Why I want to be a priest

I suppose that I have poor blogger etiquette being that I am trying to blog Monday through Friday and have only accomplished that once. Hopefully you will forgive me for being inconsistent and continue to come back as I work on being consistent. I do need to work to bring this set to a conclusion on why I want to be a priest.

The best answer for why I want to be a priest is that over time I have discovered that deciding to cooperate with God is far better than trying to move through life on my own. I have not abdicated my freedom. In fact, it is just the opposite. In freedom I have discovered that when I cooperate with God’s grace, then I know the joy to the fullest.

It took a number of years to discover this. Thanks to my parents I knew that obedience was a good virtue to practice. Thanks also to my parents I knew that I could trust in authority. I did not spend much of my youth in rebellion but I spent much of my youth knowing that my parents and grandparents loved me. I suppose this was why it was easy for me to enter the seminary and why I enjoyed many parts of the seminary.

I did spend much of college always looking around for what I thought would be fun or interesting to do. Much of the time this was my own perception and ideas. It was not until I considered Theology school that I began to answer the question about being a diocesan priest or a religious priest. The answer finally came to me mid way through my senior year in college. I knew that God wanted me to be with my diocesan brothers and not in some other community. So through pray and releasing my selfish tendencies I was finally able to hear and know what God wanted.

This led to what has been the happiest day of my life. It was the Ordination to the Diaconate. It was happy because I had finally arrived at what I had been working for so long. I was being ordained at the Josephinum with good friends and I had family and friends to witness the event. Ultimately I was happy because I had what I can only describe as a surplus of God’s grace. I am certain that I knew that God was happy and that made me happy. To this day I still have some of that joy with me.

There have been tough days as a priest. There have been some days that I would not want to repeat. But there has not been a day where I regretted cooperating with God. I truly understand the passage 15:11 from the Gospel of John.