We are continuing to celebrate our soon-to-be-Reverends, who are being ordained this week. We are sharing two stories a day in the lead-up to the Ordination of Deacons service on Sunday. This morning’s story comes from Emily-Grace Sainsbury.
How was Emily-Grace called?
When I was very little, I wanted to be a ‘weathercaster’, until I discovered that was a career in science. Moving up to secondary school, I found that I did not, in fact, like science much! It was genuinely that realisation that first got me thinking about what my vocation really was.
My mum was in ordained parish ministry, and she gave me an inspiring example of what that could look like. So, ‘being a vicar’ first began as an idea of a job that my budding passions, skills and values might allow me to love doing. Looking back, it was an answer to the question, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ long before I had any way of expressing a calling.
I remember thinking that I couldn’t tell people I wanted to be a vicar because I’d need some dramatic story about a dream, a vision, or hearing God’s audible voice for them, and I had experienced none of those things. Yet, as I became more involved in church life as a teenager, joining rotas, chairing Leicester’s Bishops’ Youth Council, and serving as a Deanery Synod rep, people around me began to casually affirm this sense of calling. Gradually, I realised that perhaps I had given myself too much credit…maybe this was not something thirteen-year-old me had simply ‘worked out’. If God had given me these passions, values and skills…perhaps that was because this was what God was calling me to do!
After finishing school, I studied Comedy: Performance and Production at Winchester University, then entered the formal discernment process while working with the Franciscan community at Ladywell Convent, in hospitality, pastoral care, and later retreat centre ministry. I never went on to have the dramatic calling I once thought was necessary, but came to understand my vocation to priesthood as the centre of a Venn diagram, where my passions, values and skills overlap, and my calling as a magnetic force towards it, growing stronger both because of, and despite, all I have experienced since.
Whilst there have certainly been times during my training when I have felt far less effortlessly confident that God has equipped me for this than I did at 13, God has continued to provide opportunities for formation in surprising places. So, my encouragement is this: you could always be more ready before you begin, and you could always have more experience to draw on, but that will never stop being true. Hold that reality honestly, and in humility, but do not let it be an excuse!
‘I have done what is mine to do; may Christ teach you what is yours.’
St Francis