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Ethan and Julie Roberts are two of the FOCUS missionaries at UConn, bringing students on campus to Christ through evangelization, outreach, and discipleship. In August, they united in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. I recently sat down with them to discuss their discernment of their vocation to marriage.
Both Julie and Ethan had transformative experiences with the Lord while in college themselves. Their earlier relationships had not been oriented toward vocational discernment. Neither had understood that the Lord had a vocational call for them—that He had a definitive plan for their lives that would lead to holiness. And that missing optic meant that, for them, dating was more about fun and experiences. “I felt that marriage was just the end goal of a relationship, but that was for adults, and so for me, dating was just practice,” Julie said.
Once they each came to understand Jesus more fully in college, their entire perspective changed. “Meeting Jesus in Confession and the Eucharist changed everything for me,” Ethan recounted. He broke off an ongoing relationship, starting to understand that God actually was calling him to some path of life that would sanctify him. Ethan was not yet sure what the Lord’s call was, but he knew that he needed to find out.
After graduation, both Julie and Ethan joined the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) as missionaries. They themselves had been the beneficiaries of the FOCUS missionaries on their campuses, and they wanted to pay it forward. Many college students across the country have come to fervent faith through the work of campus missionaries over the last 25 years. FOCUS missionaries are trained and assigned to ministry at a particular campus, where they lead Bible studies, provide discipleship, and even just hang out with students. Julie, from New Jersey, and Ethan, from Vermont, were sent to UConn to minister to the students of our state. At UConn, they got to know each other first as colleagues and friends.
Now, FOCUS takes vocation very seriously for its staff. Each FOCUS missionary, in fact, enters into a “dating fast” during their first year of service. In addition to ministering to students on campus, each missionary is supposed to use that time to pray and discern which vocational call the Lord might be asking of them. For Julie, this led to a freedom from having to worry about her vocation for that year. She came to put more faith in the Lord’s desire to reveal her vocation to her. When she got off her dating fast, she was content to follow the Lord’s call wherever it might lead.
Ethan, on the other hand, had been terrified before his dating fast that the Lord might actually be calling him to priesthood or religious life, while he wanted marriage. But the dating fast gave him the opportunity to imagine life in one of the other vocations, and he started to see the attraction of them. As their year of service together progressed, however, Ethan started recognizing his feelings for Julie, and he asked her out as soon as they were both free to date.
From the beginning, Ethan and Julie were very intentional about discerning the vocation to marriage with each other. They had already gotten to know each other during easy and hard times as FOCUS teammates, and now they were each able to contemplate whether or not marriage to the other was God’s call for their life. Julie’s spiritual director gave her two questions to keep in mind as she imagined marrying Ethan: (1) Do you like him? and (2) Are you willing to choose and love him forever? Ethan, meanwhile, began to understand that marriage to Julie was indeed the answer to his vocational discernment when he realized that he was ready to sacrifice the good of the other vocations, which he had truly come to appreciate, for her.
Ethan and Julie are still newlyweds, figuring out what it means to be a spouse committed to the other. But their vocational discernment is over; the Lord has called them to marriage, and they have properly given themselves and received the other in Holy Matrimony. I asked them if they had any pointers for those still discerning a vocation to marriage or elsewhere. They told me to encourage people to repent, to be open to a relationship with the Lord, and to actively search for Him—and He would do the rest.
By Fr. Jeffrey Ellis
Photo Credits: Emily Robitaille