Casey Cole, OFM

Joy is something that gives us life. It is something that gets us out of bed in the morning. It is a lasting sense of positive meaning, something that not only survives the hard times but carries us through them. If that is the way we feel about something—or maybe more importantly, if we do not feel this way about something—we cannot ignore it in our discernment. God, I truly believe, does not call us to a life of misery and despair. And how could he?

With a life in Jesus as our foundation and nothing else, God’s call to us and our ultimate purpose in life tend to look very different. Thinking less about the decisions themselves and more about the life those decisions effect, we realize that what matters most to God is ultimately not what we choose but the amount of love that those decisions create in our lives; where we go to school, what we do for a living, and our familial life matters to God only to the extent that what we choose enables us to live as Christ-like as we can.

Francis never wanted anyone to follow him, he wanted them to follow the one he followed. “The Lord has shown me what is mine to do. May he show you what is yours.” In this humility, we realize that it is not our strength, our ingenuity, our love, or our care that is going to shape the world. It is Jesus that the world needs, working through us. The world does not need us. It needs someone who will bring it Jesus. Thank God. Because, really, we could never do anything well on our own. As hard as we try and no matter the intentions we have, the truth of the matter is that sometimes we fail.

While a vocation does bring us joy and should be something that we are good at, it is not primarily concerned with either of these things. As the word indicates, a vocation—from the Latin vocare, “to call”—is something that comes from outside and for the sake of something other than ourselves.

Maybe what the world needs is more Franciscans. More people to live with the radical love of Saint Francis, to leave everything behind and “rebuild” the Church with humility and joy. In consecrated vowed life, cloistered contemplative life, and even in married secular life, the Franciscan charism has found a home in hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Maybe now is time for another rebirth of that charism. If  we are to be followers and imitators of Saint Francis, then the thing we need above all is the humility to know that people do not need us: They need Jesus.

We can never know who or what God is going to use to teach us something new. If we truly want to build up the kingdom of God, we must have the eyes and ears of that kingdom, and the humility to accept that we do not always have the answer. If what we do allows us to do that, we might be well on our way to a vocation. 

— from the book Called: What Happens After Saying Yes to God