This article has been excerpted from a webinar presentation by Fr. Agustino Torres, available on the National Eucharistic Revival’s YouTube channel.
God has a plan.
It’s a plan for you. It’s also a plan for us, corporately, for all of us. When you’re aware of this plan, when you are aware of what God wants to do in your life, your life becomes an adventure.
I’ll tell you a story. When I was over in New York at one of our evangelization events, I struck up a friendship with one of the women who was living at the home of the Sisters of Life on 51st Street. When the event ended, she said to me, “When my baby is born, I want you to do the baptism.” And I said, “Of course.”
As it turned out, however, the baptism was sandwiched in between two other events I needed to be present at, one of which was four hours away in Pennsylvania. I was confident I could be present at the baptism in downtown Manhattan and then get in the car with my brothers and get to Pennsylvania in plenty of time. But it’s New York. So after the baptism and holding babies and greeting friends, I said, “I gotta go!” and—this couldn’t be planned—my car had been towed. I was so frustrated. “I’m trying to help people!” I thought, “Now there’s no way I’m going to get to Pennsylvania on time....”
Brothers and sisters, God had a plan.
When I reached a lady on the phone for information on how to find the status of my car and where it was located, she said to me in Spanish, “You’re a priest? Can you pray for my son?” Right there I prayed with her. I knew it was the Holy Spirit. Afterward, I hung up the phone and said, “Thank you, Lord!”
You see, I had plans. I was going somewhere, but the Lord also had a plan. The Lord wanted me to evangelize “in season and out of season.”
But wait. There’s more.
On the subway I was taking to get down to 42nd Street where my car was impounded, a girl came up to me while I was praying and asked, “Do you know about the Bible?” It’s my favorite type of question! I opened up the Scriptures as best as I could from 135th Street all the way to 42nd Street. When I exited the subway station I said to the Lord, “There’s no way I would have been there at the right time for her if I had not been towed. Thank you, Lord.”
And there’s more. The rest of the day I continued to bump into people God had planned for me to be with that day.
Brothers and sisters, we are all called to preach the Gospel to all nations. Why do we evangelize? Why preach the Gospel? Here are three reasons why:
1. We evangelize because we’re all called to be saints. You might think, “Me? Father, you don’t know me. What I’ve done. What I’ve been through. No, that’s not for me.” Listen, all of us are called to be saints. The world needs to know this. Holiness, in essence, is friendship with God. Dare I even say, holiness is to fall in love with God. Our call is to be renewed in our own lives. I don’t care what your past is. The Lord is looking to help you today. The Lord is calling you to be a martyr: to be a witness. You are called to go against the current, follow the Divine Master, “to follow the Lamb wherever he goes.”
2. To evangelize is a call to love. We are called to love our neighbor. I know that there are sometimes a lot of difficulties with our neighbor. There can be a lot of infighting even in families. But we are called to love even in this. We are responsible for our neighbor. Who is our neighbor? We can look at the parable of the Good Samaritan for the answer. The Eucharistic Revival is a battle cry to love our neighbor, ultimately to give them Jesus, who loves them enough to give his life for them.
3. The call to evangelize is a call to repentance. We usually talk about repentance during Lent. After the Resurrection, Jesus asked Peter (who had betrayed him three times on the night before he died), “Do you love me?” When Peter replied, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” Jesus told him to feed his lambs. So, our reconciliation with God is a call to evangelize. I remember the story a chaplain once told me about a prison where he served. One Sunday he preached about forgiveness, not knowing that the person playing the guitar at the Mass was a prisoner, and at the Mass was also the person who had killed his brother. After the homily, the musician laid down his guitar, went before the altar, and said for everyone to hear, “My heart has been moved. As the Gospel asks us, so now I do....” He called the name of the prisoner who had killed his brother, “Jim, I forgive you. I forgive you for everything you have done, and I ask forgiveness for what I and my family have done to your family.” You could hear a pin drop. Then Jim stood up and approached the altar. The guards were getting ready to assemble, not knowing what was going to happen. Jim walked up to the front and then embraced this man with the fraternal embrace of forgiveness. Everybody there began to shout and cheer. This stepping out and reconciling, this stepping out and evangelizing, has the power to bring great healing and reconciliation.
It's clear that the power of evangelization does not come from us. To evangelize is to tell others about the joy of this friendship with Jesus that we have found. It is to trust God’s plan when our plan doesn’t work out! It is the joyful announcement that Jesus Christ is a living person, and that he wants to enter into relationship with you, and that through his Resurrection he has defeated sin and death.
God is real, my friends, and he wants to be in relationship with you. He has defeated sin and death and wants to invite you to be with him for all eternity in heaven. With this basic message, thousands, millions of souls have been converted. So, I invite you to pray.
The Congress was an incredible, incredible time, but it is now time for us to make it a way of life. Revival is something that God wants to do in the history of this country. There have been awakenings in our history and these awakenings have even led to mass conversions. Dare we believe that we are alive now during what will be an extraordinary awakening for us in these times?
I dare to believe.
Fr. Agustino Miguel Torres is a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal (CFR), a religious community established in the Bronx, NY, that is dedicated to working with the poor and evangelizing. Watch his full webinar presentation here.
