Why Did God Make Me? By Colleen O’Sullivan

Memorial of Saint Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church

In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to boast in what pertains to God.  For I will not dare to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to lead the Gentiles to obedience by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum I have finished preaching the Gospel of Christ.  Thus I aspire to proclaim the Gospel not where Christ has already been named so that I do not build on another’s foundation, but as it is written:  Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand.  (Romans 15:17-21)

Piety

O Lord, may the ways we seek to serve you be in tune with your desires for us.

                                                                                               

Study

One of the questions and answers I remember clearly from the Baltimore Catechism, No. 2 (yes, I am old enough that that was the textbook for CCD when I was growing up) is “Why did God make you?”  “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”  I was probably in third grade when I memorized that.  And that’s a great answer as far as it goes.  Eventually, though, we get older and need to drill down a little deeper on the details of what that means for each of us.  Exactly how does God desire that we serve him?

In today’s epilogue to his letter to the Romans, Paul shows that he knows precisely why God made him and how God wanted the apostle to serve the Lord.  God took this former zealous persecutor of Christians and literally stopped him in his tracks on the road to Damascus.  God took all that misplaced energy and zeal and channeled it in a very different direction.  God set Paul the task of bringing Gentiles into the Christian family.  So Paul spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to another, preaching the Word in places where it had never before been heard and planting new congregations.  The apostle didn’t take personal credit for any of this.  All that had been accomplished to the time of the penning of this letter, he laid squarely at the feet of Christ. 

Paul also made a point of emphasizing that he always went where the Gospel had never been preached before.  Much of the work we do in our parishes is outreach to those already part of the family of Christ.  Perhaps we need to branch out a bit.  We wouldn’t have to go far because there are individuals in our families and on our neighborhood streets who know very little about Jesus or the Church.

Action

As I pondered today’s first reading, I thought a worthwhile exercise might be for us to look back and pinpoint the ways in which God has used us to accomplish something for God’s Kingdom.  If you come up with a list and see a pattern emerging over time, that might be a way to discern the details of how God would like us to serve.

Though I suspect there are many people who have never given great consideration to the specifics of their vocation, God gave it great thought even before you or I were born.  In Healing the Purpose of Your Lifeⁱ, the authors talk about the “sealed orders” that God has for each of us.  God has a purpose for each of us and the book is meant to help us discover what that might be.

ⁱ Written by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn and Matthew Linn, Paulist Press, 1999