For my Christian Belief and Thought class last semester, we had to read a few books and then write essays about any point in the book. Our first book was Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). The part of the book that I focused on was a story about St. Terese of Lisieux, where she admitted to faith struggles. This made me think of my own faith struggles. This is what I wrote on this topic:

The  Christian concept of doubt as expressed through the anecdotes that Benedict uses is a concept that many Christians, even the best Christians can struggle with. Benedict cites Terese of Lisieux, who is a saint, as someone who doubted a lot. She claimed that she was always tempted to atheism. However, there are ways of thinking that are just as dangerous for Christians as simple atheism. For many Christians, myself included, the struggle with doubt does not come from a temptation to atheism, but it came in many periods of my life in doubting that God has a divine and perfect plan for me.

When I was born, there was a hole in my back, called spina bifida. I had to have surgery as soon as I was born and spent my first few months in the hospital. Growing up, I had many other experiences where I had surgery. There were a lot of very painful surgeries in quick succession. It was not just the surgery. Growing up as a young boy, all of my friends played sports of some sort. I obviously could not. While my friends regaled me with their stories of scoring touchdowns in their football games, I sat around my house wishing that there was something I could do, something I could do to play with my friends. All sports were out of the question due to my condition. When I was young, I felt left out and hurt and a little bit cheated. “Why had God done this to me?”, I asked. I wondered why I existed and to be perfectly honest, there were a lot of times when I was young that I did not want to exist anymore. This is not to say that I had a bad childhood. I ultimately had a very good and fulfilling childhood, but I nearly fell into a form of atheism, not quite the way that Therese struggled, but a doubt in God’s good influence on my own life. I thought that God had abandoned me, and the messages that the culture was sending me, that disability is something negative that takes away most things good in someone’s life, reinforced this way of thinking. Whenever I expressed my concerns with my life, my mother would tell me something like “God has a special plan for you”. We even had a book along those lines, called “The Crippled Lamb”. It was my favorite book growing up even though I did not believe the message. It was not that I did not believe it per se, it was more that it was an abstraction to me. I did not know that God had a plan for everyone because I had not seen what His plan for me was. Like Therese, I had a lot of doubt about what my life was and what my life’s purpose was. It was not until that changed that I was able to receive God more fully into my own life.

When I was in high school, I participated in theatre. This was better than what I had been doing before. I had stopped openly doubting my life and its purpose; I just was not thinking about it at all. Theatre was a place for me to let go. When I was in high school, I learned that my disability was not necessarily a negative; it was just one of my characteristics, the way people have different colored hair or eyes . This erased the major doubts in my life. This was a good development, but it was not the ideal. I was no longer struggling as Therese once struggled as well, but I was still not particularly sure of my purpose. This could be seen as really not ideal because the reason that I was not doubting my purpose was because I was not really looking for it.

One day during senior year of high school, my life changed. I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed and I saw an article about an Icelandic woman who had Down Syndrome who made a photo series of other people with Down Syndrome. It said in the article that if a woman gets a positive prenatal test for Down Syndrome in Iceland, she chooses abortion 100% of the time. This shocked me. I had always been what one might consider “pro-life”, as I was born into a Catholic family that rarely discussed the issue, but when we did it was understood that this was something bad. It was not, however, an issue that I had thought about greatly. When I found out that the world was getting rid of individuals with Down Syndrome at that high a rate, something clicked inside of me. I could not sit by and watch this happen. By this point, I had come to have enough appreciation for my life to know that my life was a good thing, despite the complications. I knew that I quite enjoyed my life even as I had a disability, and I was horrified to find out that there are a lot of people who do not get the chance to live at all because they would be born with a disability.   I got to college, I went to the table of the pro-life club, but I had not really gone to any of their meetings. I went to the March for Life in Washington D.C. with my parish, but I did not really get involved other than that. In my second semester, I got more involved. I started going to meetings and doing the other events. I would talk to my mother about this. One night, I heard one sentence from my mother that would make this fight personal. “You know, some people wanted me to abort you.” She later told me the full story. When my parents went in for the tests and they found out what was going to happen, they made sure to get a second opinion. When the tests happened the second time, the radiologist rudely informed my parents that “[the hospital] already diagnosed this, so why haven’t [my parents] taken care of it?” Considering that the fetal surgery option was in its infancy and they had not been told about it, the implication was quite clear. This changed everything. Fighting for the right to life for all was no longer an abstraction to me. The culture of death had actually tried to kill me. Now it was personal. It took me some time even after this to realize what my taking this up as a personal issue really meant. This was my purpose. The reason God created me the way I am is so that I could have my story and I could share it. With this story, I am in a unique position to fight for the right to life for everyone because I know how much it hurts to be told that there are some people who believe that your life does not matter because of your genetic code or for any other reason. I was no longer doubting my purpose like Therese, but was able to overcome this doubt as she did. I know my purpose now. God put me here to make sure that no one is ever told in that way to “take care of it” ever again. While doubts about purpose can hurt anyone, it is a matter of prayer, discernment, and experience. The doubts can happen to the best of us, but our doubts of life’s purpose can change once we find a passion from God.