Listen to God, desires of heart, campus minister says
By Fr. Kent Bowlds
“If you had everything you ever wanted, right when you wanted it, what would you have now that you didn’t really need?”
“Probably about seven ex-husbands!” was Fran Lavelle’s answer to the question above, posed in a homily she heard 15 years ago during a time when she was asking where God might be calling her next, and beginning to realize even more the difference between wants and needs.
She was living the dream she had since childhood — to be involved in politics — by working as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. “That job was an amazing gift . . . I felt so blessed, that in my early twenty’s God handed me on a silver platter everything my heart had ever desired.”
The pay was good and the work fulfilling, though it gradually consumed more of Fran’s life; she used to read three newspapers every morning to stay on top of things, and kept an eye on C-Span television even during dinner parties. She made good friends and had a great parish family; she matured and came to know herself better.
But though life was good and she never felt morally compromised by her job, Fran had a growing sense that there had to be something more to the legacy she would leave to the world — a feeling that came to a climactic turning point the day her father died suddenly from a heart attack with no prior warnings at the age of 65, just nine months after his retirement.
“I’ve always believed that on the worst day of your life there are 10,000 graces, if you look for them,” Fran says, “and my dad taught me, even in death, by the beautiful, loving way he had lived his life, so I knew that I didn’t want to put off until my retirement a life fully lived with integrity, honesty, and joy, being the person that God was calling me to be.”
Fran returned to her home in Ohio, helped her mother for a year, and thought and prayed about what she would do next, which led to a three-year stint as a lay missionary with the Glenmary Sisters, working in rural western Kentucky — tutoring adults, visiting the elderly, serving at a soup kitchen, and doing parish ministry. “It was an incredible gift, completely opposite from my life in Washington.”
And when she felt again it was time for a change, Fran thought perhaps she could find a way to combine her political advocacy skills with her love for children, the elderly, and the poor.
But first, not really wanting to do so, she honored her mother’s wishes by sending a resume to St. Joseph Parish in Starkville; a friend of Fran’s mother had seen their ad for a campus minister in Mississippi Catholic.
Fran reluctantly responded to the invitation to come for an interview, praying, “God, I will go there and interview with that nice priest and then you can go about finding me my real job.”
Returning home Fran prayed again, “Lord, if that is where you want me to be, then open the door.” Four days later, “Father Mike O’Brien called and said the words that forever changed the course of my life — ‘Fran, how would you like to move to Mississippi?’ — and I said ‘yes’ — without even negotiating salary, because I knew that since I didn’t try to make it happen, it had to be God calling me here.”
When giving advice about discernment to college students, Fran uses her experience of coming to Mississippi. “It was so different from the way I had done things in Washington, where I was always maneuvering behind the scenes to try to make things happen the way I wanted.”
She encourages them to listen well, “something that we are all losing the ability to do, as our lives become more busy and noisy. Prayer is a two-way conversation; we have to listen.”
It involves not only trying to hear what God might be saying, but coming to realize the deepest desires of our own hearts. “I tell the students it applies to things like dating, also.
A lot of times people don’t listen to what their own heart is telling them; they just rush forward, thinking this or that person might be the last one who will ever love them.”
When she is not giving good advice, Fran coordinates Tuesday night dinners and talks, student prayer groups and retreats, service projects, and activities such as the Catholic students’ involvement in intramural sports — “a different sort of evangelization, just letting people know we are present.” She also serves as the Diocesan Director of Campus Ministry. “When asked what I do for a living, I say that I get paid to love people!” (Fran Lavelle can be reached at St. Joseph Church, Starkville, 662-323-2257. falavelle@hotmail.com, “Hearing the Call” is a monthly series of interviews with people who “have welcomed Christ’s call . . . to proclaim the Good News everywhere in the world” (Catechism, par. #3). To submit ideas or comments contact Fr. Kent Bowlds, Vocation Director, website: jacksonvocations.com, 601-944-9844.)
