God, I’m ready! What are you waiting for?
- Fr Raphael Ma, CR
- Mark 13: 33 - 37
A Resurrectionist Vocation Minute for December 3, 1st Sunday of Advent
God, I’m ready! What are you waiting for?
One of the more difficult things about finding one’s vocation is the waiting. We want to know, we want to dive right in, but sometimes it is clear that because of circumstances, the time is just – not now. It can be frustrating, and we sometimes we can feel like saying to God:
“God, I’m ready! What are you waiting for?”
It’s possible to idealize our future vocation as a kind of escape, as if it were a solution to our problems. But a vocation is not a solution to any problem. Because when you find God’s will for your life, when you enter into your big “V” vocation, you will still have the same problems as before – only the context will have changed.
The truth of the matter is whether you’ve found your big “V” vocation or not, we each have a little “v” vocation – God’s will for us each day. It is only through being attentive to that call of God each day – not just doing things, but seeing them in the context of our relationship with God – that we will grow and make progress with our problems, and find the path that leads to our big “V” vocation when the time is right.
When we learn to recognize this, even what once seemed like a difficult waiting period can become a great gift. It will be the gift of learning to recognize God’s will each day, which we will need in living out our big “V” vocation. And if that’s what we need to be ready for our vocation, that may be what God is waiting for.
“As our faith grows we will come to recognize that the Holy Spirit speaks to us in many different ways: Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium, the prescriptions of our Constitutions and Statutes, ecclesiastical and religious superiors, personal inspirations, the consensus we arrive at when we collectively seek God's will through dialogue and house meetings, the demands of common life and the apostolate, and the events of daily life.”