Coonecting to God
By Rev. Frank Majka, S.J.
associate
director, University Ministry
Within a culture of e-mails and cell phones, where peoplework hard to stay connected, people of faith know the importance of staying connected to God. Jesus Himself set the example by taking time to pray, realizing that the fruitfulness of His life and ministry demanded a strong relationship with the Father.
If you are one of the countless number of people who make a special effort to work on staying connected with God, here are four observations that may help.
• The very desire for connection is part of being connected. God normally doesn’t force Himself on us, but waits for us to show that we want to deepen our relationship with Him. Setting aside some time for prayer, whether once a day or a couple of times a week, demonstrates our desire for such a relationship.
Hoping to stay connected to God without it is like wanting to learn to cook without going into the kitchen.
• We stay connected to God by staying connected to ourselves and our deepest needs, desires, hopes, even our deepest fears. In his book Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey observes that most of the time people are preoccupied with things that are high on the urgency scale but low on the scale of importance. The deep parts of ourselves may not seem to demand immediate attention, but they are the wellsprings of our lives. By tuning into these things, we can become more aware of how and where God is leading us.
• We stay connected to God by staying connected to the world outside ourselves. Probably most of us find that our awareness of the world is not what it should be. Covey says that our sphere of influence, where we can directly make a difference, should not blind us to what he calls our sphere of interest, where we become aware that the world is bigger than our particular part of it. God is active in this wider world with all its beauty and ugliness, happiness and pain, richness and poverty, so being connected there is a big part of being connected with God.
• Finally, those of us who are believers stay connected to God when we stay connected to our churches. That may be challenging, and we are all likely to feel closer to our churches at some times than others. But God has promised to be present when we pray and worship with others, and in our faith communities, we find support in living our faith.
Staying connected to God is a gift, but also a discipline. Human beings are made to have that connection. When we make the effort to foster it, we discover that God wants to be connected with us, too
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