When I was a bright-eyed college freshman, I felt so excited to be living with other men whom I could truly call brothers in Christ. One brother I particularly looked up to was named Dan. Dan had recently served for a year in a ministry called NET, which stands for National Evangelization Teams. While on NET, you spend a year of your life on the road serving Jesus and the Church by driving around the country with a dozen or so other lay missionaries running retreats for Catholic middle and high-schoolers. It seemed like a dream come true for me.
Many different things seemed attractive to me about NET. First, I have always enjoyed traveling and getting to see new places and meet new people. As an extreme extrovert, I loved the idea of being thrown in with a team of strangers and serving with them for a year and on top of that, getting to meet and interact with different people in different places all the time. What an awesome adventure it would be! Finally, I had a heartfelt desire to serve the Lord more deeply, and going on the road for a year to help run retreats seemed like the perfect way to do that!
So that was how I found myself in the spring of 2005 at Franciscan University doing an interview weekend for NET. It was me and probably about a hundred other late teens and early twenty-somethings and we were definitely full of life and zeal. We saw skits, prayed together, did one-on-one interviews and got to know each other. I just remember being so thrilled to be part of something bigger than myself. It was a great weekend and I left full of anticipation for what the following year might bring. The NET leaders who ran the interview weekend told us to expect a call within the next few weeks. If we were invited to be part of NET the following year, they reminded us to take time to pray before accepting the offer.
Several weeks later, Rex – one of the NET leaders – called to invite me to be a missionary with them the following year. My heart jumped with excitement at the offer, but Rex reminded me again to pray about it and call him back. So I took it to prayer and was surprised by what came to me. As I mulled the decision to leave Ohio State after my first year and be a missionary on the road, I began to sense that this was not what the Lord wanted for me. My heart wasn’t at peace saying yes. As much as being in NET seemed to check so many boxes for what I loved to do, I realized that the Lord had already abundantly blessed me with mission opportunities together with my brothers in Christ right there in my household. In the end, I knew He had more for me to do by just continuing to live with them and carry on as a student missionary at OSU.
Then I had to make one of the harder phone calls I’ve made in life. I can still remember standing in the lobby of one of the academic buildings at OSU to call Rex back and tell him that after praying about it, I didn’t feel called to do NET after all. He was very gracious and thanked me for praying about it. Even though it was an emotional rollercoaster, looking back, I know the Lord led me to the right decision.
The following year turned out to be full of growth, blessing, and deepening friendships with the guys in my college Catholic group, cementing relationships that still continue to this day. Even though it would have been fun to hit the road and serve the Lord, I know that He had plenty of important work for me to do right there at OSU. I am forever grateful for the growth Jesus gave me during that season of life by being rooted in the wonderful Catholic community at Ohio State.
I believe the Lord has a message for us about attentiveness in the readings today. The Gospel tells us of a story about a man who was blessed by Jesus, but ended up ignoring the guidance Jesus tried to give Him after that. This is the easiest thing in the world to do. So often when we are in times of blessing and abundance, we forget to look to the Lord to see how He is at work in the midst of that blessing.
This leperous man had received an incredible gift from Jesus. Because of the ritual laws in place with the Jewish people that we heard about in the first reading, this man would have been a social outcast, unable to participate in the life of his family or the wider community. As the law of Moses stipulated: “As long as the sore is on him he shall declare himself unclean, since he is in fact unclean. He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp.” Only in recent decades has modern medicine caught up and found a multi-drug treatment to cure leprosy. During Jesus’ time, lepers endured a life of suffering and crippling isolation. So when the man in the Gospel came to Jesus with the desire to be “made clean,” his heart didn’t just yearn for the wholeness of bodily healing, but also the restoration of his relationships. I can only imagine those desires were strong in his heart as he knelt and begged the Lord: “If you wish, you can make me clean.” And, of course, Jesus told him: “I do will it. Be made clean.”
Imagine the thrill in his heart as the man rose to his feet and realized the sores that had plagued him were gone! I imagine him weeping for joy. But in that moment of high emotion, it seems that he missed the next words that Jesus spoke about not telling anyone and going to the priest to make an offering for his healing. He may or may not have gone to the priest, we don’t know, but what we do know is that he did the exact opposite of what the Lord was inviting him to do: he went and told everybody, exactly the opposite of what Jesus commanded.
We can definitely forgive him for his inattention to Jesus. After all, he was caught up in the joy of a great miracle, but let’s not fall into that same trap. I am so grateful for the advice from the NET leaders about prayerfully discerning my path forward. If I had simply accepted their invitation without thinking about it, I would have been missing out on His best plans for me the following year. The Lord would still have worked through that decision, as Jesus did in spite of the man’s inattention in the Gospel today, but He invites us to live our lives by those challenging words in the prayer He taught us to pray: “THY kingdom come, THY will be done.” How easy it is for us when life is blessed and things are going well to say: “MY kingdom come, my will be done.”
As we approach the holy season of Lent this coming week, let’s pray for humble hearts attentive to the voice and guidance of the Lord. I pray that we listen for His voice and look for those nudges from the Holy Spirit that will help us to enjoy all of the blessings that come from following Jesus’ path for us!
+ Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us access to your heart and your will through your Son. Jesus, help us to be attentive to your will for us. Holy Spirit, help us in the midst of our distractions to see and follow Jesus’ plan for us in the big and small things. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +