"Be Satisfied With Me" (Part 1)

DISCLAIMER: This is going to be a long post with multiple installments. And hopefully there is a point to it.

“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” 

-St. Augustine, Confessions

That restless, longing heart. Sometimes we wander in sin, but so often in complacency. I'm so incredibly humbled when I look back and realize how far I was from God in my complacency, and how close He has drawn me. In Him I find my rest.

We are longing for the desired of our hearts to be filled, but they can never satisfy us until we find our ultimate satisfaction in Christ. In authentic relationship with Him. And the beautiful thing is that God is so incredibly faithful in satisfying those desires of our heart...He first wants to draw us in, to pursue us and make us fall in love with Him before those other desires can distract us from our true goal.

This would be one of the top five things I wish I could have told sixteen-year-old Catherine.

Now, to kind of switch gears, picture me in high school. Woah, actually, DON'T. High school wasn't the most pleasant of experiences for me, and suffice it to say I was not exactly a smash hit in the popular crowd. But that's not my point. Me: oldest of nine kids, totally unsure what to do with my life, practicing and active Catholic but cradle Catholic in the truest sense of the word. My parents are amazing Catholics, and growing up my faith was a huge part of my life. I have always loved and lived out my faith. But for a long time it was really just going through the motions...doing it because it was what I knew. And I thought I loved it. Great. Keep that in mind.

Throughout high school, but especially in my junior and senior year, I was a typical girl and I wanted a boy to give me flowers and think I was pretty and I wanted to fall in love and get married and live happily ever after. So, yeah. My group of friends was pretty borderline obsessed with boys. I wasn't nearly as obsessed with them, but its pretty fair to say that "finding love" was my focus. I wanted Mr. Tall, Dark & Catholic to waltz into my life and sweep me off my feet. But I was also pretty despairing of that ever happening. So, in true teenage fashion, I swung on a pendulum of emotions that made me dream of fairy-tale endings and moonlight dances but also made me expect and plan for a lonely life as a cat lady in small town Iowa.

I didn't have any plan for my life. No career path, no concrete steps towards bettering society. Not even really any solid ideas. And that scared me. I wanted to do something worthwhile, but I was terrified of change. I wasn't happy where I was, I didn't like the small town Iowa scene, but I didn't really see a way out of that. All of this made for a pretty bleak outlook on my life.

But there was a point when I started feeling a tug on my heart. A pull to go deeper. To find something more. More than just having a plan for my life, more than finding some dude who was willing to put up with me, and more than just going through the motions in my faith.

In 2008, I was given the following "poem" at a youth event. It has been attributed to St. Anthony of Padua, though I haven't been able to find the source. This poem ROCKED. MY. WORLD. And it was, in a lot of ways, the very first step of my conversion...my journey of falling in love with the Lord. This poem is called "Be Satisfied With Me".

Everyone longs to give himself completely to someone, to have a deep soul relationship with another, to be loved thoroughly and exclusively.

But God, to the Christian, says, "No, not until you are satisfied with living for Me and being loved by Me alone and having an intensely personal and unique relationship with Me alone.

"I love you my child; and until you discover that only in Me is your satisfaction, you will not be capable of the perfect human relationship that I have planned for you.

I want you to stop planning and stop wanting, and allow Me to give you the most thrilling plan ever existing--one that you cannot even imagine.

I want you to have the best. Please allow Me to bring it to you--just keep watching Me, expecting the greatest things--keep experiencing that satisfaction in Me, knowing that I AM--keep learning and listening to the things that I tell you.

You must wait. Do not be anxious. Do not worry. Do not look around at the things others have gained for themselves or that I have given them. Do not look at the things you want. Just keep looking at Me or you will miss what I want to show you.

And then, when you are ready, I will surprise you with a love far more wonderful than any you would ever dream of. You see, until you are ready (and even at this minute I desire to have you both ready at the same time), until you are both satisfied with Me and the life that I have prepared for you, you will not be able to experience the love that exemplifies your relationship with Me--and this is perfect love.

And, dear one, I want you to have this most wonderful love. I want you to see in the flesh a picture of your relationship with Me and to enjoy the everlasting union of beauty and love.

I AM GOD. Believe and be satisfied."

I could probably write a book on the ways that this poem changed my life. Instead, I'll make do with a couple of blog posts. But literally this poem gave me a new outlook. I realized that I needed to make Christ my priority. I realized that the well-worn phrase "God has a plan for your life" was true, but I could only participate in that plan if I stepped out in faith and DID something. I needed to learn to be satisfied with God...to have that be enough for me and more than enough for me before I could even start thinking about what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be.

I also made the crucial and painful realization that I didn't have the foggiest idea of who I was. Really, I just didn't know myself well at all. I didn't know what the desires of my heart were, and even if I had an idea of what they were I didn't know why I desired those things. And so I came to the conclusion that until I knew myself and had learned to be satisfied with God, I was not ready to be in a romantic relationship.

My desire to have a real relationship with God, and my decision to not date in high school were my only two nuggets of wisdom. Other than that, I was clueless.

But I prayed with this poem every day for almost two years. "I AM GOD. Believe and be satisfied." These words rang in my brain.

I started praying for my future husband. I had a feeling that he was in a very different place than me. But I trusted those words "until you are both satisfied with Me and the life that I have prepared for you, you will not be able to experience the love that exemplifies your relationship with Me- and this is perfect love."

And throughout the next couple of years, I fell madly in love with the One whose Love is perfect. I stopped waiting for my future and started jumping into it (kicking and screaming at first, but gradually I came to jump into that unknown with excitement).

I came to know myself. I learned my strengths, my gifts, my weaknesses, my total failures, and the desires of my heart. I kept praying for that man...my future husband...and my expectations were shaped to match my desires, and trusting..."I want you to have this most wonderful love."

To be continued...