Hey guys! It’s Mike again, back to talk to you about our second week of the Winter Wine series. On Wednesday, our own Bryan Fong shared his talk, “The Young Adult Field Medic,” about our role in the church as evangelists, and how to approach the sharing of our faith with those who have never experienced it, or those who have fallen away. In multiple addresses to the Catholic people—as well as the world—Pope Francis has likened the Catholic Church to a field hospital. A normal hospital is a large building where the sick and wounded are brought to receive care. Aside from the ambulances that roam the streets, normal hospitals don’t come find you: you have to actively seek out the care yourself. A field hospital, on the other hand, goes to the front line in order to care for those in the most desperate of situations. A guy who lost an arm in battle needs immediate help, and this is where the field hospital comes in. Sure, they might patch him up and send him off for more specialized care later. However, the field hospital is the first line of care.

By this logic, we can imagine the church as either a traditional hospital or a field hospital, and it’s clear which would be more successful. We cannot wait for everyone to come find us, looking to hear about Jesus and his teachings. We must, instead, seek them out and actively help them on their paths to righteousness. We have to go out into the battlefield and patch up our lost brothers, even as the shells fall all around us. Sure, we want them to eventually find the main hospital. However, they cannot usually get there on their own. If we look generationally, the Catholic church has steadily shrunk in percent with each new age group: 24% of the silent generation considers itself Catholic, Baby boomers are 23%, Generation X is 21%, and millennials are 16%. Not only that, but the number of people who are unaffiliated with any religion has risen from 11% to 36% in the same time. Almost one third of young people surveyed said they didn’t see religion as an important part of the world. Slightly more said they pray seldomly or never at all, and more than half attend religious services once a year or less. The youth of our country has lost its faith, and they need help to find it again. But, how do we help them?

Before we can hope to help others, we must first make sure that we ourselves are okay. Would you trust a physician to care for you if he himself was sick with the flu? Would you want a surgeon who accidentally cut off three of his own fingers? Of course not. These would be obvious warning signs that something was wrong. Likewise, who is going to listen to you about religion if you don’t pray, you don’t attend mass, and you don’t know anything about your faith? So, to effectively be the voice of God, we must first engage ourselves in the very areas we wish to preach about. I don’t mean to say we have to do everything: I don’t pray, go to mass, perform service, visit adoration, attend Bible study, and evangelize every single day. This would be an unclimbable mountain for most people. However, I can certainly pray and help the people I meet each day. Once a week or more I will attend mass and bible study. This is doable, and it’s a foundation I can continue to build upon. Maybe, then, it’s more important to find our specialty and use it to the fullest extent. God isn’t calling us to be everything to everyone, but rather our best self, in order to be an example of his love to the world around us.

So how do we help our fallen brothers and sisters, all while improving ourselves? First, we must triage: we need to assess the level of need and meet the person on their terms. Jesus didn’t tell the tax collectors to sit through mass or to just pray—he had dinner with them in their homes. We need to get to know those around us and come to where they are. Once we triage, it’s time to treat. Upon establishing a connection, you can now show what having God’s love in your life has done for you as well as helping them to find it. We can show how much we personally need to practice our faith and bring this joy to them. Finally, we transfer. A field hospital is meant to patch someone up until they can be taken to the ‘real’ hospital. Likewise, we should not become someone’s only source of faith. We want to transfer them to mass, Bible study, or whatever most calls out to them in the Church so that they can continue their growth both when together or when apart. Bryan’s talk serves as a reminder that we should always be a sign of God’s love, doing our best to live out the life that God envisioned for us.