Live It Part 2: a Gift from His Heart to Ours
Author: Maria Fernanda “Fer” Galvez
I wanted to share an experience I had during my missionary year. I spent the year loving life and everyone around me. I worked with two other girls, who soon were my sisters for life. Also, I worked with a team of Regnum Christi Consecrated Women. This was such a huge blessing. Watching them live their vocation with such a deep joy rooted in their spousal love for Christ was captivating. When they would speak of Jesus, I swear I wanted to give up all worldly things and fling myself into His arms and live only for Him. So intense and beautiful was their vocation, that soon all of us missionaries were discerning Consecrated life. Of course, when you see something that extraordinary, you just pray that He wants you to participate in that. We joked about it and then cried about it, all the while praying about it. But then my world shook. Something that in my innocence I never saw coming.
Around halfway through the year, one of the Consecrated Women told us that after much prayer, she knew that this was not the vocation that God had planned for her. She told us that because she became Consecrated so young, she hadn’t been able to fully delve into what God really wanted for her and that now, she had the maturity and peace to hear God telling her, that all along, this wasn’t for her. She discerned out of Consecrated life. This moved me so deeply but I understood. But then, another Consecrated came to the same conclusion. TWO??!!! In a matter of months?! DANG! But I understood, and I so admired that they had been so generous with their lives and that they trusted so much to give it all back to Him and basically start their lives over. They were true saints, these women. Slowly, I processed this. At this point, I was more hesitant to keep discerning. I started to question if all of the apparent beauty of the calling had made me mistakenly fall in love. But I held out hope.
Then ANOTHER Consa sat us down and told us that she had also been asking God in prayer if this was her vocation. I was really close to her so it hit close to home. I nearly flipped out of my chair. Before she even finished talking I was already sobbing. Sobbing and laughing embarrassed, trying to explain that I was ok. I was not ok. My heart was shattered into tiny splinters. I felt so fooled! So naïve! Why had I believed that something so beautiful could exist?! For weeks after that, I felt like I was doing everything half-heartedly. In my apostolate, I felt distant from my girls. In prayer, I wasn’t focused. I realized that I was actually giving Jesus the cold shoulder without even realizing it. I was so angry at Him for making me believe that there was a way to be so happy. For letting me fall in love with something that I had lost all hope for now.
When I realized this, I began to talk about it with Him. And I started to understand something buried deeper than my disappointment. Through all of this madness, He had planted there a seed of truth that now seems like the most beautiful thing about the vocation. I understood finally that what made the vocation of Consecrated Life so beautiful, so extraordinary, so deeply joyous and lovely was the very fact that it is a calling. It is being chosen by God Himself from the beginning to be set apart from the world to be His hands and His heart. Because they left, I was able to see that one doesn’t just choose a vocation because it is attractive or because it would be nice, but because Christ looks at you and in your heart He tells you, “Come be only mine”. This is what redeemed all the hurt; knowing that we are all called like this. And we do not choose it for ourselves. It is so beyond us! It is something that only our creator and greatest lover can call us to. That is why vocations, whether marriage, consecrated life, priesthood, they are a gift from His heart to ours. He has a purpose for us. A calling. Something that He wills for us that will give us the greatest joy imaginable. Every vocation, if lived to its fullest, is as extraordinary and as attractive as Consecrated life was to me. It is us, living according to what He has always thought and kept for us. That is a vocation. And it is His love for us captured in our time on earth. It is our Heaven on earth.
