Who Will You Be This Day?
National Vocation Awareness Week ends this weekend, and today’s gospel meditation on John 1:35-42 by Rachel Subras in Give Us This Day fits the occasion well:
You are called like Simon to leave aside your plans and go when summoned, to be beheld and known by God’s own, and be renamed.
You do have a choice. You can retreat, take comfort in the familiar, and risk missing your calling. Or you can set out, take on the discomforts of the strange and the stranger, and live into, live up to, your new identity.
Who will you be this day, this year? Who will lead you?
Answer by beholding. Perceive in a passerby your seeker, your teacher. Look into a life you might otherwise overlook, and let yourself be beheld. Is not this unfamiliar gaze — fearless, mutual, and clear — a revelation? Is not this new name your name?
Her words resonate with me as the reality of ordination to the diaconate draws closer, but her thoughts don’t just apply to a vocation to ordained or religious life. Whether a person is preparing for ordination or marriage or mission work, Subras’ meditation reminds us of the choice we have to make. But the choice is not a one-time event. Each day we wake up with the same opportunity: Who will I be this day? Who will lead me?
