In the novel Christy, a young, nineteen-year-old woman travels to an impoverished area of the Smokey Mountains in the early part of the 20th century to become a teacher.
It is a difficult journey. Though she feels called to do the work, she is in no way prepared for what she finds in Cutter Gap, not the sixty-seven children who she must teach in a one room schoolhouse, not the poverty, not the casual acceptance of that poverty by the residents. She is sensitive to and heartbroken by children with no shoes walking through the snow, babies dying due to lack of medical care.
After a month, she is ready to quit and confronts her mentor, Miss Alice, with her concerns. Christy doesn’t understand why God allows such horrible things to happen to people and she doubts that He means her to be at Cutter Gap at all.
Miss Alice then says a number of things (you could write a whole of the book on the wisdom of Miss Alice, she’s that good), but the one thing she says that really stood out to me today as I read it was this:
“God has all kind of riches for all of us … His promises in the Bible are His way of telling us what’s available. But this plenty doesn’t become ours until we drive in our stake on a particular promise and thus indicate that we accept that gift. That Christy is ‘claiming.’”
I’m at a part of my life right now where I’m getting ready to start a “Christy” kind of journey. I’m already a teacher—I’m not traveling out to the Smokies, but I am getting ready to make another kind of journey. Just like Christy left home, comfort and safety behind, I too will have to leave behind the comfort and safety of my current job to pursue this calling to the priesthood.
It may be tomorrow (that would be scary)—it may be ten years from now, but eventually, I will leave a job that I have loved and cherished through the good and the bad, so that I can do this thing that God has put in my heart to do.
And I must admit, I’m scared and I’m having a hard time letting go.
God’s call to the priesthood is a gift that He has presented me. But I haven’t yet claimed it.
I’m standing there staring at it. And make no mistake, I want it very much, but I am also afraid to leave my old life behind and I also worry whether God means the gift for me at all. Maybe He means it for the person standing behind me, and I’ve just been blind in thinking I’m the only one in the room.
But then I remember BACAM and the Parish Discernment Committee and Pat who stopped me in the restroom at work the other day and asked me if I was still “lovin that church.” And then told me that I’d make a very good priest because I was a teacher and compassionate.
All these people … and every single one assuring me that yes the gift is meant for me. Claim it.
And I will. I will claim it. I know this. I will never be truly happy if I don’t.
I don’t what God will do with me next.
But I know that nothing will happen until I claim His gift.
