Casey Cole, OFM

But no matter what we do or don’t do, no matter if we get it “right” or “wrong,” no matter if we figure out what we’re “going to do with our lives” or take every moment in stride, God will be there at our side guiding our path. Our goal in discernment is not to answer all of the big questions once and for all, to check boxes off a list and cast them—and God— aside until we have another question; our goal is to journey with God, to be constantly listening for the call that he has for us, the call to be a disciple of his Son in today’s world.

In its fullness, prayer is an encounter with God that transforms the way we see and interact with the world. It is like a bright light that reveals what we otherwise do not see: When we wear glasses or look through a window away from the light, we can believe that the glass is perfectly clean. But turn our perspective and hold it up to the light, all of a sudden we are able to see smudges, scratches, and cracks that have been there all along but completely hidden to our normal consciousness. That is the effect that an encounter with God can have on our lives.

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.