Filling the Great Needs: What am I Called to Do?

I decided to take a break outside the house for a bit and breathe for once. I took some time to relax and reorient my thought on the happenings from the past several months.

I happened to be finishing up on a military chaplaincy discernment retreat when I read that my state would be undergoing a strict stay-at-home order due to the outbreak of COVID-19. A couple of months later, George Floyd was murdered, triggering a sociopolitical powder-keg which had been decades (arguably centuries) in the build-up. Coupled with this was a series of disappearances and murders within the ranks of the Army I loved with my whole heart.

So much brokenness in our country right now. This new decade has indeed ushered in a new chapter in our society: an era of mistrust, violence, and many unanswered questions. Many of my friends, family, and peers are devastated and burnt out by surrounding tensions. I've listened to some of these conversations, and I'm personally afraid of being on the "wrong side" of history.

Then, I remember my time at St. Patrick's Seminary during the retreat. Looking through the notes I took during those talks, I find a note I wrote down about "filling the great need." Now, I know this likely pointed to filling the need for military chaplains, but I think today's situations bring this bullet point to a much deeper meaning and calling.

Much of my prayer time was spent asking God for Him to do something. Unfortunately, this mentality often places God in the role of a holy vending machine which automatically grants us wishes if we say enough Our Fathers and Hail Marys within a particular period of time. Prayer is not magic that demands that God conform to us; it is an exercise which challenges us to manifest the will of God on our part. In other words, we ask God to on how we can answer the "great need" in our daily lives, because "faith without works is dead" (James 2:26).

I currently am on track to commission as an Army Officer as well as to be licensed as an Illinois teacher (by the way, the statements in my blog are by no means official statements or endorsement from the Department of Defense). In light of all the brokenness in America today, I hope I can help fill the "great needs" in the lives of my future students as well as the soldiers I may be leading. I know I can't fix everything, but I can sure as hell plant some seeds. I just hope things do change for the better after this subsides.

"You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works." --Pope Francis

 Memory Eternal:
George Floyd
SPC Vanessa Guillen
SPC Enrique Roman-Martinez
Breonna Taylor
PFC Gregory Wedel-Morales

Lord, have mercy on everyone lost and broken in these tragedies.