National Vocation Awareness Week: Is God Calling You? While we are to always pray for and encourage vocations to religious life, Vocation Awareness Week highlights this in an even greater way. This annual event affords us a specific time to reflect on how as individuals and as a community we are promoting the call to religious life. Do you: Have an ability to help others and to relate well with peers and adults. Have a growing relationship with God that is demonstrated through prayer, service to others, and involvement in parish ministry. Have a gift of leadership that draws others in and promotes a spirit of collaborative teamwork which affirms and challenges. Have courage to take a stand to “do the right thing”, even when it is not popular. Have a thirst to know Christ and wants to bring His teachings to the world Witness to others by word, action and deed on how to live as a disciple of Christ. Have a concern for issues that affect others, such as social justice and peace. Have a willingness to serve to help right these issues. Have good people skills, live with a sense of hope and joy, and possesses a good sense of humor. The call to religious life, the call to be a nun, is always marked by a desire to serve God and God’s people, to care for the needy and to bring people to experience God’s love. But, since ministry is a part of every vocation, service is not the distinguishing characteristic of a call to consecrated life as a member of a religious community. The uniqueness of the call to be a nun, the call to religious life is living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in community. The essential service of the religious is to witness to all the faithful that each of us is called to treat things, persons and our own self with respect and as ultimately belonging to God. At the heart of the call to religious life is a desire to give oneself in love to God in a way so total that the pursuit of union with God makes it impossible for anything or anyone to be more central. One becomes unavailable for marriage. If you believe you are being called to be a nun, give us a call [330. 261.4729] and we can help you discern God’s call.