Good Lord, I hope I can help. I type that because I know this fight. I have a busy, busy brain. I have a busy, busy life, and I have no shortage of experts all around me telling me how a priest should be, what a priest should preach on, how a priest should act. I often tell people that everyone is an expert on priesthood except me. 

For years, I’ve wrestled with this. I have spent so much time in prayer and reading and thinking, trying to figure out how to be holy – how to be the priest that Jesus wants me to be.

To me, your question is exactly what all of us who want to love Jesus struggle with, and so I’m blessed to share with you what I’ve learned so far.

The foundation of the answer is in remembering that God is your judge.

Humans look at you and see what you are doing. The only information they know about you is the information you give them. God looks at you and sees it all: your intention, your desire, your struggles. He sees you at the deepest part of you and he will be the one to judge you. You will not be judged by that gal who wrote a book. You will not be judged by the opinionated person with a podcast. You will be judged by God and God alone. This is who you want to make happy. This is who you want to approve of you.

And here is the good news: God approves of you. He delights in you. He has stacked the deck in favor of you getting to heaven. Your goal is to pray for the grace to be humble, prayerful and concerned with the poor and vulnerable. Your goal is to make sure you call on the Holy Spirit to help you live like Jesus.

It’s also important to remember that you are not called to every fight. The reason God made so many of us and made us all so different is because one person can’t do it all. Some are called to pro-life ministry, some are called to visit the sick or imprisoned. I’ve noticed that some folks take their personal call from God and assume it should apply to everyone. Be careful of those who do so; they usually mean well, but they can also make it seem as though their specific pursuit is the only one that truly matters. This leads me to my next point: Passion does not equal rightness.

I love passionate people: I’m one of them! But if I have learned anything about us passionate people it’s that we need to be careful of pretending that just because we feel strongly about something, everyone else should. Passionate people can convince us that their call should be ours as well, and we want to be sure and keep our eyes on that.

It’s a balance between challenging ourselves to be holy, and not confusing holiness with pretending we are God’s Only Answer to each and every problem.

In terms of what we believe and how it all works, the crazy part is this: In the end, it’s pretty simple. When you strip away the layers, quiet the noise and immerse yourself in Scripture and the catechism, you can soak in the core of it all and the core of it all is this:

We believe that God is a community of life and love. We believe that this community of life and love created the human race. This Trinity of Persons made humans for one purpose – to love. You could quite literally say that we were created by Love, for love, to love.

This is the core of our existence: LOVE.

The problem is that at some point, we humans “broke rank” and decided that we would go our own way. We decided to disobey God and in the process, our human nature was broken.

In the breaking of our human nature, we became self-obsessed. We moved God off his throne and placed ourselves there.

Jesus came to take on that human nature, restore it and give us victory over the two primary fruits of the breaking of human nature: sin and death.

He took on our sin and put it to death with him on the cross.

He rose from the dead and made heaven a possibility for us.

He did this because he is Love and could quite literally do no other.

For you and me, then, our life is a response to this incredible love. It’s an awareness of how we can distort what love is and in the process, draw ourselves away from God.

For we who long to love God, the noise can drown out the simple truth: Our faith is a response of Love to love. We are called each day to think of and act on the word Love, growing in our understanding of how God loves, how we love and how the gap between that is filled with mercy and grace. We can never, at any point, grow content with our understanding of love. We can never say “I’ve done it!” There is more of love and less of us to throw into every equation.

If we spend our life doing nothing but reflecting on what love is and how to love like God, we will be saints.

In the end, I hope that you can take a breath today and be at peace, knowing that God sees you. He sees what you do, and why you do it. He sees how much you want to follow him and love him well, and this is all he needs to get you closer to him each day.

Love God, grow in love and be at peace.