The Record, January 21, 2010
Marnie McAllister
More than 400 elementary and high school students in the Louisville area learned about vocations from priests and men and women religious during National Vocation Awareness Week Jan. 10-16.
At St. Stephen Martyr School, 2931 Pindell Ave., children as young as kindergarten and up to the eighth grade learned about religious life from Benedictine Sister Michelle Sinkhorn and Passionist Father Justin Nelson.
Sister Sinkhorn told the students about receiving her call to religious life at age 25. She said that until then she’d never thought to ask God what he wanted for her. She always planned to marry and have eight children.
But one thing after another in her life kept pointing her away from married life and toward something unknown, she said.
“I finally prayed to God,” she said. “At 25-years-old it was time for me to pray to God and ask him what he wanted for me.”
She urged her listeners to start sooner than she did.
“Start today or tomorrow,” she told them. “Ask God what he wants for you.”
Father Nelson, who came to Louisville from his native India just three months ago, is associate pastor at St. Agnes Church. He told the students about his vocational call.
“After saying yes to God, God has worked wonders,” he said.
During school one day in 1981 when Father Nelson was a child, a Passionist priest visited his class and spoke about his life as a priest and his mission as a Passionist to “preach Christ crucified on the cross throughout the world,” Father Nelson noted.
The priest also handed out pamphlets that asked the question, “Do you want to preach Christ crucified in India?”
“So I wrote a letter to the priest saying, ‘Yes, I want to preach Christ crucified.’ ”
In 1988, Father Nelson joined the seminary to begin his studies, and he was ordained a priest in 2000.
He has faced two challenges in his formation as a priest. First, Father Nelson said, he was terribly shy and found it unnerving to speak in front of people. Second, learning to speak English proved to be very difficult for him.
Yet, he said, “I can now preach to all people in English.” These, he pointed out, are among the wonders God has worked.
Father Nelson said his service in India has been varied, but it focuses on people who are suffering. He served as a pastor of a poor parish in southern India where he and his community started a school to educate children who worked tending animals in the fields.
He also has engaged in prison ministry in Bangalore — another way of “reaching out to the suffering,” he noted.
In Louisville, in addition to serving at St. Agnes, Father Nelson celebrates Mass and visits prisoners at the Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange, Ky.
The vocation week presentations were sponsored by the Archdiocese of Louisville Vocation Office. Schools can contact the office to schedule a presentation. Another round of talks are being scheduled for this spring.