This year has been a journey for me. After making the physical journey to Ireland I began a spiritual and emotional journey that has seen great shifts in what I plan to do with my life. When I first got to Ireland I had a plan: apply for graduate school, get into graduate school, and then go to graduate school. At some point I abandoned this plan in favor of something more drastic. I decided to pursue entrance into Moreau Seminary at the University of Notre Dame. And I did pursue it. I spent months with seminary as the plan and priesthood as the goal. I considered what sort of priest I would be. I resigned myself to the fact I would never be married, have a family of my own, or move back to Nebraska. My life had a map and that map didn’t leave a lot unknown, at least for the next seven years or so. Then, after several trips back to Notre Dame, going through formal and informal interviews, and telling my friends and family about this plan, I took a phone call with the vocations director at the seminary and we decided it wasn’t the right move. In a less-than-five minute conversation my plan was torn to pieces.

Not to be caught unprepared I immediately swiveled my plans and my life. Instead of seminary I would move home, live with my parents, find a job, make some money and get my feet under me. I shifted my plans without blinking to something completely different because to me any plan is better than no plan. Now, I had to think about finding a job, paying bills, buying a car, paying off my loans, and the one-hundred other questions that now were flooding my head. Then, out of nowhere an opportunity arose that seemed to be a divine gift. Everything became so clear. My high school, Pius X, had need for a campus minister. It is what I want to do with my life. It is in Lincoln. I already know the school. It was perfect. I saw why God didn’t want me to go to the seminary. He closed that door but opened up this wonderful window. I applied and was denied. God closed the window too. I was not hired. Someone else was hired. What was the point of this Notre Dame degree? What was the point of this year working in ministry and all the hours spent in ministry in college? Why did God decide seminary wasn’t right for me just to humiliate me, taunt me, with this perfect opportunity? I finally felt the impact of all the twists and turns, all the torn up maps, and I decided it wasn’t fair. Now that my plans weren’t so easily replaced I began to mourn their loss. Uncertainty is not where I thrive.

I was in sixth grade when I chose Saint Anthony as my confirmation saint, and until a little while ago I hadn’t given much thought to him since. I didn’t relate much to his story. The most interaction I had with him was to ask him to find things that I had lost. I figured he could do that for me since I had taken him on at my confirmation. A few weeks ago, however, we were teaching a confirmation prep course and I had to say something about Saint Anthony and what he means to me. I was forced to read his story again and think back to sixth grade when I chose him. I remembered that he was a Franciscan, was renowned for his preaching, and saw a vision of the Child Jesus. I had forgotten one crucial part of his story. He didn’t want to do what he ended up doing. Anthony had a dream of being a missionary to a foreign land where he could be martyred for his faith. That was his plan and it was a great and glorious plan in the name of God. God had other ideas. On his way to fulfilling his dream Anthony became deathly ill and had to return home. He never again returned to sufficient health to be able to travel. Dreams crushed. Plans ruined. Instead, he became the “Hammer of Heretics” and converting the hearts of many. He became a missionary to his own people, a prophet in his native place.

God had different plans for St. Anthony, and he has different plans for me. I’m not just saying different from seminary or campus minister at Pius X High School. I mean it more generally. God’s plans are just different. As a rule they don’t make sense to us. They are jagged and illogical as far as we are able to see them. They are messy and hard to make out on the map. They persist in being different from the comes and goings with which we trouble ourselves. St. Anthony was not necessarily made sick because he was supposed to preach or because he wasn’t supposed to me a missionary. He got sick. All we can say for certain is that he wasn’t supposed to follow his own plan. He was supposed to follow God’s. We can look back and see all the good that came from his life as it was lived and forget that it must have been devastating to the man who had to live it. Anthony didn’t know why he was barred from being a missionary, but at some point he accepted the path he was given despite this ignorance.

We are called to be constantly discerning the next step in the road to God, not discern the whole map, because the map would look like nonsense to us and we would most likely reject it. I am not being sent home by God because there is an opening for me at my high school. That’s not how that works. I should simply go home with peace in my heart and trust in God, not because something wonderful is waiting in Lincoln that will make all the uncertainty worth it, but because the plans of God are complete and final and good. They may be painful and confusing or they may be filled with joy and light. Either way, God is not going to save me from uncertainty but rather lead me by the hand, asking me to trust that He knows the way. I am forced to trust because I cannot see the way. I have only His hand to hold.