

Yes, it was burdensome to have to go through something and knowingly suffer through it, but the glorifying end result is worth all that suffering. The lives you help change, the Spirit you help nurture in those you serve, and so much more good deeds the Lord does in all of us. Suffering is meant to go hand in hand with Salvation, because otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it.

Discovered this song today and it really resonated with me on a deep level, beyond the current situations I’m facing. This song was a reminder that through all the craziness of life, God reigns supreme over everything. All the worries, doubts and fears mustn’t rule us because He has already overcome them.

` Dear God, you have truly called me to Love more this weekend. To be honest I was dreading this entire family retreat because truthfully I really didn`t think I needed to spend any more time with my parents. But after what we experienced here together, I`will be returning with my best friends, my shoulders to cry on, my main support, my celebrants, and of course my crew. Thank you Lord for bringing me here to experience this with them; thank you for allowing me to see Your Love through them`

That was the last letter I wrote for the Family Encounter retreat I attended with my family, hosted by the BLD ministry. My parents aren`t a part of the CFC community, but I`m happy nonetheless they are proactive in their faith in this way.

I`m not going to lie; the weekend was a complete disaster up until the last day. It was exhausting, frustrating, seemingly pointless and it really ran my entire family to the end of our nerves. I thought it was all just headed nowhere and would just create even more of a gap in our relationship. But something incredible happened on the last day; the Holy Spirit showed up. I`m not going to go into detail, but I swear I saw the Spirit itself entering my entire family and overwhelm all of us. it was beautiful, heart wrenching, and just plainly freeing. I always wanted my family to be on better terms with each other and the Lord really came and delivered just that. If there`s one thing I learned this weekend aside from how awesome my family really is, it`s that anything really is possible with the Lord.

Holy family, pray for us.

“and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”

– Galatians 2:20 (NRSV)

Favourite bible verse hands down. I’m a very strong advocate of complete surrender. Surrendering yourself to the point where it’s really not just you that exists, but there is a whole other being that is dwelling within in you. That state of surrender humbles you, transforms you, and ascends you to become a greater version of yourself. Now think about if you were to do that daily. Absolutely nuts. The Lord asks us of that every day anyways, yet we have our doubts, insecurities and fears hold us back from being a part of that great ascension. It all always comes back to that fundamental idea of surrender, and when we allow ourselves to do so, we are no longer human; we are more refined, endowed with the supernatural with the natural as our foundation.