“The Girl with the Microphone” by Brian Flanagan

“The Girl with the Microphone” by Brian Flanagan

Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

This week’s readings are all about sharing our faith and being “the light of the world.”  To illustrate, I’ll tell the stories of “the Girl with the Harp”, “the Girl on the Plane”, and “the Girl with the Microphone”…

The image of being “the light of the world” is one of the easiest images to understand in the Gospels.  Once we’ve experienced for ourselves how a life in Christ is the most fulfilling, satisfying way we could possibly live, we can’t help but tell people about it; and we’re called to!

When evangelizing or “sharing our faith”, I love the quote; “Don’t have a connection? Well, too bad.  Make one”.  In college, some of my Catholic friends and I met a girl who played the harp who lived in our dorm.  Could we have given her a flyer with Mass times? Sure.  Would she have come to Mass? Maybe.

But that’s not what we did.  A few of us were involved in the music ministry at the weekly Sunday night 8pm Mass, and we invited her to join us one night.  We picked her and her harp up in a big blue fifteen passenger van and then helped her haul it up the stairs to the choir loft of the Church.  She had a great time and played harp for Mass again the following week.  And again the week after that.  She kept coming around because of our friendship with her and because of that personal invitation.  The Girl with the Harp ended up getting really into her faith, and also became one of our very close friends.

Sometimes you don’t have days, weeks, months, years to share your faith with someone.  Sometimes you only have a few hours or minutes to work with.  I was on a plane once coming home from a friend’s wedding in Texas.  I decided I wanted to be evangelistic and strike up a conversation, just to see if I could throw in a little something about my faith.  There was a guy about my age in the aisle seat, and a girl about my age in the window seat.  The guy put earbuds in and closed his eyes.  So I decided I would talk to the girl.  And it wasn’t just because she was cute.

We got to talking about work.  She was a nurse, and I talked about my working in youth ministry.  I could see she wasn’t responding to any Catholic buzzwords, so I decided to go for a different approach.  I told her about the longest flight I’d ever been on, going to Tanzania in East Africa for a service trip that I did with the Catholic Student Association at Rutgers.  That opened the door for me to talk about faith and the role the Catholic Church plays in running lots of schools, hospitals, and other outreaches in Tanzania.  I also talked about the joy the people had there.

Taking this approach wasn’t “in-her-face” about faith.  I may have had to scramble to creatively make a connection but it was totally worth it.  I’ll presumably never see the Girl on the Plane again, but she might remember meeting a Catholic guy on a plane once who spoke about faith and the Church in a positive light.

Jesus tells us to put our light on a lampstand so people might be drawn to it.  I met the Girl with the Microphone while I was emceeing a panel of speakers for one of my Confirmation classes.  I didn’t get a chance to chat much with her before she presented, but when she started telling the Confirmation class about how the Lord has worked in her life and what her faith meant to her, I saw this light of faith glowing around her and I was drawn to it myself!  She seemed super holy (and cute too…).  Ironically, I had to cut her off since we were pressed for time, so she soon became the Girl without the Microphone…but she still agreed to go out to dinner with me!  Since then, our whole relationship has been built on bringing one another closer to Christ.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Being the light of the world means trying to bring everyone we encounter throughout the day closer to Christ.  Whether they are strangers, acquaintances, friends, significant others, or family, we always need to keep this in mind.  In the words of the classic childrens’ song, “This little light of mine – I’m gonna let it shine!”