Let me ask you a question. Why do you think believers believe? You think it's just always been a part of their family, and that makes it easier, or maybe it was important to have a friend who inspired them along the way, or a great priest, or a good teacher, or maybe a great book? It's a good question, isn't it? But let me ask you a better question, a more important question. Why do you think God wants you to believe? The answer to that question comes in the last line of today's gospel reading. God wants you to believe so that you will have life in His name. That's the goal. It's what you were made for. Life in His name. In other words, Jesus desires great things for you. In fact, that very last line says that the gospels are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name. In other words, you weren't made for ordinary, mundane, run-of-the-mill, unenthusiastic life. You were made to have life in His name.

God didn't make you to be some second-rate version of yourself. You were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness. Not to be lackluster, half-hearted, stumbling, bumbling, fumbling. He created you to have life in His name. It's exciting. St. John of the Cros put it this way. God's purpose is to make your soul great. God's purpose is to make your soul great. He desires that your life would be filled with joy, teeming with love, saturated with peace. God designed you to have a life where your relationships work better, where your work has more meaning, where your life is spent pursuing a purpose. God desires for your fear and your anxiety to lessen a little bit and for your faith and your trust to grow in their place. He designed you to give your life away and to find your life in the process. A life filled with passion and purpose. This is what you were made for. That is life in His name. And it is anything but ordinary. It is extraordinary. After all, Jesus has breathed His breath on you. He has pronounced "Receive the Holy Spirit" right on top of your head. And because of that, you are capable of far more than you know. You can be braver, stronger, more patient, and more peaceful than you can even see right now. God sees it because He made you for it. He made you for greatness. That's why we read the gospels each week, to feed your soul, so that we can believe and have life in His name. And the results can be astonishing. Just look around you and you'll see it.

For Bob, he hated his job. Most folks would say it was a great job. It was a high-tech job, software design, good pay. He was really good at it. But he found himself slogging through the day, drudging through life with no joy. And he knew because of the restlessness inside of him that God had something else in mind. He knew he was made for greatness and it wasn't doing this. So at age 45, in the middle of his career, as a husband and father of three kids, Bob quit. He scaled back the life of his family dramatically and he went and got a degree in teaching. And two years later, he became the middle school social studies and history teacher at the Parish School. And he's never looked back. He gets up each day with his purpose in mind and a passion in his step. Now, personally, I wouldn't find a lot of joy working with middle schoolers every day. But for Bob, it's pure joy. Bob believed and has found life in his name.

For my friend Julie, greatness came in a different form. By the time she was a teenager, she was already an out-of-control alcoholic, destroying anything, anybody, and any relationship in her path. But slowly over time, as she came to believe and surrounded herself with other people who did the same, Julie not only grew into a healthy relationship with a husband and now four children. She began organizing, and still does every week, a group of women in her hometown who get together to encourage each other and hold each other accountable for their behavior and decisions in trying to stay clean and sober. They meet early on Monday morning every week to believe and to pursue the greatness God has made for them. Think about it: 14 women and their families now look very, very different because Julie found life in his name. Instead of a destroyer, Julie is now an encourager and a builder-upper.

But believing isn't easy, is it? Just ask Thomas. At first, he doubted, and that's usually why we remember him. "Oh, you're a doubting Thomas, doubting Thomas." But if there's one thing I hope you take away from the story of Thomas, it's this: your future isn't determined by your past. Thomas moved from doubt to trust, and that trust propelled him outward across the world to share what he had discovered, and tradition teaches us that Thomas left that little room in Jerusalem, and he carried the gospel all the way to India and planted the church there.

In fact, in India today, there are Christians, today, who call themselves Christians of St. Thomas. Think about it: there is a church in India today because of the faith of doubting Thomas. Because of Thomas' faith, his courage, his passion, Thomas discovered greatness. Unbelief can be transformed into belief, fear can be turned into courage, and weakness can be turned into greatness. If God can do that with a middle-aged man named Bob, with my friend Julie, and with a guy named doubting Thomas, just imagine what he might be able to do with you.