Have you ever had a moment when you knew that your faith was true? Everyone experiences doubts about their faith from time to time, which is normal since that is the nature of faith. But we also have moments when we experience a conviction that what we believe is true.

When I taught high school, in an attempt to assert their independence, some students would say that they would not believe in God until it could be empirically proven. I responded by asking them if they thought poetry was ever true? Did they think love was real? They acknowledged that those things do exist, but that the faith they were given as children didn’t work for them anymore. Of course it didn’t. Our faith lives are about being in relationship with Jesus, and what relationship stays the same forever?

St. Ignatius would say that we should always remember the moments in our prayer where there was consolation so that in times of desolation we might recall that we are present to God even if only sometimes.

Take a moment and recall when you have felt God’s presence. How might you savor these moments of consolation as you go forward in life?

—Fr. James Prehn, S.J., Vocations Director for the Chicago-Detroit Province Jesuits. For more information on Jesuit vocations, click here.