I glanced over at my daughter sitting at the table next to mine. One of my college students raced by, pushing a delighted young child in a toy car. My daughter had made the deliberate choice to sit beside an older woman who had been sitting alone. She was the grandmother of the young child squealing in excitement. I chuckled interiorly as I thought, “babies and old people.” The Lord has given my daughter charisms for ministering to babies and the elderly. It’s been that way since she was very young.
Our daughter is an only child on this side of eternity. Her five brothers and sisters await and intercede for her from heaven. Only children tend to grow up quicker because they spend most of their days with adults. She’s been involved in adult conversations since she was young. It helps that she has an old soul and is more comfortable with adults than she is with her peers.
When she was little, she would beg me to go across the street to visit the elderly woman who took care of her much too wild twin great-grandsons. I would walk out onto our porch to see my daughter reading story books on the swing, while our elderly neighbor listened.
Early on, she was adopted by multiple spiritual grandparents. Some of her closest friends are old enough to be her grandparents. Her pen pal is a Little Sister of the Poor introduced through a mutual priest friend. Elderly people will walk up to her out of nowhere and ask to sit and chat with her. I’ve seen it time and time again. I told her this has all the hallmarks of a charism from the Lord.
I saw this charism on display recently when my 14-year-old, by God’s grace, went into the heart of a grandmother’s suffering. My daughter sat and listened to this woman’s agonized life all on her own, while I chatted away with a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in months. We were there to provide dinner to homeless families. The Lord had a deeper mission for my daughter in that moment.
After quietly listening to this woman throughout dinner, she walked up to me with urgency and asked if I had a Bible. I happened to have mine in the car. We retrieved it, and as I emptied out the prayer cards and papers I had tucked away in it, I noticed one of my last remaining copies of Bob Schuchts Be Healed books, from a “Healing the Whole Person” conference, where I had bought a whole stack to give to my college students. I grabbed the book to give to the woman along with the Bible.
Other than to grab the spiritual materials needed, I didn’t step in; my daughter was doing the Lord’s work—evangelizing to this woman in one of her darkest hours. As I wrote last week, our suffering allows us to enter into the suffering of others. My daughter was equipped for this moment because she has suffered. She’s lost five siblings, known the pain and fear of a seriously ill father, and was nearby when my father breathed his last nearly a year ago. She was able to shed the light of Christ into the darkness of this woman’s life because she knows some of what she’s been through.
This moment was also possible because we are raising our daughter to serve the suffering. We’ve provided dinner to homeless families since she was a baby. She’s been with me when someone needed me for spiritual counsel or called me in crisis. She’s gone with her father to provide furniture and other needs to the poor. She’s been with us while we’ve provided Holy Communion to a friend who nearly died. She spent 11 years—from the time she was in the womb—praying regularly with me at Planned Parenthood. She befriended the daughter of a woman we helped through a crisis pregnancy. Service has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember.
Discipleship is learned side-by-side within the worshipping community at Mass, where it flows outward to our homes and communities. Examples of service begin in the domestic church, in the home. Serving others should be fostered from a young age so that children mature and grow into sacrificial adult disciples who serve the suffering, poor, and lost souls sent to them by Christ.
Our children should learn early that our primary focus should not be on solely secular pursuits. Mature Christian discipleship means serving those in need. It means asking the Lord for the mission He wants to give to our families or to members of our families. We each have a primary vocation, but we also have missions that flow from our baptism. Each person has unique gifts to offer the Church and the world. My daughter is forging her own path with Christ as her guide. Her gifts differ from mine. She can reach people differently from me because of those gifts. We serve the Lord in the manner He has created us to serve.
I did not force my daughter to minister to this woman. She made the choice to go into this woman’s suffering on her own. Her heart was moved with “compassion and pity,” like Our Lord’s, when faced with the immensity of this woman’s suffering. My daughter realized the urgency of the moment and sought to bring Christ into it as much as she was able to in a 1.5-hour visit.
What if our domestic churches were more ordered toward the suffering and the afflicted rather than on dance and soccer? As good as those things are, they must give way to the mission Christ intends for each one of us if we are to grow in holiness. Leisure is a gift from the Lord, but it is not meant to be our primary pursuit. Christ could save countless souls in our communities, if only we realigned our gaze to see as He sees and lead our families into the hearts of lost souls to shed Christ’s light in dark places.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
