Friends are everything to Missionaries of God’s Love Sister Isobel Stewart. They were by her side as the former primary school teacher discerned the call to religious life and remain there now as she navigates her new life. Source: Melbourne Catholic.
Sr Isobel’s path to religious life began with a deepening of her faith before the COVID pandemic. Late in 2019, she attended a Summer School of Evangelisation, a week-long retreat where she first encountered the MGL Sisters.
“It was really powerful for me to see a vibrant group of both lay people and religious who were really alive in their faith,” she said.
“They had this joy that was very much connected to their faith. And I wanted it.”
She took a year off to do more in her faith, although activity was curtailed by lockdowns.
Once the world opened up again, Sr Isobel prepared to go back to teaching, but found she did not want to. There was no epiphany, however, and her discernment gradually unfolded through the year.
It was through friendship that her calling became clearer. In a phone call with a close friend – herself an MGL sister – Sr Isobel was seeking advice on whether to take up an offer of a job that, on paper, seemed perfect but left her feeling unsettled.
Her friend asked her: “Instead of thinking about what job to take, what do you actually want for your life? If you were to die tomorrow, what would you have wished that you did with your life?”
Sr Isobel took a moment to write what she describes as a sort of prayer focused on her life and her hopes and dreams, while her friend prayed for her.
“At the end of that, she said, ‘Okay, looking at your list of your heart’s desires and what you want to do with life, does that point you to one of those jobs?’ And I was just in silence on the end of the phone because I was like, ‘Umm, it doesn’t point me to a job’.”
Another friend, Jenelle, said she was “taken aback” when Isobel first told her she was joining the MGL Sisters but now “I couldn’t see it any differently. It just suits her so much”.
Visiting Sr Isobel at the MGL Sisters’ centre in Canberra confirmed Jenelle’s sense that her friend had made the right choice. “It’s like constant sisterhood all the time … It just was really where she belonged.”
FULL STORY
‘That’s so you’: how friendship shaped one woman’s call to religious life (Melbourne Catholic)
