Vocation

Our day begins early, but Tom hasn’t slept well again. Usually I am the one with troubled or restless sleep. We talk about possible causes and solutions. We’ll just have to experiment.

I give a lot of thought to Fr. Alfonso’s book Discovering Your Personal Vocation. I keep noticing the phrase “Be still” in so many places in the psalms during our prayer times. Perhaps this is my personal vocation, the name by which God calls me. It seems so apt when I think about how busy I tend to be --- and how hard it is for me to say “no” to tasks. I don’t spend a lot of time being still. Yet the one day I was, sitting in the prayer group on Saturday, I experienced God in a new way.

Now it is if I KNOW, at an elemental level, that I am in God’s presence and that He is present in me. I could say before that I believed that God’s Holy Spirit was in me, but that day brought me a new awareness, a direct experience of His love and indwelling. Believing is different than knowing, at least for me. I have been trying to make a real part of my life that I am “a beloved child of God.” Now I have the moments of total communion to affirm me.

I understand why people who meditate and contemplate make time for this practice. It is a life-giving affirmation that God loves me enough to be with me always, and He wants to be present to me at all times. It’s I who let the busy-ness of life crowd Him out. I hope to find a way to bring this awareness back home with me so I can incorporate it in my Gilroy life.