Gabe Garnica, Author at Amazing Catechists

Faith and Gym Memberships

The other day I was working out at my local gym when I began to notice the various types of participants around me. One man was sitting at his weight station looking at his cell phone. Another was shooting the breeze with two other guys who were standing near his exercise machine. A few folks took longer to wipe down and wipe off their station than to exercise, lifting the weight three of four times and getting up. A guy nearby lifted far more weight than he could handle, judging by the look of death on his tomato red face. After a few lifts he had to stop. A lady behind me lifted a very light weight something like 40 times and left. There were a few folks who clearly knew what they were doing, applying proper weights and technique and the right reps and sets. However, for each effective exerciser there were ten who were clueless, oblivious, lazy, creative, or any combination of those latter traits.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that I have been each of those exercisers when it comes to practicing and applying my faith. Sometimes I am more interested in my cell phone than in praying. I can think of numerous times when it was distracted in church speaking to someone, or when I dropped into church seemingly as a drive by visitor. There have been times when I lifted more commitment than I could handle and gave up soon thereafter. Other times, I have been quite proud of myself for lifting the lightest burden possible a million times, as if I had accomplished anything by the process. For every time I have been focused and effective in prayer or meditation, there have been two where I was going through the motions.

We may ask why people sign up for gym memberships and then go through the motions or do not even show up to the gym. We may wonder in awe at how folks can attend mass once a month or less and think that they are good Catholics just for doing that. Truth be told, we are all guilty of doing such things with our faith. We act as if the beautiful faith that we have been gifted is a permanent tattoo that we can just wear and that is all.

Like it or not, we have to actually practice what we believe and preach. We have to make our faith a real meaningful part of our life, sort of a routine on steroids that we do because we feel it, not out of some mindless habit. We have to help anyone who asks us to explain things, or who is reaching out in general to see if the Good Samaritan story is just a myth. Perhaps we can use this Lent to make our faith more than a glorified gym membership. I think we can if we try.

2017 Gabriel Garnica

Divine Mercy is All About Breaking Scripts

By Gabe Garnica

What is Your Script?

As I started the current new year of teaching religious education I made the usual review of incoming students’ past behavior and other issues. I was warned about one boy in particular who had past behavior issues. When I spoke with the boy in class, he told me that he ” was always getting into trouble” and that ” That’s just how I am”. It became clear to me that this boy had somehow developed the self-identity as a problem and that this label was the only one he knew how to embody. I confronted him and rejected that label, telling him in no uncertain terms that he would be one of my best students by the middle of the year, which he has become. Two other boys are showing similar issues which I hope to resolve in a similar fashion by the end of the year in May.

As I thought about what happened with the first boy in the past 5 months, I realized that Our Lord’s Divine Mercy works in just the same way with us. As weak, defective human beings who have fallen too many times to count in the past, we can consciously or subconsciously embrace the labels of being hopeless sinners not worth the effort. Oh, we may play the game of going to confession and trying to be better, but deep inside we may very well have given up on ourselves. One way or the other, we may see ourselves as some old car that we do not want to get rid of and keep fixing, expecting to eventually throw in the junk heap.

We All Need Repairs and Maintenance

In that context, we may see Our Lord as the ultimate auto mechanic and Divine Mercy as the fundamental service guarantee. As long as we care enough to keep bringing in our jalopy to confession in a sincere effort to keep it running as God wants it to run, Our Lord will keep helping us out. We must bring the car in and we must sincerely want to fix it, however. God will give us roadside assistance at times and by His discretion, but ultimately we have to bring our jalopy in for service.

Reading the Right Script

In a sense, we are all actors as Shakespeare so famously stated. We choose our roles and our scripts in this life. We can be the true follower of Christ and follow the script that goes with that. On the contrary, most of us very often choose what we consider more interesting or juicy roles as villains, troublemakers, pretentiously self-obsessed snobs, manipulators of people etc. Sooner or later, however, those latter roles will only lead us away from God and to the ultimate off-Broadway production of Dante’s Inferno. Sometimes, we play such roles so much that we can typecast ourselves into oblivion.

Divine Mercy is the way to break that destructive pattern. It allows us to break the scripts in our lives which prevent us from reaching out yet again to God when we need to. The devil wants us to give up as Judas did, but we must love and seek God with such sincerity despite our imperfection that we are able to break out of the scripts that bind us. Armed with this beautiful gift of Divine Mercy, then, we will always be given the opportunity to rewrite our life scripts.

2017 Gabriel Garnica

Following Christ : Relentless Love

By Gabe Garnica

I have met many people who gave up trying to follow Our Lord simply because they felt that the effort was a hopeless cause. Mired and paralyzed in their imperfection and inconsistency, these folks grew tired of falling far short of Christ Himself. While I pray for them and often try to warmly invite them out of their funk, I realize that their folly is more common than one would like to admit.

Got That 80/20 Rule Wrong

I once read that salvation is 80% focusing on God and others and 20% focusing on oneself. Certainly, we all need to undergo faith and practice self-reflection to make sure we are constantly improving ourselves in the eyes of God. Just as surely, we all most spend most of our time focusing and serving God and others by putting our faith into action.

The problem with those who give up trying to follow Christ is that they have somehow flipped that 80/20 rule around. Whether they realize it or not, they are spending most of their time worrying about themselves and too little time loving and serving God and others. The greatest saints in history did not worry about themselves because they were too busy loving and caring for others and serving God. Thus, the first step to following Christ is to focus on Christ and others and worrying less about yourself.

Relentless Love over Relentless Perfection

People always hear how perfect Christ was–and with good reason. However, that perfection was born out of the fact that He is all God and all human, while we are not. Trying to be perfect as Christ is perfect is an exercise in frustration and failure. Trapped in a society and world which defines failure as failing to reach some stated, pinpoint target is a prescription for unhappiness.

When we look at Christ, do we see His perfection as a case of relentless love over relentless “perfection”? Our Lord is perfect because He loves perfectly. We are not perfect because as fallible and weak humans we can only love imperfectly. The key, however, is that our standard or target should not be perfect love but, rather, relentless love. Christ was able to love perfectly and relentlessly. As mere humans, we are called to stick to the relentless part and do our best with the perfect part.

Simply put, imperfect love relentlessly and sincerely pursued and practiced will get us to heaven a lot faster than so-called perfect love insincerely and occasionally practiced. Often, it is not how well we love but how much we try our best to love better that counts. God knows that we are not perfect, but He wants us to love so much that our imperfection does not matter.

Conclusion

If being a Christian means following Christ, then being a Christian entails falling as Christ did yet relentlessly getting up again to keep trying as Christ did. While Our Lord never made a mistake, He did fall under the weight of His cross a few times. We make plenty of mistakes and we fall under the weight of our crosses, real or created, all the time. The key distinction and goal to be sought here is that we must love God and others so relentlessly that getting up and trying over and over to love and serve others, regardless of our falls, is the difference that matters.

2017 Gabriel Garnica

Serving God is all about Re-gifting

By Gabe Garnica

As Christmas approaches we begin to hear the familiar stories about gifts, traditions, and what is appropriate or not regarding gifts. I remember growing up hearing horror stories about people passing unwanted gifts to others or, as accurately described in popular culture, “re-gifting”. The argument against this practice centered around being cheap, ungrateful, inconsiderate, and deceptive. The general feeling in those days was that re-gifting was a slap in the face of the original giver, and a blatant sign of ingratitude or disrespect for the time and effort that person put into giving the gift. Certainly, even today, most would agree that giving away a personalized or meaningful gift is improper form, as would be passing over a used or dusty gift from the past.

However, a review of more recent thoughts regarding this practice shows a growing sentiment away from total negativity toward measured acceptance and even praise of this behavior. The general sentiment seems to be that passing off an unwanted gift to someone who might enjoy or use such a gift more is a noble way of avoiding waste and spreading enjoyment. It seems that, as long as good taste and practicality is observed, many people today do not automatically shun re-gifting if the recipient will benefit or enjoy a gift which would otherwise remain unused.

The Magi brought the infant Jesus gifts in the form of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and some joke that the latter two gifts were certainly re-gifted since gold would be the preferred gift. In all seriousness, gifts were part of the very first Christmas because the Infant Jesus is a gift from God in every sense of the word. Moving forward, Our Lord’s entire ministry on earth was a continuous gift as the perfect example of loving service and care for others that we are all called to follow. Saint Therese the Little Flower once stated that she wanted to come before God with empty hands which were free of all the gifts God had given her which had been offered to others. We know from the famous Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) that we are expected to turn God’s investment in our talents into a profit of service to others.

Simply put, we re-gift when we use the gifts God has given us to serve others. Our abilities and skills do not belong to us but, rather, are merely temporary possessions which we must use to bring God’s touch to others. The singer too lazy to sing for others or, worse, who merely uses her talent to gain personal fame and material possessions without helping others is ignoring the purpose of that God-given gift. The excellent public speaker or writer who uses his talent to spread harm or create hatred is certainly misusing his talent.

At the end of the day, then, following Christ is re-gifting for the glory of God, and you are certainly welcome to pass that thought to others.

Gabriel Garnica, 2016

Faith Lessons from the Pareto Principle

By Gabe Garnica

Image copyright James Hrkach/Josh Hrkach

Pareto Basics Applied

Perhaps you have heard of the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few. This theory states that 80% of the effects in our lives come from 20% of the causes. The theory was developed by the economist Vilfredo Pareto as a way of describing the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the country’s population. While its core application is in business and economics, I have found this observation to be very pervasive and perceptive in observing life in general.

Economists and others have concluded that two key deductions from the Pareto Principle are that most things in life are not distributed evenly toward a good or bad result. Some things contribute more than others. The second deduction, stemming from the first, then, is that life is not always fair. In a so-called perfect world, everything would contribute equally to whatever effects were caused, making figuring things out a lot simpler. Five workers would each supply 1/5 of the work resulting in a job well done. Each would be rewarded equally given his or her equal contribution, which means that there would be no need to weigh relative contributions and harms of things we did or decided.

As we all know, however, life is not fair, nor easy, to calculate and predict. It is likely true that 80% of our sins come from only 20% of our lives. Most of us may likely keep repeating the same mistakes, slipping up in the same spots of our lives, over and over. This is why we are not as bad as we think we are. If we commit 20 sins in a week, the odds are that 16 of them, or 80%, come from the same old patterns of thinking and acting.

Likewise, it is likely that 80% of our concerns and worries come from 20% of our issues. Most of us tend to worry about the same situations and problems over and over. Again, we are not as hopeless as we lead ourselves to believe.

Lastly, 80% of the good we do may likely be coming from only 20% of our time. Thus, we are not as good as we think we are either. There is always much more room for improvement !

Armed with the realization that life is not meant to be fair, that things are not synchronized and predictable, that we are neither as bad nor as hopeless nor as complete as we fancy ourselves to be, we can finally be free to trust God, love others, and truly become the tools for good He wants us to be.

2016 Gabriel Garnica

The Saint in the Mirror is Waiting for Your Acceptance

By Gabe Garnica

The Feasts of All Saints and All Souls defy our mistaken belief that sanctity is beyond us. St. Therese of Lisieux reminds us that sanctity is beyond us only if we allow it to be. Most people think of saints as holy super heroes with powers beyond those of mere mortals. Under this view, thinking that one can become a saint is about as naïvely foolish as pretending that one can become a grand pianist while poking at two keys in our first lesson at age eighty.

Why do we so often sell ourselves short when it comes to striving for sanctity?

For one thing, many define a saint as someone who performs extraordinary things in incredible ways, such as working miracles or practicing extreme penances and sacrifices. Certainly, there are saints who have done this, but they are the more famous saints and not representative of the vast majority.

St. Therese of Lisieux reminds us that becoming a saint is no more than seeking to please God by doing the ordinary extraordinarily well. Fame and public relations have nothing to do with sanctity. St. Therese is famous now, but she was a virtually unknown, cloistered Carmelite during her life. One must only seek to please God over seeking fame, fortune, or self-benefit.

The saint is one wrapped in God, in love, and in service. If we always put God first, others second, and ourselves last, we will be on the way to sanctity.

We grow in sanctity by merely striving for sanctity, and we must never feel that we are holy enough for God. The saint is not complacent because there is always more to do for God.

Another reason that many ignore or surrender their calling to be saints is that it is much easier to pretend that sanctity is impossible than to admit that it is very possible. There is no criticism of the grade school student who fails a bar exam because nobody expects such a student to pass it. Likewise, the very young and inexperienced skater who fails to medal in a competition is not rebuked because nobody expects her to be ready to medal anyway.

Still others argue that they are not called to be saints because of this or that reason. Such people forget that saints come in all shapes, colors, backgrounds, talents, and types. In fact, we need diverse saints because people and the Church have diverse needs.

I once read that inventions are merely creative ways to solve problems and answer needs. We are each a unique, beautiful invention of God. Each of us is blessed with special gifts and talents waiting to be used in His service. God invites each of us to fulfill that purpose and that potential to be saints. Our mistaken notion that saints are superheroes beyond our abilities prevents us from daring to believe that we too can become saints.

Armed with God’s love and mercy and dressed in our faith, each of us is a saint waiting to happen. The question is not if we can become saints. Rather, the issue is will we accept Our Lord’s standing, loving invitation to serve Him and love others with the very tools He has provided.

Gabriel Garnica, 2016

Lesson Idea for Teaching Trust in God

By Gabe Garnica

Objective: Children will be able to recall and recite three important things that we can offer to God…1) Harms….our sins 2) Hopes…the things we would like to do/receive 3) Hurts….people/things/situations that have hurt us

Materials Needed:

3 medium-sized cardboard boxes/cartons, with labels Harms, Hopes, and Hurts on the front respectively. Box should be large enough so that it cannot be held in one hand easily
Items to place in boxes, such as books or rubber balls etc (optional)
4 volunteers

Grade Level: Grades 3 to 6, but the delivery can be simplified or amplified for lower or higher grades

Scripture: 1 Peter 5:7 “casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.” Matthew 6:26 “ Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they?”

In the interest of brevity, I will summarize this lesson so that any catechist will be able to modify his or her presentation as needed.

Have one child play God; that child will stand to one side for most of the lesson
Remind the children that just as Jesus offered His cross to God, we can also offer all the good and bad things that happen to us to God also.
Explain to the children that, in addition to our thanks, praise, and requests, we can offer three other things to God
Give the box labeled “Harms” to one child and explain that this box represents those times that we hurt God, others, or ourselves by not obeying what God wants us to do.
Ask the children what we call those times…invariably someone will say “sin” and so ask the children how we “let go” of our sins….confession.
Give the box labeled “Hopes” to one child and explain that this box represents those things we want to do in the future, such as passing a test, getting on the soccer team, or becoming an athlete. Explain to the children that while we can prepare for these things, we have to trust in God and leave it up to Him if we will get what we want because He knows what is best for us.
Give the box labeled “Hurts” to the last child and explain that these are the times we have been hurt by people or when things do not go our way. Explain that, just as Jesus forgave those who hurt Him, we too should forgive people for hurting us and ourselves when we cannot do the things we wanted to do.
Ask the children to try to hug or shake hands while holding their box. Now ask the children with the boxes to give their boxes to the child playing God.
Close by telling the children that they cannot love and help each other as God wants them to until they give their boxes to God as well.

2016 Gabriel Garnica

Why Magnifying the Lord is Our Mission as Christians

By Gabe Garnica

One of my favorite prayers in Scripture is Mary’s beautiful Magnificat, which begins with the phrase, “ My soul magnifies the Lord”(Luke 1:46) Curious about the use of “magnify” in Scripture, I discovered that it is used well over 100 times. If you think about it, is there a better way to describe our purpose as followers of Christ?

See the Lord in Proper Place and Perspective

To begin, we must realize that magnifying The Lord does not mean that we are making Him more since that would be absurd. How can we, imperfect creatures of God, make our perfect Creator more? A magnifying glass does not make its target image bigger. Rather, it makes that target bigger for us to see better. There is no imperfection or limitation in the object but, rather, in ourselves that we need help in seeing that object more clearly.

Although God is perfection and all good, we often need reminders that He can seem small to us if we forget His Presence in our lives. First, we need to magnify that Presence in ourselves through our worship, praise, humility, and good works. Second, we need to magnify that Presence in others through those same good works, our example, and our proclamation of God’s Word.

Remove Our Splinters and Thread Our Needles

We have all had the unpleasant experience of having a splinter in our hand. Everyone knows that such a task often requires the use of a magnifying glass to help us remove this obstruction. This brings the mind Christ’s powerful reminder that we first remove our defects before presuming to point out those of other people ( Matthew 7:5). It is easy to judge others in our drive to drive to be holier-than-thou, but Christ tells us to be humble. Regardless of the size of our defects, we often see them, if we do at all, as mere splinters. How often do we downplay our faults while magnifying the faults of others? We need to see our sins more clearly if we are to truly avoid continuing them.

Another famous passage reminds us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to find eternal salvation ( Luke 18:25). We understand this to mean that we cannot save ourselves unless we release our obsession with the temporary, temporal, and superficial things of this world. Self-reflection will enlarge the eye of our moral needle allowing us to navigate this delicate balance between our present and eternal needs.

Start a Fire

A final use of a magnifying glass is to start a fire by focusing heat and energy on a given point. We do this by concentrating diffuse light into a powerful beam. While our lives bear their share of darkness and light, even our light can often be diffused. We need passion, dedication, commitment, and constancy to focus that light into one important purpose.

Christ’s mission and His apostles sought to light a fire under others and motivate them to spread the flame of Our Lord’s love message. We need to inspire others and we do that by magnifying the power of God’s love and the example of Christ’s teaching unto hearts and minds that still lack such a blessing.

Conclusion

Magnifying glasses do many great things that make our lives better. However, we have the same capacity to prioritize, self-reflect, and ignite and spread dedication to Our Lord. Biblical magnification is not about ourselves but about magnifying God (Psalm 35:26-27).

Let us each be a magnifying glass for The Lord, for that in essence is what being His follower is really about.

2016 Gabriel Garnica

The Lesson of a Pet Contest

By Gabe Garnica

Unexpected Lesson

I once read that the most profound lessons often cross our paths at the most unexpected times. A few weeks ago I experienced this truth in the form of a pet contest. I did not expect a simple pet contest to become a deep lesson but that is exactly what I received.

We have a beautiful beagle mix rescue dog named Cassie who has brought nothing but love, joy, and peace to our home. We found her through a series of events best left for another day. Suffice it to say that those events were surely heaven-sent. We all know how much St. Francis loved animals, but other saints such as Basil the Great, Cuthbert, Philip Neri, Melangell, Hubert, Columba, Roche, Cirian the Younger, Chrysostom, and Jerome were all known for loving and appreciating animals as beautiful gifts from God. This lesson, and this contest, all came about as we were about to go on vacation.

God, however, is never on holiday. He does not take vacations from teaching us loving lessons, often when we least expect them.

Like many pet owners, we allowed our love and pride in our pet to cloud what is truly important. At some point in this process, it became more about showing off our dog than appreciating her. This beautiful dog had taught us so much and we were responding with petty superficiality and selfishness.

Through this process we began to realize how much we really cared about and loved our pet. We realized that we did not need a contest to confirm or validate how special and unique this innocent gift from God truly was.

When Losing is Winning

When the contest people informed us that Cassie had been disqualified over a voting irregularity, we became upset, resentful, and even bitter. All that time and effort, and all of that pestering those we knew to vote, had seemingly gone to waste. It did not help that the disqualification claim itself seemed suspicious, nor that the contest seemed rigged in favor of the second place dog.

We lose touch with the genuine truth, the priorities, and the things that really matter in our lives when we fall into this world’s petty validations. These earthly, external validations are not necessary when we have the internal validation of God’s blessings. He touches our lives with a genuine beauty and love that do not need trophies, awards, front covers, or contests. Loving and serving God is a daily blessing that no earthly contest can touch. We need to be reminded of the many daily blessings of God, and how we each take those blessings for granted.

In case we have not noticed, there is injustice, selfishness, superficiality, corruption, and deception in this world. Christ certainly faced these things, and we cannot follow Him without facing them as well. However, we cannot allow injustice to define who we are. Resentment and bitterness only arise to the degree that we validate and play the petty games of this earth.

Our Lord faced and transcended what is wrong about this world with His message of what is right about God. As His followers, we cannot expect to do anything less.

Long before this foolish contest, we had come to see Cassie as a gift from God. One look at her big brown eyes reminded us that we were winners the day God sent her our way, and we did not need any twisted contest to remind us of that fact.

2016, Gabriel Garnica

Zacchaeus: The Long and Short of Our Faith

By Gabe Garnica

We have all read and heard the story of Zacchaeus, the short tax collector who climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus when Our Lord passed through Jericho on His way to Jerusalem ( Luke 19: 2-4). As the story goes, Zacchaeus ran ahead and climbed the tree knowing that this was the only way he would be able to see Our Lord. When Jesus passed by the tree, He called out to Zacchaeus by name and called him down, for He intended to visit his house. As would be expected, the crowd was shocked once again that Jesus, a Jew, would supposedly stain Himself by being the guest of a tax collector.

As is often the case, there is a powerful lesson to be learned in this story which transcends the simplicity of the narrative. To begin with, tax collectors were despised as corrupt traitors who stole from their own to serve themselves and the oppressive Romans. Our Lord, however, sees what is in the heart of the person, and He knew Zacchaeus was a good investment. As was always the case, Jesus did not measure by the standards of this world but by the insight of God. We are certainly not God, but we can emulate Our Lord by refusing to judge a book by its cover.

Secondly, Zacchaeus refused to let the obstacle of his short stature get in the way of his desire to see this Jesus with his own eyes. Others might have used their height as an excuse to give up, or let others describe Our Lord to them. They might have let their circumstances dictate their response to Our Lord’s call. How often do we let circumstances become obstacles and obstacles become excuses?

Third, Zacchaeus ran ahead of the crowd in order to find the most effective and favorable place to overcome his obstacle. Sometimes, our greatest obstacle is failing to anticipate the very obstacles and issues that will befall us. Many people suffer from obsession with the past, which they cannot change, and the regrets that bubble from such obsession. Others are chained to the present, only focused on the here and now and what they can gain in the immediate present. Zacchaeus reminds us that following Our Lord often means that we have to think long-term, anticipate, and plan ahead. Serving God and others is often a question of proactively looking for opportunities to love, not waiting passively for such chances to arise. Great saints like Mother Teresa did not sit back and wait; they reached out in love and stepped outside of their comfort zones.

Fourth, Zacchaeus was willing to climb a tree to see Jesus. He was willing to elevate himself away from the everyday perspective of others. He knew that staying grounded, while seemingly safer, was far more risky to his ultimate goal of seeing Christ himself. Do we prefer to stay too grounded, and too safe? Are we willing to climb out of our usual perspectives to get closer to Jesus?

Finally, when Jesus called out to Zacchaeus, and expressed His intent to visit with him, Zacchaeus quickly came down from the tree, eager to obey and follow Our Lord. Do we cultivate an ability to transcend and rise above the world yet likewise become grounded in Christ? Do we realize that getting closer to Christ often means being able to both rise above obstacles and ground ourselves in His example?

As we walk through our journey on this temporary stop toward salvation, let us harness our inner Zacchaeus and be willing to identify, overcome, and transcend our shortcomings in order to answer Christ’s call to love and service !!

2016, Gabriel Garnica

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