A Priest is Who God Made Me to Be

My vocation story is a story of my walk with the Lord.  I grew up in a Catholic family, but it wasn’t until high school that I started really taking my faith seriously.  In high school, I began to make prayer a regular part of my day, and my relationship with the Lord began to deepen.  Prayer is nothing but communication with the Lord.  The more I kept in touch with God throughout the day, the better I came to know Him.  I also came to know myself more – who I am in God’s eyes. This is how I began to see my vocation to the priesthood.  A vocation isn’t something outside of you – it’s within.  It’s what you’re made for, the way you can love God and others to the fullest extent possible.  The more I came to understand what it means to be a priest, the more at peace I felt about living that kind of life.  I could imagine myself saying Mass, hearing confessions, preaching the Gospel, and showing the love of Christ to others as a spiritual father.  The Lord showed me that a priest is who I was made to be, and the seeds of it were already planted in my heart.  God made me with the priesthood in mind, so the more I came to know myself, the more I saw that I was made to be a priest.

Each of us, whether called to be an earthly husband and father or a spiritual one, has extremely important work to do.  The Lord is counting on us to grow in holiness and then bring the light of Christ to those in the world around us.  If God wants a man to be a priest, it is the best thing he could do with his life.  It’s what he was made for, and the way he will be the happiest.  So ask God in your heart, “Who am I?  Who have you made me to be?”  And then throw yourself into it with your whole heart.