Next week is Vocation Awareness Week, a time to prayerfully reflect on one’s vocation in life, the vocation to which God has already called us or the vocation to which God is perhaps now calling us.
Our Christian belief in Providence affirms, among other things, that God has had from all eternity a plan or path for each of us, even by name. At this point in their lives, most of the readers of DeSales Weekly will have embraced one of life’s major vocational options: the single life, the married life, the religious or the priestly life.
In whatever path of life you now find yourself, God wants you to bloom right there; God wants you to flourish there and to maximize its potential, especially as it leads to the fulfillment of love’s commandment toward God, one another, and of all creation.
A special focus of Vocation Awareness Week is, of course, on those who are still in the process of discerning which life path God is inviting them to follow. One thing is absolutely certain: if what we discern and decide upon is also what Providence has planned for us, then that vocation will more surely lead us to God –to union with God and God’s will for us in this life and for an eternity of blissful communion with God in heaven.
No matter whether you are now on your life’s path or still discerning that path, this bit of wisdom from a fellow Oblate is certain: wherever life leads you is where God meets you.
Life, any life, will have its happy moments, its joys and emotional highs, as well as its challenges, disappointments, reversals, and setbacks. Faith assures us that no matter where or when in life we experience the happy or the sad, the high or the low, wherever life leads you is where God meets you.
Our God is a faithful God. He is there, always there. No matter where we are in life; no matter our health or wealth status, no matter who our companions are or are not, we are never alone: the God of love, mercy, compassion, and fidelity meets us there. God is our life’s Companion.
For those of us who are already on our chosen life’s path, let us thank God for being “Emanuel,” God with and for us.
For you who are still discerning your life’s path, pray to know what God desires for you and pray also for the courage, once it is known, to follow wherever God leads. Happiness --true happiness—lies there.
For both groups, have a firm and steadfast trust that wherever life leads you is where God meets you!
Rev. Lewis S. Fiorelli, OSFS
Provincial
Wilmington-Philadelphia Province
