By Georgia Clewer
After spending a year
in youth ministry, my faith was stronger than it had ever been. Through the ups
and downs of the last year, my faith is something that always remained
consistent. When your faith becomes your work and is the foundation for the
community you live in its understandable for it to be so important. However,
moving away to university, I started to notice my faith dipping. I was no longer
living with other Catholics, my CathSoc meet ups clashed with my sports team’s
night out. I would make an effort to attend mass, but what I was missing was
sharing my faith with other young people through praise, worship and adoration.
The Youth 2000 Courageous retreat was my first experience of a Youth 2000 retreat and it could not have been more perfectly timed. The retreat gave me
the opportunity to step back and take some time for myself and God. The
opportunity to just sit and be with the blessed sacrament restored the
tranquillity that I had lost in my busy life.
I found the workshops
particularly interesting over the weekend. I attended Theology of the Body first, curious as to what this would entail. This workshop was very thought
provoking and made me re evaluate some of the past choices I had made. I had always
known the church’s stance on pre-marital sex, but I had never really thought to
look into why as I felt it wasn’t relevant to today’s society. I found out that there is so much to it! The workshop explored how we value our own bodies and
how God does as well, providing a positive and uplifting session opposed to the
condemning and negative one I had feared.
At the university life
workshop, I was able to talk to other current and ex students who were very
open and honest about their experiences about their spiritual and social lives
at university.
The talks with the
students, and the reconciliation service that followed in the evening, gave me
the reassurance that although I am a Catholic student, I am not defined by
only that. Yes I make mistakes and my faith isn’t perfect all the time but I am
able to recognise that I can always seek forgiveness- there isn’t anything I
can do to keep me from God’s unconditional love.
Over the past few
months I had been struggling a lot with my own self worth and where it comes
from, leading me to make decisions that didn’t always make me happy and help me reach my
full potential. During the talk on the
last day, the seminarian Paschal Uche quoted the Dominican sister St. Catherine
of Siena: '"Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”' This
quote sums up the retreat for me; the love I felt over the weekend was
overwhelming, the love from God, my friends and the love from strangers has had
such a huge impact on how I am choosing to live my life now. When I cannot
recognise my own worth I know I have the strength to renounce the lies I sometimes believe, because being who I truly am in God’s eyes is more powerful than
anything else, and I truly intend to set the world on fire.
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