By Laura McCarty ‘11

For a long time, I approached finding my vocation as if it were divine career counseling. I was mistakenly praying for God to unveil my life path like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.

For most of my years at Notre Dame, I felt a growing call to join a religious order of sisters known as the Nashville Dominicans. This discernment came to a head in the year after my graduation from ND, while I was taking pre-requisite classes for graduate school. I was torn, and my family suffered as a result. Eventually, I said to God, “I can’t do this. It’s too painful for me and for my family. I’m going to grad school instead. I’m sorry.” 

I felt like a failure. Even after I started graduate school six months later, I told myself, “That’s it, Laura. You’ve given up your chance at closeness with God. You deserve to suffer for this, because you knew your vocation and you failed to follow it.” 

That fall, on campus for a Notre Dame football weekend, I was staying with a friend in Cavanaugh Hall. I found myself crying in the chapel because I still felt like I had failed God. But somewhere in my heart, there was a gentle voice that said, “You’re treating your suffering the wrong way. You’re opening your wound over and over again, when all I want to do is heal it. Let me love you where you are.”

Looking back, I can see that I was overlooking the joy of getting to know God in my daily life. Seeking my vocation became an endeavor to steer towards a distant future rather than a call to holiness in the here and now. I ended up placing my hopes in the future and missed chances to discover God’s will for me in the present. 

In the years that followed, I experienced many ways in which God continued to find me: in my graduate school experiences, my travels for clinical rotations, and now in my work as a therapist helping people recover from surgery, injury, and illness to return to their daily life. God has met me so many times in the small moments of my days, which is where vocation is ultimately found. It’s important to place our future in God’s hands, but the present is the only place where we can choose to cooperate with grace each day. 

Leo Tolstoy has a famous short story, “Three Questions,” where a king asks, “What is the right time for each action? Who are the most important people? What is the most important thing to do?”

And his answer, by the end of the story, is a beautiful description of vocation as God intends it for us, each and every day:

“Remember then: there is only one time that is important—now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else. And the most important affair is to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!”

May God continue to unveil our vocation step by step—may God give us patience with the mysterious ways in which grace and holiness unfold in our lives. As the old saying goes, when we’re driving at night, we can only see as far as our headlights, but we can make the whole journey that way.