I am often asked what it was like to be a FOCUS (Fellowship of
Catholic University Students) missionary. My response is always the same: I
have the greatest job in the world. I describe it as having front-row seats to
conversion stories, to God working in souls.
When I first stepped onto campus, I don’t think I fully
appreciated what St. Paul told the early church — “No eye has seen, nor ear
heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love
him” (1 Cor 2:9). My time as a missionary took me many places that I have never
seen: from the great state of Massachusetts, which I called home for my first
year on staff, across the world to the Holy Land where the Son of God made his
home among men. I even had the great pleasure of seeing Our Lady of Guadalupe
in Mexico City, twice. She was just as beautiful the second time.
I heard many new things over these past two years. I had some of
the best conversations of my life with fellow missionaries, chaplains, and, of
course, students. I learned so much about our faith and was in awe of the
beauty and thoroughness of church tradition. But I never heard something quite
as moving as a friend sharing with me that he went to confession for the first
time in his life when he had been a self-proclaimed agnostic the day I met
him.
What God had ready for me, what my heart had not conceived, was
something even beyond these experiences. What God had planned was not only an
adventure across the world with students and missionaries as my companions, it
was an adventure within myself with him, the greatest companion. Stops along
the way of my interior journey included joy, gratitude, anxiety, frustration,
rejection, heartache, desire and grace upon grace. At every turn, at each
crossroad between virtue and vice, at every fall, at every victory, the Lord
was there with me, always extending the same invitation: Come, follow me. Being
a missionary afforded me the greatest opportunity of my life to pursue
discipleship intentionally, and to invite others to follow him with me.
But Jesus did not stop there; he pressed his invitation further.
In the midst of the silence of prayer on an eight-day Spiritual Exercises of
Ignatius of Loyola retreat, my heart ignited with a desire to be his priest.
The consequences of such a monumental invitation weighed heavy on my heart for
many weeks, but at the bottom of all the doubts and anxieties was the
inescapable feeling that I had to give God everything. It was during my time
with FOCUS when God asked me to follow him as his Apostles did: “And they left
everything and followed him” (Lk 5:11). I responded to his invitation with the
only thing that the Lord wanted: my heart. As my adventure with FOCUS drew to
an end, I have entered seminary to discern the call to the priesthood and I go
knowing that my heart is in his hands.
As I look back on my spiritual journey as a missionary, the
wisdom that St. Paul shared with the Corinthians becomes evident: eye cannot
see, ear cannot hear, the greatest thing that God has in store — the
transformation of hearts. May the Lord continue to transform my heart and yours
as we follow him all the days of our life. Amen.
Evans, who is from St. John the Evangelist Church in
Warrenton, is in his first year of pre-theology at St. Charles Borromeo
Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa.