Everyone has vocation

WE all need to remind ourselves of this basic truth. All of us have a vocation. We have to sharpen that sense and make it the directing and shaping principle of our life.

Vocation is not only for a few, and for some special part of our life. It is for all of us, since as creatures and children of God, our relation with him is never broken. Our life will always be a life with him.

God continues to be with us, and while respecting our freedom always, he calls us to him, for it is him, more than us, who directs and shapes our life. This is the essence of vocation—God calling us to share his life and activity with us.

Let’s always remember that God created us for a purpose. He did not create us just to leave us on our own. He created us to participate in his life and in his love which is the essence of God.

This is what a vocation is. It is God inviting us to be with him, to correspond to the reality that God is already with us and wants us to actively participate in his plan for each one of us, which can assume an infinite variety of forms and ways.

Since God lives in eternity, his call to us, though discovered and carried out in time, springs also in eternity. In short, if we cooperate with him, we can say that what he starts with us will also be completed by him.

St. Paul says something relevant: “He who has begun a good work in you will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6)

It’s important that we realize ever more deeply that we are never alone, nor are we thinking and acting alone. We are always with our Lord. This awareness and our effort to correspond to that reality is what makes up our sense of vocation.

And so we have to realize that our vocation is meant to cover all our life, in all its aspects, and not just some parts of our life. Our vocation gives meaning to our whole life, projects us to our proper destiny.

Nothing is excluded from it, since God’s presence and interventions in our life are constant and abiding, and not just from time to time, nor from case to case. It covers our whole life, from beginning to end.

Thus, we need to develop the habit of going to our Lord for anything and everything that happens in our life. We can ask him questions, consult him, ask him for help, light and strength.

When we are in the dark, in doubt, gripped with fear, falling to cowardice, etc., we can ask, “Lord, where are you? Help me, Lord. What are you trying to tell me with this event or situation, Lord? How am I supposed to understand these things, how am I supposed to react and to behave at this time…?”

We can ask him to make his presence more felt, his will more clear, his way more accessible. We should not be afraid nor ashamed to make these demands, since God is our father, we are his children. We can tell him anything.

We should have the faith of the child who can ask anything and even complain to his father, but never doubts the love of his father. We need to be reminded of this ideal, since we cannot deny that in life we will pass through various and even severe trials that can test our faith.

That is why we have to base our sense of vocation on the firm ground of faith in God, of faith in its fullness, which means that it has to go all the way to the Cross which Christ, the fullness of revelation, embraced as the culmination of his redemptive work for us.

This will assure us that we will be faithful to our vocation. On God’s side, he is always faithful. His will for us is irrevocable. It’s on our side that we need to work out. Our fidelity and perseverance to our vocation would depend on how willing we are to embrace the Cross the way Christ embraced it.

Let’s go through the supreme drama Christ himself lived in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he begged his Father to let the cup pass him by, but rectifying himself in the end: “Not my will but yours be done.”

We should repeat those words often.