Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to Calgary, Canada to promote vocations and visit my sisters who are missioned there. As vocation director and promoter for my province, I’ve had the blessing of visiting Calgary annually for the last several years to speak to young hearts preparing for the world.
As I recently visited the Catholic high schools there, I was sensitive to the fact that the schools had predominantly non-Catholic student populations. Yet, I was eager to speak to all the students, seeing it as a great opportunity to tell them that: (1) God loves them; (2) He is eager to have a relationship with them, and that (3) they have a mission inseparably tied to their identity.
As always, I began with prayer, and I anchored our time together with the Lord’s words to Jeremiah:
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. (Jer. 29:11-14, ESV)
God loves them—the students and all of us are loved into being. From the first moment of our conception, we were automatically son or daughter. This filial relationship is our first identity in the world. And, even if this first filial identity with our moms and or dads may have been wrought by wounds and traumas, we were still, from the beginning, “conceptualized” (if you will) by God, devised in His mind and intentioned. Totally loved and desired. I imagine the dynamism between the Trinity fondly “thinking” of each soul into being—“This one, she will have these dispositions and characteristics…this beautiful boy will have these charms, strengths and gifts.”
So even if our family backgrounds may not be perfect, even if it is filled with pain, we can go back to the beginning and anchor ourselves in God’s love. He who made us, first and foremost, for his own. He knows “the plans he has for you”. He knows it—every aspect and depth— “plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
At times in the midst of suffering, we forget that there’s a future outside of our grief and distress. But the Lord tells us through Jeremiah that a future filled with grace awaits us. Stand fast!
“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”
I told the students that God wants to be found by them, and is eager to have a relationship with them. Our Father in Heaven is longing for this communion with his children, with each and every one of us. Jesus died and gave his life for the sake of such relationship, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a believer or an atheist—God is longing for you.
I then said that as beautiful as this world is, there are also many sorrows in it which, unfortunately, we are all accustomed to, and these sorrows, ironically, fill us with nostalgia for what we haven’t yet seen—Heaven. We are made for more, for our eternal homeland—the Kingdom of God.
And we are invited there.
Will you go with God? How will you now prepare for it?
