www.vocation.com - What if a person doesn't follow their vocation?

	Molly asks: Fr Bannon, This is the first time in my life I've ever done anything to seek out my vocation. I just finished my freshman year in college. At my house my parents focus more on the idea that "My siblings and I can do God's Will wherever we are", and that past or future mistakes will not throw us out of God's Will forever. My question is this: What if a person doesn't follow their vocation? What if a man or woman is called to the religious life but gets married? Or if a person who should've been married enters the religious life? Does this happen (I imagine it must, sometimes) and if so, what do people do?
	Dear Molly, Fortunately for us, God is both the ultimate realist and inexplicably in love with us. He never asks anything of us that we cannot do with his grace, and in this life no matter how we let him down he tries everything to reach us where we are and offer us a new chance. The way to deal with the past, which for most of us tends to be humiliating, is to put it in the hands of his mercy. There is really no way to tell what would have been, we can only guess at what might have been and I think God would prefer we not torture ourselves about it. He just wants us to admit the failings we had, go to him, and from where we are work out our salvation with his grace. That means accepting the state of life in which we find ourselves, using all the means both spiritual and human he gives us to discover what his will is in the here and now, and to do our best to carry it out. God bless.


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