There was this catechists' course where the priest presenter mentioned, "Some catechists teach that when you bite the host, blood will come out of it!" and one excited girl in the audience jumped up to say, "That's what I did! What do I do now?" Hordes of youngsters must have left her classroom with this idea.

The priest assures her, "Don't worry! Stop fretting over it. Remember this: God writes straight on crooked lines."

It was a marvelous phrase. I've kept it since as part of my psyche and throughout the years have unearthed event after event to prove it true.

Here is a statement of someone who read Da Vinci Code and benefitted from it by researching his Catholicism and finding truth from falsehood. God makes use of everything the Enemy did. While you and I get outraged and worried about possible outcomes, the Lord smiles and twists the situation to suit His own purposes.

You've got to figure out that THAT was how He saved the world in the first place. Imagine the D [enemy] fretting over the arrival of the Holy One of God and doing all he could to get rid of Jesus. Finally, they tortured and killed him! Disciples all in disarray. Hope of his mission being achieved gone! D laughing in delight that he managed to get rid of the Saviour so easily.

Only, the laugh is on him. Too late! The plan God had all along was to save the world by suffering and dying. And the D was the one who arranged it! I can't think of anything more (i was going to say diabolically) clever! All the prophecies of the suffering servant of Yahweh in the OT was misunderstood until it happened.

And it will go on... this guy who tore up his grandmother's rosary and threw it away, gave his Catholic girlfriend an anti-Catholic book and she declared, "Thank you. I'll never attend another Mass again!" and swore he will always work to save the world from Roman Catholicism... has a name like Scott Hahn, and now, his evangelizing is all the more potent for having stories like this to tell. Makes any rabid anti-Catholic wonder, "Say, this guy is coming on stronger than me against Catholicism, so what's in it that got him finally?"

This classmate of mine married an atheist who refused to get married in church. So she was lapsed for 30 years—until the husband was ill and dying, and she prayed for him. He joined her, and died three days after his baptism. She is back at church with a vengeance: daily Mass, rosary, Divine Office, confession, retreats, making up for lost time. Hmm. God used her to get him. Took a long time by our reckoning, but to God a thousand years are like a day.

And then, we have the Reformation, but a flourishing of Catholicism and revival of theological thought and counter-Reformation followed. Or wait, closer to the present, all those scandals about priests and sexual crimes are leading to a rash of vocations of orthodox and upright young men joining the seminaries. It is as though good young guys are inspired to say, "Enough of this nonsense! Lord, Here we are, we come to do your will!"

God's writing straight on crooked lines makes good ideas for how events in our Catholic novels can turn out. We must put this into our next book because I get such a sense of glee reading about it. But all I know are true stories. Will fiction lessen the impact? You know -- make readers say, "Such things don't happen in real life!"

Oh, but they do, they do! Thank God for His writing. Now we should write the same? ♥