(continuation from previous article)
3. If I do not know myself, can I be free to choose?
Dear young people,
it is a great joy for me to welcome and share your vocational concerns. You are living a very beautiful period of life, you deeply feel the desire to live to the full, and all the paths to reach it are open before you. Have the courage to search patiently and, above all, to arrive at a decision that will fill your yearnings with truest happiness. It is not an easy task: it implies assuming one’s own fragility and discovering the fundamental truth that life is a wonderful gift that has been given to us, a mysterious gift that surpasses us.
God has given us life and faith. The Christian vocation is precisely the response to the call to life and love with which God has created us. We are called to be children of God and to live as children, feeling and acting in the love that God has poured into our hearts. We are called to be his disciples and to be them with passion. By responding to it, we find the path to true happiness.
What we seek, what we want to be, has as its basis and foundation who we are. Starting from the loving acceptance of what we are, the Lord calls us to build our identity. We can hardly live this search and this effort alone. We have the great good fortune that Jesus himself wants to accompany us. Always keep Jesus close to you, as your companion and friend. Nobody like him can help you find your way to God and be happy. Next to him, invoking him with simplicity and with much confidence, you will be able to discover better the meaning of existence and of your vocation.
Seeking your vocation means being concerned about how to respond to God’s dream for you. By him you were created and dreamed. What is God’s dream for your life? And how can you respond to this dream? Let it always be God’s will, the divine will, that which guides your life. Seek, love and strive to do God’s will. He has given you life to give it, for you to give it, to share it, to hand it over, not for you to keep it for yourself. To whom do you want to give your life? It has a divine destiny. Out of love you were created in the image and likeness of God and only He will fill your desire for goodness, happiness and love.
The first and most important task you have in your hands is to discover and build your vocation. It is not something established from the beginning, in advance. It is the fruit of freedom, of a freedom built slowly, capable of venturing on the path of self-giving. Only with great inner freedom can you arrive at an authentic vocational decision. Freedom and love, in fact, are the two great wings to face the path of life, to give and deliver it.
I conclude by assuring you that I will always remember and commend you to the Lord, so that He may accompany you, guide you and direct your life along the path of grace and love. On your part, always seek the good Jesus, have Him as the friend of your soul, invoke Him, share with Him your sorrows, your anxieties, your worries, your joys and your sadnesses. And dare to commit yourself seriously to Him and to His cause. He is waiting for you.
Office for Vocational Animation
