Discernment For Vocation & Life
The young adult years are a time when discernment skills are invaluable! Navigating decisions such as what to do after school, which ministry to move into, who to date, whether to check out priesthood or consecrated life, where to live, whether to travel or save $$ and (the big one) what is the ultimate purpose of my life are all things that most young adults need to consider at some stage.
But discernment skills are needed the whole of our life! Even once you are settled in your state of life (ie: married, a priest or religious or in a permanently living single life) you will still need to make major life decisions, like where to send the kids to school, where to live, which ministries to take up and when to move on from particular friendships or communities. And even though many people become more grounded in their sense of purpose and call as life goes on, it is actually a question that we need to keep revisiting over and over again.
As MGL Sisters, we spend a lot of time walking alongside young adults as they seek to hear God’s voice in their life and make decisions to follow where they think he’s leading them. Here’s eleven of our best tips on D.I.S.C.E.R.N.M.E.N.T.:
Don’t Panic! Making major life decisions can be very scary...but you’re not alone in this. Many people have gone before you in similar circumstances and made it through to the other side. Take a deep breath and know that you can do this and that God is very much with you.
Include Jesus: As Christians, discernment is ultimately about listening to the voice of God. Times of discernment are opportunities to absolutely double down on prayer! Take retreats, fit in extra prayer time into your day, get to holy hours, pray rosaries, cut your work hours down or drop an extra curricular activity if you need to in order to clear the space to hear God’s voice and draw close to Jesus. This will lay a very strong foundation for your discernment and the decisions you need to make.
Seek Wisdom: Times of discernment are also times to intentionally seek out mentoring, pastoral care, spiritual direction and/or wise people to speak to and seek advice from! Most people around you would be only too willing to answer your questions, share from their experiences and pray for you as you seek to do God’s will in your life, so don’t be shy to ask for help and prioritise your time (and finances if needs be) so you can avail yourself of the wisdom of others.
Contact With: It makes sense when you’re discerning to connect with others who have made the same life decisions that you are thinking about. If you’re discerning your vocation, hang out with married couples and families, priests and religious to see and ask them about their life. If you’re looking into a particular job, ministry or another big life decision (like taking off in a campervan or having a travel gap year) get alongside people who have experienced this decision from the inside for the real scoop on what it’s like. What you’re trying to do here as much as well as seeking their wisdom is listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you as you put yourself in their shoes. Does your heart sink or soar as you hear their experiences? Is there a fire of excitement in you or just cold coals? This is discernment in action and it is what will help you to make great decisions with your life!
Exercise like Ignatius: Wondering what to do in all your hours of extra prayer you’ve added to your life? St Ignatius can help! He created the Spiritual Exercises as well as Rules for Discernment that have aided many people in their discernment over the past 500 years. Some of his exercises include taking a daily (or twice-daily) Examen of Consciousness, to look at your day with the eyes of the Holy Spirit and see where you were able to respond to the movements of the Spirit, and where you struggled to do this. Some other exercises of St Ignatius include prayerfully listing the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of the decisions you’re weighing up and seeing if you’re drawn more to one option over another. Finally, St Ignatius recommends that you imagine you’re on your death bed (bit full on, I know, but stay with me here) and to think about if there is a course of action you would regret taking or not taking in your life. This can give you a perspective that is different to the one you have right now. There’s heaps more examples so grab some more resources on Ignatian prayer and discernment if you think this could help you!
Respond: A crucial part of discernment is knowing when it’s time to jump on in. Some people can find themselves delaying decision making and missing opportunities before them, so always be asking the Lord when the time is right to respond to what you feel like He is saying and just take the leap. Discernment is also a two-way street, so it is really encouraged for you to have a two-way dialogue with the Lord in your prayer time so you can express how you’re feeling about the discernment process.
Not a Career but a Vocation: Ultimately, when we are discerning anything, we are asking God what His will is for our life. We have only one life, with limited time and opportunities available to us, so we want to make sure we’re moving in line with God’s will as much as we possibly can. Sometimes this will mean ‘going with’ something in our discernment even if on a head level, it doesn’t make heaps of sense. Choosing our vocation is a bit different to a job application, where we need to meet certain criteria or ‘tick all the boxes’. Sometimes an opportunity will come along that is of the Holy Spirit and is totally from left-field: a ministry we feel unqualified for, a romantic partner we would’ve never considered in a million years, a new home in a place we swore we’d never live...so we need to be ready to think with an eternal perspective about where God is calling us to go and not limit His plans for our life.
Move: Discernment is an active process! Just as you can’t really discern marriage without going on dates, being engaged and getting to know the person and their family, there are few things you can discern from the comfort of your prayer time or daydreams. This is because discernment often involves another party or parties who need to discern as well: the order or bishop who is accepting you into religious life or priesthood, the person you’ve decided you’d like to marry or the employer or ministry coordinator who has a vacant role on their team. Even when you’re discerning something you could carry out yourself, it will do you well to collect as much information to aid your discernment as you can and to take the practical steps you need to along the way. If you feel like you’re being called to a particular religious order or ministry, call them up! If you’re thinking of changing your uni courses, do the research about the process. If you feel called to start a new business or ministry, gather a team around who can help you, or begin saving or looking for financial support. Sometimes when we begin to move, our discernment will happen in a more clear fashion: we start to see that this may not be the person we want to marry, we start to realise that moving to the other side of the world for a ministry will draw us away from friends and family and might not be God’s will after all or we realise that we’re actually happy in our current job and not that keen to change career after all.
Enjoy life and Explore it! Once we let go of the panic, there’s actually something exciting about stepping into God’s plan for our lives and seeing it come together for us, and something pretty exhilarating about exploring all of the possibilities and potential for our life. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with exploring avenues we eventually don’t take or needing to make a few u-turns or changes of direction as we discover God’s will in our lives. Every day is a gift from God and every time we are active in our discernment, it hones our ears better to the Holy Spirit and the calling that God is placing on our hearts. As someone who joined the MGLs at 28 years after a really solid discernment period during my 20s, I’ve now lived this vocation for 10 years really confident in my vocation and sure that God was calling me in this direction because of the desire I felt for this during my time of discernment. When I look back I know for a fact that my previous life of romantic relationships, the workplace and even international travel have not fulfilled me in the way that religious life has. I am so grateful for my previous life experiences and glad that I could appreciate, enjoy and live them fully at the time, but I’m also grateful for them because I know that even in the midst of them the Spirit was whispering to me that God had more in store for me in my life!
Notice the Signs: The biggest lesson we need to learn in discernment is how to listen to what is happening within us. At certain times we will notice ourselves filled with joy, flooded with dread, can’t-sit-still-excited or absolutely bored to tears. These are all signs that will help us in our discernment. Sometimes it will be convenient for us to ignore these signs, because we have become attached to a particular outcome: we’re getting niggles of ill-ease in a relationship but ignore it because we’re already engaged and feel like it’s too late to break it off, we’ve literally just moved cities for a new job or ministry and we discover it’s the wrong fit for us or we’re feeling called to religious life or priesthood but are struggling in the courage needed to face up to this. Noticing the signs and then responding to them is a crucial part of the discernment process and one that takes honesty and sometimes courage from us.
Take Time: Sometimes when we’re discerning we can feel as though we’re “on the clock”. We set for ourselves, or have others set for us, particular timelines of when and how things should happen. It can be really hard for us when we feel like we’re “behind the game” in terms of our life decisions: like when we’re the last to be married in our friendship group, still tackling uni when our friends are all in fulltime work or when we’re the one who never had a gap year and hasn’t yet “seen the world”. But really, there’s no timeline in God’s plan. As long as we’re open to His will and not deliberately closing ourselves off from the opportunities he’s giving to us, we can have a certain level of confidence that we’re living in his plan and can instead live and cherish each day as though it is the last one we might ever live. Nothing would be more sad for us than to long for a particular future outcome in our life at the expense of seeing the amazing work of God in the here and now. Depending on your circumstances, it can be a difficult thing to find daily joys in the midst of grief and disappointment, but maintaining this attitude of hope and gratitude is ultimately what will sustain us and give us life in the season of waiting.
Discernment is ultimately an exercise of listening, trust and surrender. Hopefully the tips I’ve shared with you will help you to hone these skills in your spiritual life and lead you to the life of fullness and joy that God has in store for you in the future as well as right now!
Bernadette has spent the last 20 years involved in youth ministry. She lives in Varroville on the outskirts of Sydney where she runs retreats, trains young missionaries, walks with cows, tries to grow veggies and leads people closer to Jesus. This year her ministries included leading the Disciples School of Mission team in a month-long outreach to South Australia, being part of the organising team of Melbourne Summer School and Light to the Nations, leading the popular MGL Sisters Pentecost Retreat, as well as being a guest speaker and presenter at several youth ministry events and conferences. If she wasn't happily in her eleventh year with the MGL Sisters she would have loved to have made it as a talk show host, rally car driver or high school RE teacher.