Reasons to Believe

I just came back from Eucharistic Adoration. More than anything else, it has given me faith and a reason to believe. In my times of hopelessness, it is to the Eucharist, to adore it, I have gone. When the only woman I ever loved broke up with me, it was to the Adoration Chapel she found for me that I fled. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I went to that Eucharistic Adoration Chapel. When both my cousins had high risk pregnancies, I went to that Eucharistic Adoration Chapel. Whenever my future has been uncertain, and continues to be, I go to that Eucharistic Adoration Chapel. It is where I truly came to believe all I had read was true...it is the place where I was forced to my knees to acknowledge the Body of Christ given form. It is this place where I prayed my first Rosary and first taught myself the Anima Christi.

It is not an easy journey. While loathe to give the Enemy too much credit, I've encountered a number of obstacles while going: Ice storms out of nowhere, horrible thunder storms (one of the worst of my life the night I first went), rock slides, fallen trees, flooding, kamikaze deer and turkeys...the list goes on and on. Twenty to thirty minutes from where I work, along winding back roads with sheer drops into rivers and valleys, falling rock signs everywhere for good reason, heh. Yet, I think this is also a part of why it gives me so much faith to go there in the presence of the Lord. If something doesn't want me there, it has to be good for me.

It is also the one place where I can drop all my pretenses of who I am and should be. It is the one place where my masques fall and I am forced to confront who I am and who I should be. It is where, perhaps most importantly, I am forced to look at the man I am and will be. Hope. Love. Charity. Things so difficult for me at most times, but things that compose the core of my being none the less.