Casey Cole, OFM

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

In its fullness, prayer is an encounter with God that transforms the way we see and interact with the world. As so many saints have suggested, it is like a bright light that reveals what we otherwise do not see.

All around the world people are looking for meaning and finding it in strange, even destructive places. The world needs men and women who are so in love and so convinced of the truth that they cannot help but share it with others in word and deed, that they cannot help but make Christ present in the world. More than anything else, if what we do enables us to live with evangelical zeal for the sake of the world, we just might be doing what we are called to do.

Listen with the ears; see with the eyes of God.

With a life in Jesus as our foundation, 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.