List of points

Do not be afraid. Do not be alarmed or surprised. Do not allow yourself to be overcome by false prudence.

The call to fulfil God’s will — this goes for vocation too — is sudden, as it was for the Apostles: a meeting with Christ and his call is followed…

—None of them doubted. Meeting Christ and following him was all one.

You wrote: “My King, I hear you proclaiming in a loud voice that still resounds: Ignem veni mittere in terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur? — I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled!”

Then you added: “Lord, it is me — all of me — who answers with all my senses and faculties: Ecce ego quia vocasti me! — here I am because you have called me.”

—May this answer of yours be a daily reality.

Being chosen by God means, — and demands! —, personal holiness.

If you respond to the call the Lord has made to you, your life — your poor life! — will leave a deep and wide furrow in the history of the human race, a clear and fertile furrow, eternal and godly.

Our Lord has made you see your way clearly as a Christian in the middle of the world. Nevertheless, you tell me that you have often thought, enviously (though in the end you admitted it would be taking the easy way out) of the happiness of being a nobody, of working away, totally obscure, in the remotest corner… God and you!

—Now, apart from the idea of missionary work in Japan, the thought of just such a hidden and sacrificed life has come to your mind. But if, free from other holy natural obligations, you were to try to “hide away” in a religious institution, assuming that was not your vocation, you would not be happy. You would lack peace; because you would have done your own will, not God’s.

—Your “vocation”, in that case, would deserve another name: it would be a defection. It would not be the result of divine inspiration, but of sheer human reluctance to face the coming struggle. And that would never do!

Meus es tu — you are mine, the Lord has declared to you.

—To think that God, who is all beauty and all wisdom, all splendour and all goodness, should say to you that you are his…! and then, after all this, you can’t bring yourself to respond to him!