Personal reflection by Matthew Purt, St Charles Seminarian, as published in Humilitas, Spring 2023 edition.
When God spoke to Moses, He first told Moses how much He loved him, that He was the God of Moses’ ancestors, that He was with the Israelites when they were enslaved, and that Moses was to be the one who would make the eternal love of God known among His beloved people (cf. Exodus 3). When God spoke to Jeremiah, He revealed His love for him and how, from the moment of his conception, Jeremiah was loved by God and specially chosen for a divine mission to preach repentance to His chosen nation who had exchanged the truth of God for a lie (cf. Jeremiah 1-2; Romans 1:25). Both men responded to God’s call with fear; Moses hid his face, trembled and offered an excuse to God that because he was not eloquent and was slow in speech, then protested that God ought to correct this error in judgement and choose someone else (Exodus 3:6, 4:10).
Jeremiah too said he did not know how to speak and that he was too young. Both of those holy men whom God had revealed Himself to and had revealed His love for responded with fear and said that God had made a mistake; they were not up for the task. They were right to recognise their absolute lowliness in the face of Almighty God, but they were wrong to accuse God of making a mistake. The same God who revealed His great plans for these men was the same God who moments earlier revealed His great love for individual man whom He singled out from among Israel and was indeed the same God who helped them respond to the call and fulfil their mission. It is for this reason I write, to remind myself and to remind those who believe that they have received a vocation from God that when the anxiety over an uncertain future plagues us, we are to remember that at the moment we believed we heard God’s call, we first heard His acclamation of love for us.
Moreover, it is really His great love for us and not the appeal of the vocation that initially motivates us to respond and continue to respond. For from the moment
of our Baptism, we were singled out, called and chosen by God to live for Him, to be “totus tuus ergo sum et omnia mea tua sunt” as the great maxim goes — to be totally
yours, that all that I have maybe yours — it is our response to God’s gift of justification by the supernatural virtue of faith that has been infused into our soul.
For God has given us all that we have, what right do we have to keep this gift of our life to ourselves? We belong to Him, our life belongs to God, and when He calls, when He tells us how we are to live, we ought to listen and not make excuses, however pious or sensible they may seem.
Like St Joseph, we are to do as God has commanded and rise out from our circumstances and comfort to go and serve The Lord (cf. Matthew 2:14).
To those men who believe they have truly heard God’s call to be with us at St Charles’ but for whatever reason are yet to be, I ask you not to make excuses, not to be
anxious, not to worry about what others may think. I ask you to be like St Joseph, like Moses and like Jeremiah, who all [some eventually] trusted in God, to respond in love to the call of The God who loves you always.
God will never call you to do something alone or ask you to do something beyond your natural abilities or without His grace.
These words of St Paul have brought me much consolation in difficult moments of my discernment, and it is my hope that may do the same for you: “But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it” (2 Timothy 4:17).
