How many Father Mike Schmitz and this is a sense of presence when people share their testimony or their conversion story, it's usually three parts.

Here's my life before I had this moment of encounter. Here's my life before this encounter. Here's the encounter itself and here's how my life has changed since then.

And so sometimes if you grew up in church, you might have heard these testimonies of people coming in to your youth group or to your church and they were like, yeah, so they're really dramatic.

And they're like, you know, I was an atheist. I hated God. I hated the world. Maybe I have all these, you know, a history of drugs and all these bad things.

And then powerful moment of encounter with Jesus. And now here I am and I travel the world and tell people about Jesus, including you, junior high kids in that kind of situation.

And so sometimes when we hear those testimonies, when we hear those stories, we look at ourselves and say, oh, I guess I don't have a story. I guess I don't have a testimony.

Because why? Because I guess I was never lying in a curb and then Jesus appeared to me. Some people's testimony is, I was raised Catholic and it worked.

Sometimes that's, I mean, you got to put some details into that. But sometimes that's the testimony. And actually, that's not a bad testimony. In fact, I heard someone talk the other day about how that testimony that I was raised Catholic by my family and my grandparents and my parents, my siblings, they created a culture where Jesus was.

And Jesus was preached. He was shared with us where grace was a part of our family life, not just a part of church life.

And then at one point, I embrace that. And here's how my life has been changed since then. To be able to give that testimony, give so much honor to your family. If that's your story, that might be your story.

Your story of just, yeah, I was raised Catholic and it worked is, thank you, mom and dad. Thank you to those, my grandparents or whoever it was, else who brought them to the faith.

Thank you to my parish that helped me actually say yes to the Lord. So the amount of brokenness a person has taken from and brought into this life of grace, that's not what makes a good testimony. What makes a good testimony is, who is the star of it? Who is the star of your testimony?

Here's my life before I met Jesus. Here is my encounter with Jesus. And here's how my life has changed after Jesus. So sometimes when people give their testimony, they just kind of talk about, here's the details of my life. And that's not bad. That's a start.

But in that case, I'm the star still. In that case, the person telling the story is the star. But we want to highlight, when we give testimony, when we bear witness to Jesus, what we want to do is actually bear witness to Jesus.

The testimony is about how he has changed our lives. So I invite you to look at your own life and ask the question, okay, so where was that moment of encounter or was even that season of encounter, that time of encounter, where my life changed because of Jesus.

So for years, I didn't know. For years, my testimony was essentially, I was raised Catholic and it worked. I always threw in the stuff about, I didn't really, I was raised Catholic, I didn't like going to mass, I didn't like church, I didn't like Catholic school, all those things.

And then I talked about how I went to confession one day and encountered the Lord and everything changed from then on. And now here I started praying and started reading books and started whatever.

I didn't realize that that was my moment of encounter. I just said, well, this is the story of my life. I didn't realize how profoundly I was transformed until I read an encyclical letter by Pope Benedict XVI.

Not a lot of people read the Pope's encyclicals, we really should because some of them are really, really good. Pope Benedict XVI wrote an encyclical called God is Love.

And in the first page, like paragraph two, he says this, he says, being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty ideal. What he's saying is, being a Christian is not the result of, you want to be a good kid or because you have high standards.

He says, being a Christian is the result of an encounter with a person, an encounter with a person that gives one's life a new horizon and sets it in a decisive direction.

Again, I read that and I thought, well, that's awesome. I'd love to have that encounter with a person and even ask myself this question. Now, I might have already been a priest when I was a priest when this came out.

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