TRANSCRIPT:
Every week I reach out to other Catholic men on LinkedIn- men who are professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs- and we talk about life, faith, family, business, whatever’s on their mind. It’s just a kind of personal apostolate that I’ve done to get to know other men who are like me, who share things in common with me, who have a similar world view.
And this week I had an extraordinary phone call. The man I was talking to was a founding member of the Medellín Cartel in 1976. He, along with Pablo Escobar, made a million, two million dollars per month moving cocaine in the United States. And of course, eventually, he was caught and arrested, convicted, did 10 years in federal prison. He got out, returned to the same life, got caught all over again doing the same thing, and he got another five years in prison.
Imagine doing fifteen years in prison by the time you’re forty, and the only thing you’ve ever done and been successful at was being a drug kingpin. This guy got out of prison, turned his life around, went and got a master’s degree, then got a PhD from Loyola and devoted his life to prayer and evangelism. He wrote books, he did speaking, he was a best-selling author, he was an in-demand speaker; he built a business, raised six children, and returned to the Catholic faith.
And as he was telling me this story, I was just blown away not just at the depths of the sin, but at the degree of redemption and how far he had climbed out of that pit of sin. And you know, it got me to thinking about how God permits our sin because of free will. He permits it, but He also can use that, and we are to work through that sin to achieve an even greater good than otherwise we would have. And we can look at the Life of Saint Paul as an example of this. We can look at a life like that of the man I spoke to this week, Jorge, who had done so much so wrong for so long and yet had then grown through that to achieve even greater things.
So sometimes I think it’s helpful for us to get outside of ourselves. We spend so much time kind of navel-gazing everyday, thinking about ourselves, thinking about our interior life. Sometimes I think it’s helpful to step back and talk to other men and learn from them about their failures, how they’ve overcome things, and the things that they’ve gone on to achieve in their life, both in the material world as well as the spiritual. I hope this has been helpful to you. God bless you.