College Connection
April 13^th, 2008

The 4^th Sunday of Easter

Notice that in the Gospel this week Jesus first drives out the sheep from where they were and then walks before them leading them to pasture.  Sometimes we may find ourselves in a certain predicament that may seem awful at the time but, in the end, turns out to be not as bad as we had thought it to be in the beginning.  It may be that we have been driven out so that we can be led to a place that we would have never gone to on our own without a nudge.

God bless and keep you all,
 

Fr. John Linden

Parochial Vicar
 
 

Jesus said:
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate
but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber.
But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice,
as the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has driven out all his own,
he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him,
because they recognize his voice.
But they will not follow a stranger;
they will run away from him,
because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.”
Although Jesus used this figure of speech,
the Pharisees did not realize what he was trying to tell them.

So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
I am the gate for the sheep.
All who came before me are thieves and robbers,
but the sheep did not listen to them.
I am the gate.
Whoever enters through me will be saved,
and will come in and go out and find pasture.
A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy;
I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

The Gospel of the Lord.
 
 

My first stint in college came in 1985 (probably before most of you were even born).  I went to college because my buddies went there and they went there because, among other reasons, it was a party school (I shall refrain from revealing which school it was).  I had little focus and few regards for my future at the time. I just went because that was what you were supposed to do when you left high school.

That lasted two trimesters and I then received a letter stating that they needed my dorm room for someone else.  In other words, I got the boot.  I wasn’t concerned at the time about maintaining grades or about preparing for my future life in the world.  I soon got another kick in the pants when I realized that I was, in fact, going to be in the world whether I was ready to be or not.  The future had become the present way faster than it was supposed to.

No better lesson had I learned in life up to that point then I did through that unexpected letter.  I had to come to terms with reality, a reality that was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not.  The next ten years of floundering around taught me, through many ups and downs, where to turn in this world when I couldn’t make things happen exactly the way that I had planned them to.

I slowly learned to pray again like I had when I was a boy.  In fact, I learned, bit by bit, to pray like a man.  The more I prayed, the more things in my life made sense to me.  I then began to find my way through life by seeing a lot more meaning in it.  That meaning was coming from Him who is the source of life.  I began to realize that I had a vocation to point out this source to others.

He was the shepherd that had driven me out of my lethargy and was leading me on to greener and greener pastures.  But he had also asked me to turn back at certain times and to turn aside at other times and to invite and collect other sheep out on their own trying to secure their own futures, or like I had been, not even concerned about such things.

This week is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations.  The first prayer we might all want to start with may indeed be for the discernment of our own vocation in this world.