What happens is that we have a notion, or a thought, or a hankering:  career, marriage, monastery, priesthood.  

It floats around our days and our solitude. Sometimes it seems the only real thing. Other times, it seems an airy unreality.  We get a part of it, another part, and then it’s not there.

We are in the way our Creator and Lord most likes to do things: by a process, a slow unfolding from within, the end not at all clear. We can be impatient; we can doubt. Then it comes back in strong clarity.

We’d rather do it now, skip to the end.   It’s really hard to be in a place but you’re not there any more. And it’s hard to be waiting, waiting, to see where this thought,  this hankering is going—until our Creator decides to give us what He has in mind.

Then we find that we have been doing the truth. As Jesus told the great Pharisee Nicodemus:  whoever lives the truth comes to the light,  not as though we were doing this on our own, but so our works may be clearly seen as done in God (Jn.3:21).

We do it, and it’s done in us. This is how the God of love lives in us and leaves us free to choose to live in Him who is love. Not just a thought, , a hankering, but living the truth, as done in God.