God cares about each person’s joy; His greatest desire is for every person to have life in abundance. Our freedom and His will intertwine to design a beautiful path, which each person is called at the same time to embrace and discover.
By what means? Through what means and what steps? How does one become a sister?
life in abundance
Vocational announcement and accompaniment
Through a personal journey of discernment, which starts from listening to a Word received in one’s own reality, enriched by comparison with one’s daily life, the person is accompanied to a deeper knowledge of himself and of God, Who loves him.
In the gradualness of the steps and in the freedom of one’s own response, in the confrontation with our religious family, desire and willingness to continue one’s path in a more specific vocational discernment journey may emerge. Here are some cues for deep listening within oneself and to the Spirit of God.
Knowing:
Who are you? Who am I?
Deep in the heart there are questions that cannot be silenced. St. Francis, as a passionate “beggar of God,” never stopped asking the Lord to show him the truth about himself and the face of God.
Inside us dwell gifts, wounds, desires, conditioning, fears…we need to open the casket of our humanity and learn to welcome it. Day by day, along with small steps of freedom and growth, a song of blessing for one’s history will also blossom.
The first gift to receive, the first call to respond to is to love life as it is, as a gift, as a miracle, just as Barbara Micarelli did.
Discern:
“What do you want me to do?”
It takes confidence and a certain amount of courage not to be content to live half-heartedly but to aim for true Joy.
If you sense that in your heart there is a great thirst for Love…you are on the path of Francis, who pushed beyond his dreams and in his desire to become a knight discovered a greater, indeed infinite, desire to love God.
Opening your heart to the voice of the Spirit means setting out, abandoning your own securities and letting the Word illuminate your life.
Discernment is not done alone, but with guidance, just as Samuel did with Eli.
Decide:
“This I want!”
When Francis, hearing the Gospel, tasted all its beauty, he exclaimed thus, “This I want!”
This is how it is: Love does not admit of any middle ground but asks for everything precisely because it gives everything. Deciding for God and the Gospel opens up spaces of freedom and giving that are not the fruit of merit or commitment, but come from having found such abundant life to which one wants to correspond totally, with the gift of one’s life.
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