She was silent for a brief moment, then reflected, "So you'll just have God wait until you are ready."

As I reflect on my being called to be a sister, my awareness takes me back to the first year in Mott Lincoln High School. The Home Economics teacher asked each of us to write three choices for our professional life. My list read nurse, teacher, sister.

Throughout high school I never verbalized this third choice to anyone, nor did I consciously consider it myself.

I believe it remained in the back of my mind until the second year I was in nurses training in Bismarck. Several of the instructors were Benedictine Sisters, and one in particular was graced with a keen intuition in relation to me as a student. She asked to see me in her office on one occasion, and asked me the reason for being "preoccupied." I told her I had been thinking about being a sister.

She asked, "When are you thinking of checking out this possibility?"

I responded, "I thought 1'd wait until after graduating."

She was silent for a brief moment, then reflected, "So you'll just have God wait until you are ready."

I awakened to this reality and said, "I never thought of it that way." Within 24 hours, I was at Annunciation Monastery to visit the Prioress, and in the next 24 hours I found myself fitted with a blue dress and being received as a postulant along with 10 other young women.

Prayer, community and service are primary values for me. These values maintain and sustain my relationship with God, with community and with persons in the broader community. The words of Thomas Merton give expression to the strength and hope with me: "True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation."