Author name: Molly Hostetler

From all eternity, God has had a plan for your happiness. That’s what he wants for you: happiness, beatitude, and eternal joy. Every moment of your life, he is working in some way to lead you closer to that joy, which ultimately means closer to him, the source of all joy.

As a Christian, you are called to a personal relationship with God. Protestants tend to say this more often than Catholics, but Catholics believe this as well. Catholics believe that God has invited all of us to a close, intimate relationship with himself, and that he wants us to enter into that relationship now, while we live on earth, although the relationship won’t be perfectly realized until heaven.

The St. Paul Center and Emmaus Road Publishing are proud to announce the launch of the Formed in Christ series of faith formation texts.

Every human person desires to know God. Every human heart longs for communion with him. Whether we recognize that longing or not, the desire for happiness that we all feel is really a desire for God. It’s a desire to be in a relationship with the One who made us and who is the source of all good things. St. Augustine (354–430) expressed this idea in his Confessions:

The desire for God, it has often and wisely been observed, is written on the human heart. It is a kind of inscription, or imprint, telling us who we are; an image or template, as it were, impressed upon the soul. Part of our spiritual DNA.

As parents of seven children, we often get the feeling that we are living on a different planet. People gawk at us when we are out in public. We routinely hear negative comments from strangers. Some of the comments include: “Are those all yours?”; “Don’t you have a television?”; or, our favorite, “You must be Mormons.” We’ve learned to laugh off such questions, but the fact that we hear them so often makes us realize just how far our society has gone in its outright opposition to the family.

The history of redemption is a story that involves human participation. The Apostle Paul spoke of this mystery when he stated, “We are God’s co-workers” (1 Cor 3:9). How is this? Can’t God get the job done Himself? Of course He can. But since He is a Father, His job is to raise up mature sons and daughters by making us co-workers.