Discipleship (Part 3)

Last week I highlighted that Christian discipleship is always borne through our acts of love to those around us. I made it clear that our vocation should never be seen as a way to escape our literal neighbors, the people who are close to us.

On the other hand, this directive to live out sacrificial love in a moment-to-moment basis should not keep us from engaging in long-term vocational discernment.

Even as we are loving people in our lives right now, many of us still have not yet discovered our Christian vocation. “Vocation” does not mean our job—even a job like mine, working for the Church. Our vocation, in this sense, is to marriage, holy orders, religious life, or some other form of lifeorientation.

This way of living cannot be reduced to a career. God calls each individual to his or her own vocation. What unites all of these vocations, however, is that they must be lived out in sacrificial love.

We make a grave mistake when we select a vocation because it seems like the easiest option. Christ tells us to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses daily, and follow Him (cf. Luke 9:23). Of course, we should feel a positive draw to our vocation: a desire to marry a particular person or a calling to a specific religious order. But all vocational paths must be lived out in selfdenial, putting others before ourselves.

Only by a true gift of self can a man love his wife rightly, or a mother her children, or a priest his parishioners. While the way by which we give of ourselves changes through each vocation, the need to give remains the same. We live out that gift when we imitate Jesus’s sacrificial love shown to us by the cross.

Challenge: In the core relationships of your life, how willing are you to make a gift of yourself to others?