God continues to invite us

"[H]ow  patient God is with us! He only asks our attention. If we will attend to Him, He will do all the rest. We shall find that things begin to drop into our lap without any asking. In spite of our repeated blind refusals, in spite of our obstinancy and selfwill, up to the very moment of death God continues to invite, to persuade, to beckon.

Now there is one perfectly obvious way in which we can, or ought to be able to detect if we are travelling on the wrong - or just not on the right - path through life. If there is a recurring: 'If I were you I should' in our conversations with other people, we may begin to wonder. This persistent desire on the part of them all to tell us what they would do if they were us, can only mean one thing: whatever the facts may be, we are managing to give the impression that we are not in the right place nor engaged in the right occupation.

Of course we may indignantly exclaim that it is only the mistake of a lot of intolerable busybodies. Very well, then, so much the better. In that case it is quote easy to rectify their mass-mistake by convincing ourselves that our circumstances are just what we should have chosen. If we had all the world to choose from, and that we are doing the one thing on earth which suits us best. When we have convinced ourselves of that, we shall find that quite automatically all the busybodies will begin minding their own business again and no longer be interested in us and our occupations. It is a curious fact, but it has only to be tried to be proved.

On the other hand, let us admit that what they suggest may quite possibly be true. Perhaps we are not making the best of life; not using our gifts to the greatest advantage; we are either misfits or merely forlorn drifters, and everyone else can see if except ourselves. All we do is to grumble in general about life, without making any whole-hearted attempt to grapple with it.

For we have only to turn to God: to think of Him and of our neighbour instead of thinking exclusively along our own lines. We have only to wake up and become aware of existence as a real thing, and God as a real Person, and ourselves as His creation, and the next event in our lives will be that our vocation will come walking down the road to meet us, and bump into us so heavily that even we shall no longer be able to pretend that we do not know what it is."

-- Catch us those little foxes by A Carmelite Nun