When I was young, a priest spoke of Our Lady with these words: “The greatest prayer you can offer in this life is for the grace to give the Holy Spirit the freedom to do with, in, and through you whatever He wishes, as Our Lady did in her Fiat. She simply wrote God a blank check and let Him fill in the amount, signing her name at the bottom.” I thought of this a lot and wanted to make this prayer my own.

Born in Cincinnati, I grew up in Anderson Township, was baptized at Immaculate Heart of Mary, and later attended St. Thomas More in Withamsville, where I made my First Communion and Confirmation. As a child, I accompanied my grandmother Rose Marie to her Legion of Mary meetings and wove crowns of flowers there for Our Lady’s statue. As I grew, I often joined her for daily Mass. My grandmother did not talk a lot about the faith, but she lived it deeply. I learned from her example.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, Grandmother’s best friend joined the Little Sisters of the Poor and gave my grandparents all of her religious books. Around this time, the Pilgrim Virgin statue of Our Lady of Fatima came to St. Thomas More church. While I cannot fully describe what took place, it was as if her maternal hand took hold of my heart. After this encounter, I often found myself in my grandparents’ basement reading about the saints’ lives and asking, “Who is Jesus Christ to me? Would I die for Him? What is the point of my life? Who is God?”

One Friday evening in a prayer group at St. Joseph’s, two sisters from the Blue Army Shrine in New Jersey were passing through and shared that they were taking young girls to Fatima. I turned to my mom and said, “I think I’m supposed to go to Fatima,” not fully knowing what that meant. My mother looked at my 12-year- old self and said, “We’ll see.” Even though I was underage, my mother and the sisters allowed me to go.

At the Cova de Ira, a sister instructed us to ask Our Lady what she wanted of us, as the children of Fatima did—I felt that God was asking for everything I had. At a saint’s tomb we heard about Pope Saint John Paul II’s reminder of “the universal call to holiness.” I had thought that saints were far above and beyond the rest of us, but I realized that day that a saint was simply a true friend of God, a great lover, and that the only perfection worth desiring is that of the heart.

I graduated from Anderson High School in 1998, led a normal teenage life full of activities and challenges, then entered the convent in New Jersey. After two and a half years, I transferred to a Carmelite cloister, where I loved the quiet and hidden life. Seventeen years later, however, I felt a tug at my heart, and the need to respond to “a call within a call” coincided with many changes in my community.

I have learned never to tell God what you do not want to do. He may ask you to set out into the deep and do that very thing for which you do not feel worthy or qualified. Without surety and without safety nets, I returned to Cincinnati. I didn’t know what Wi-Fi was; I didn’t have a driver’s license; I’d never written a check. But I knew that we no longer lived in a Christian culture and our youth needed religious to inspire and direct, as I was blessed to experience in my own adolescence. With permission from my Order and a blessing from Archbishop Schnurr to discern, here I am still—26 years later—with a community of women striving to build something beautiful for God and for your families: one heart, and sometimes one brick, at a time.

This article appeared in the May 2025 edition of The Catholic Telegraph Magazine. For your complimentary subscription, click here.