Transcript

Soon after I became a Catholic, I began to feel God's call to the priesthood.

And funny enough, I didn't want to be a priest, and it was a call that I fought.

But God, in his own way, made it very, very clear to me that this was what he was asking me to do with my life.

Being frustrated by that, I, I prayed one night, and I told God that I don't want to be a priest, but if you want me to be a priest, then you've got to change my heart.

And that was the prayer that I went to bed with that night.

The next morning, I, I woke up.

I remember it was a sunny September morning, and I woke up with a big goofy grin on my face.

And the first thought that, that crossed my mind was, I want to be a priest.

God had taken me at my word, and he changed my heart overnight.

There was a time in my life when I was a little girl, um, growing up in a Protestant home.

My dad was a Protestant minister.

But I felt so close to the Lord, I must have been around 10, that I would walk around the house thinking, Maybe I'm supposed to be a nun.

And my older sister, to this day, sort of makes fun of me for that because we had no experience with nuns.

We, we really didn't have much exposure to Catholicism.

But I think what that was expressing was a desire to somehow live out that, that sense of closeness to the Lord that I was feeling, that really wasn't met just by going to Sunday school on Sundays.

And, um, and I'm very grateful for my life, that, you know, marriage and children, but I think it's very important that I think it's wonderful to get to know about the priesthood, to get to spend a little bit of time in the presence of some of these people, the nuns.

I, I haven't really spent much time with nuns, but just being around a nun is amazing, especially these beautiful young nuns.

You just feel like you're in the presence of something otherworldly, and they're so full of joy.

Their faces are beaming.

Um, to me, the, uh, our priest is, is just a superhero.

These people are They have completely laid their lives down out of a deep love for the Lord, and they're experiencing Heaven a little earlier than the rest of us.

Um, at one instance, I had the privilege of meeting an archbishop from Kazakhstan, and the closer As we stood in line, approaching him, the closer we got, the more a, a almost tangible sense of holiness was in the atmosphere, and it, it was just undeniable.

And so, the Church is so wonderful, and what it, what it offers everyone, it offers a way to pursue your calling, that I'm grateful for, even though it's kind of too late for me to become a nun.

I'm just very, very grateful.

When Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple, to present him in the temple, the angel prophet Simeon spoke a prophecy over Jesus, and among other things, he said that the child was a sign who would be spoken against or contradicted.

And so, in biblical thinking, in Catholic thinking, the notion of a sign of contradiction developed the notion that there are those who, living their lives according to the life of Christ, those who follow him, those who are his disciples, would be spoken against, would be contradicted, when somehow, themselves, I think you could say contradict the culture around them.

And that's one of the things I, I love the most about the religious life.

Um, as I look at it from the outside, I see it as a sign of contradiction to our culture, just by being who they are, religious brothers and sisters, nuns and friars and monks, all the rest, by being who they are, by dressing the way they dress, by praying the way they pray, by serving selflessly in the world, they're a sign of contradiction to the values that are so skewed sometimes in our culture, to the ways we think of ourselves, the way we think of the world and of God and what's most important, to the values that we have.

They value something different.

And in doing that, they come, not just a sign of contradiction to our culture, but a sign of future glory.

'Cause the church also teaches that they live a life in certain ways because of the vows they take that points us to the life in Heaven.

What a wonderful sign they are then, not just of contradiction, but a sign of glory.

And because of that, I'm grateful for who they are, for all they do.

And now that I've been a priest all these years, I can tell you that it's such a joyful vocation that we have.

It's our privilege to stand in the place of God, to lead other souls back to God, to help them find healing and peace in this difficult world of ours.

It's my joy to preach the good news, to stand at the altar as both priest and victim, in Christ's place, and to make God present for the world.

It's a great privilege and a joy to be a priest, and I'm so grateful that God's called me to this sublime vocation.