Part 3 with Nic Wilson
Nic Wilson
This is part 3 of a 4 part series where we asked seminarian Nic Wilson (from St. Jude) about hearing the call of God and his path to priesthood.
If you missed the first or second post, you can go back and read it here.
This post talks about the freedom of truly giving yourself to God.
What is the most important or challenging thing you have learned in seminary?
The most important, and the most challenging, thing I have learned in seminary is that truly loving Jesus, committing to knowing Him personally through daily prayer and good works, changes everything. It gives life to study, prayer, and service. It provides the strength and motivation necessary to overcome hardship. It is the decisive element in the discernment of a vocation because vocation is above all a call for a specific work, and you can only hear the call if you are in a relationship with the caller. It is the most challenging because it demands that you let go of an identity that you create, your “false self,” in order to be who you truly are, a beloved son of a loving Father.
The idea of “freedom” as doing whatever you what and the feeling of comfort that might come from being good at a sport, or academics, or well-liked, must fade in the light of constant conversion, in the process of being conformed to Christ. Yet you find that that “freedom” and comfort was really nothing but dust, and I found that a great gift of seminary formation is the freedom to use the gifts that God has given to me in order to be the man, the seminarian, and one day, God willing, the priest that God wants me to be.