Vocation Stories | Sr. Maria Regina, SV

[Music] my name is sister maria regina and i am a sister of life i was born and raised catholic i went to catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade my parents took us to sunday mass every weekend but growing up my faith did not mean much to me at all we prayed as a family but that's where it stopped if you had asked me what i was i would have said catholic but that was it didn't mean anything else so then i went to high school and i went to a very large very public high school it was a little bit of a culture shock coming from the small catholic high school small catholic grade school and the lord stretched me in many ways in high school uh we had our policemen at the door drug busts in the bathroom were unusual but i learned a lot at this in high school and i think what struck me the most was seeing and experiencing the effects of our culture on my friends and my peers so what i saw in them was a desire for happiness a desire for love a desire for joy and they would seek to fulfill these desires in ways that were below their dignity and they were buying into the lies that our culture tries to tell us about where our worth lies so things like you know your worth lies in the car that you drive or the clothes that you wear or the parties that you're going to and so my friends would throw themselves into these lifestyles looking for love looking for happiness but ending up heartbroken because it was less than what their than what the human heart is made for and i would see this and i would think there's got to be more there's got to be a better answer to my own desires for love and this is it this is wrong that the culture is doing this to my friends and something there's got to be something more so it caused these questions to start arising in my own heart what am i made for how will i find love like where where is joy in life and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that the answer was not in the culture and what the culture tries to tell us but at that point it didn't i still didn't make the connection with faith or the church or with jesus um but these questions were floating in my heart so then i got to college and in college i was blessed with these wonderful catholic friends who kind of opened me up to a life of of living the faith that was beautiful and full and rich and meaningful they were fun they were friendly they were normal and yet they had a personal relationship with jesus this was new to me and i loved it so they would invite me to daily mass sometimes and i started to go to confession more regularly and just my heart was opening up to grace kind of in silent hidden ways but but the lord was working in that and i just experienced a lot of joy in that and at that point i had great desires to be a wife and mother you know i wanted to get married and have a lot of kids um so but that was i hadn't asked the lord at that point it was all just what i wanted what i thought would make me happy so halfway through college i had the opportunity to go to world youth day in sydney australia and that was a deeply powerful life-changing experience in many ways but what struck me the most from world youth day was the young priests and religious that i met especially the sisters they were the happiest people i had ever met they radiated this joy and this peace it kind of came out through their eyes and their hearts and their beings and i thought they have something that i don't have and i want it how do i get what they have um you know i didn't make the connection with prayer or anything like that but i thought they have something and i want it so i got back to school for my third year and when i returned to to college there was a restlessness in my heart i was coming after this uh coming off of this experience in sydney and i felt like i was looking for something but i didn't know what it was or where to go at the same time for the first time in my life i experienced a really deep hunger for prayer in a way i'd never had before prayer and the church in the presence of the blessed sacrament it was almost like the experience of a magnet i thought jesus in the tabernacle is drawing me like a magnet in a way that i i had never experienced before i had heard a thousand times growing up what the eucharist is what we believe is catholics that jesus is here body and blood soul and divinity but that fall of my junior year as i began to pray more in the church it actually hit me like what it actually is that jesus is here in the eucharist and that he loves me and he understands me and he knew my heart and he loved me where i was as i was with no kind of pretenses and i didn't have to hide anything from him and he wanted me to share my heart with him he wanted to share his heart with me and it was as though jesus and the eucharist set my heart on fire with his love and it was a love that i knew after experiencing this i will never be satisfied with anything else like this love that i have found has to be the meaning of my life like it's the beginning and the end it's it's this desire for more that there's always more of it and at the same time it was a gentle love and a free love a totally um total invitation and freedom but i knew that i i had to follow this it was this desire for love that i had to follow and that i was i was receiving so at this point i began to discern religious life and i began to be open to a religious vocation because i could see that my desire is to be a spouse for jesus wanted to fulfill in that way to love me in a spousal way but i still had questions in my heart about being a mother you know what about my desire for children lord and at that time he gave me a sense of the thirst in the world for spiritual motherhood how many people need to be loved by a spiritual mother and he gave me a desire to be that mother to to love beyond my own earthly family and love every child of his as though it were my own child and i just had a great desire for that and received the gift and that that jesus wants to fulfill every desire that i have so as i began discerning different communities i read the website of the sisters of life and it was like everything on the website matched exactly what was in my heart and i knew that i wanted and that jesus wanted me to love the world through this charism in this community so the love and the joy and the peace and the freedom that i have experienced in this life that the lord has given to me i have come to know her not just for me but are for every person and that he desires you to experience that as well

Channel: Office of Vocations

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Id: aXhBDBxeD6Y

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022