Home at Last

"Tell me about a challenge you faced and how it influenced your faith."

“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13)

One big struggle that I have faced in my faith journey has been loneliness. Throughout middle school, I was very involved in my Presbyterian Church, but I didn’t feel like I had any close friends there—friends who I could lean on when I was going through tough times. As a result, by the time I started high school, I began to feel isolated, anxious, and depressed. One of the few things that gave me hope during that period in my life was a YouTube video called “The Holy Land in 4K.” At the climax of the video, the narrator says, “I don’t know what our experience will be on Judgement Day, but I will be very surprised if, at some point in that conversation, God does not ask us exactly what Christ asked Peter: ‘Did you love Me?’” I don’t know what it was about that video, but every time I felt lonely, I would come back to it. It reminded me to trust in Him, and He did not let me down. Over the course of my senior year, God slowly brought three (Protestant) Christian guys into my life who I am proud to call my best friends and who I am always able to depend on.

When I came to UVA, I knew I wanted to pursue my Christian faith just as I had back home. I tried several different Bible studies, but nothing seemed to fit what I was looking for. By the winter break of my second year, many of the deep-seated feelings of loneliness that had dragged me down in high school returned. During that winter break, the Holy Spirit reminded me of the line that had gotten me through high school, “Did you love Me?” I realized that if I truly loved God, I would put just as much effort into loving Him as I did the other activities in my life. I then thought to myself, which Christians put the most effort into their faith? And the answer seemed obvious to me: Catholics. Catholicism seemed like the faith that demanded the most out its followers, and I felt that if I truly loved God, I would not shy away from those demands. The following semester, I started reading a little bit about Catholicism, attended Mass a couple of times, and even got lunch with a Catholic friend. Nevertheless, although I respected Catholicism intellectually, it hadn’t yet reached my heart, and I wasn’t ready to make the leap of faith, so I didn’t give Catholicism any more thought for almost an entire year. 

By the winter break of this year, however, I finally admitted to myself that even though I had a loving family and Christian friends with whom I could be completely vulnerable, my loneliness had become overwhelming. I reached back out to the friend with whom I had gotten lunch and started opening up about how I was feeling. I also started watching Ascension Presents on YouTube, and eventually stumbled across the 2015 SEEK talk by Father Mike Schmitz called “The Hour That Will Change Your Life.” Within a week of seeing that video, I called Father Joseph-Anthony over Zoom and told him that I wanted to start RCIA. The first thing he recommended that I do was to start praying in front of the Eucharist/the tabernacle at a Catholic Church near me. For the first time in my life, I began praying outside of the context of a church service or a Bible study, and not just a little bit, but multiple times per day. As I sat in front of the Eucharist at my local Catholic Church, I would ask God, “Why? Why am I feeling so lonely? Will this actually help me?” He responded, “just trust in Me.” 

Again, He did not let me down. I decided to come back to Charlottesville earlier than normal to start RCIA, and praise be to God, my friend invited me to SEEK, which was the first weekend of the semester. After Thursday and Friday of the retreat, I finally began to see that the Church and the Catholic Hoos ministry were where I was meant to be. I experienced more grace in those two days than I had ever experienced before. At the Saturday morning Mass, when I saw the priest raise up the Eucharist and everyone bow, tears started rolling down my face. By the end of the Mass, I told my small group leader, whom I had met just two days before, that I needed a spot to pray in private. After much trial and error finding me a place that wasn’t crowded with people, he said I could just pray in the kitchen, and almost immediately when I was alone in the STA kitchen, I just started sobbing my eyes out. I was home.  

My name is Ben Gustafson, and I’m a third-year from Edina, Minnesota. You can find me playing all kinds of pick-up sports or biking around Grounds on a bike that is slowly but surely falling apart. I love La Croix, all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants, and talking about faith!