Called to Holiness

I asked a group of middle school girls, “Who wants to be a saint?” Tentatively two of the ten raised their hands, and the rest were very clearly shaking their heads "no."

The reasons were all about the same – Sainthood is for people who are really holy, who do a lot for others, and who are pretty perfect. An eighty-year-old Mother Theresa would never fit into the middle school social scene, and they had no interest in living that way.

Don’t we see sainthood in a similar way? For so many of us, it’s intimidating and totally out of reach.

The problem is that we’re looking at it all wrong. A saint is someone who is in heaven. The ones we hear about are the ones that we have know are in heaven because they have passed certain tests that help us trust that it is true.

When I asked how many of the middle schoolers would like to go to heaven, they all raised their hands with confidence. No one wanted to be left out of that.

We need to live a life of holiness, and it doesn’t always look like the superstars. For most of us, it’s much more simple and gets a lot less press.

The next few days, I’m going to lead you through a few simple steps to get you walking on that road to holiness. It’s not as hard as you would think.

Photo: B Pedretti