Vocation Story

I grew up as a cradle Catholic in Southern Illinois and my family and I went to Mass every week. I was an altar server through high school but looking back I never remember hearing a call to the priesthood. I fell away from practicing my faith through college and into my working years. I moved to Batavia in 2004 because my parents were now living there and I wanted to be closer to them. I had been in Florida working as a golf professional and had reached the point of spiritual rock bottom, I guess you could say.

About a year and half after moving to Batavia, Holy Cross started perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, sometime around November 2005. Fr. Deutsch was asking for people to sign up for a weekly Holy hour. So for some reason or another I did, I think you could attribute that to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Around the same time we had a speaker named Christopher West who is an energetic speaker on the late pope's Theology of the Body. I didn't understand much of what he said but something caught my attention so I bought the book.

The combination of going to Mass, going back to Reconciliation, Adoration and reading the Theology of the Body had a profound effect on me. It seemed to those around me I changed overnight. I had been touched by the Grace of God.

When Lent 2006 came around I decided to give up television and attend daily Mass. If you want to listen for God's call and know your vocation, stop watching television. After that Lent, I never stopped going to daily Mass and Adoration became a daily event as well. Around this same time I began to devour as many books as I could on the faith. There was certainly this real hunger to know God and the more I read the more I knew I didn't know.

Finally, people started asking me the question. "Have you ever thought about being a priest?" or they would say, "You would be a good priest." My initial thoughts were don't say that because I knew once the question was asked I would have to take it seriously. So I did, I began to ask the Lord what He wanted from me and to pray this very powerful prayer daily, "Lord not my will but yours be done." Eventually it just seemed that God gave me so many signs that it was fairly obvious my next step would be to discern in seminary, so here I am.