Looking for Direction

Melissa Presser explains how spiritual direction gave her the answers she was so desperately seeking.

I am four months into my life imploding. Ever been there? You find yourself in a place or space that you didn’t expect to be: unfamiliar territory, unsure of your next move. You’ve prayed, gone to Mass, checked off all of the usual Catholic boxes. But the road is still dry and barren, and you have no answers.

When I became Catholic, I knew that I had found my home on this side of heaven. I was confident in my direction after going through RCIA, but I was unhappy. This unhappiness did not stem from a place of selfishness or from being ungrateful; I just continued to feel a great sense of unease, as if I was still not where I was supposed to be.

And this “dis” ease came mostly from my career as an attorney. I had chosen that path before I was a Christian, and had spent the better part of my secular life trying to get out of it. My dream was always to become a writer, but life took me in a different direction. I wanted out from lawyering on my first day of law school.

Part of my problem was that I was good at it. Not only good, but great. I would express often to the various mentors that served in my life how unhappy I was. But every mentor I had in the legal field told me that I had a gift, that I was so good at what I did, and that I couldn’t quit. But this silent discomfort soon began to bubble up inside me, a feeling that I just could not control. When I became a Christian and then later entered the Catholic Church, this feeling of unhappiness and discontentment did not go away—it only grew worse.

When I entered the Church in 2016, I spent almost every day praying about my career. I mused on my long-lost dream of becoming a full-fledged writer, even though I was freelancing about my faith. I had a very specific personal vision of what I thought my life and career should look like, and in a very unconscious way, I started to seek out two roads: God’s will and my own.

standing at an arrow pointing in 2 directions

We as well-intentioned Catholic women, believing women, often do not realize when we are chasing after our own desires. These things are stealthy and undercover as the world always is, clothed in shiny promises and self-help books and under the guise of getting what we want. On first glance, these words seem harmless and welcoming, but seemingly sent me down a self-spiraling road. That was until I found myself confronted with God’s ask of obedience for me to leave everything that I had behind.

In 2021, I left my job and shut down all the work I had been doing in my ministry. I moved my kids to a different school that was nowhere near us. I changed parishes. There was no aspect of my life that went untouched by God’s hand.

Had I lost everything, or had I found out God’s plan for my life?

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We as well-intentioned Catholic women, believing women, often do not realize when we are chasing after our own desires. #catholicmom

In the midst of the earth-shattering changes that were occurring, God gave me a Spiritual Director. This is something I had been praying for, but just hadn’t happened up until now. And the priest that became my Spiritual Director had been in my life for a long time. But this time was different. This time when he came back to us from his home country of Ghana, I knew God had sent him to me.

God could have chosen to let me alone in the desert while I navigated this tumultuous time in my life, but He didn’t. He sent me Father Peter because He knew I needed him. The mere thought that the God of the universe went halfway around the world to bring Father to me was enough to bring me to my knees. God was not taking away my life: He was giving me His.

boat in a storm

That unsettling discontentment that had followed me all those years, those prayers that I had prayed for God’s will to be done, those questions that I had, that underlying unhappiness were the nudges from the Holy Spirit. These nudges became guides that led me to leave everything behind for the promise of something greater. And as I continued to meet with Father Peter, the boat that I thought was sinking in the middle of the storm became the boat that Jesus entered to calm the wave and the winds. My life began to have a clear direction, session after session, as I took Father’s words and was obedient to the will of God.

I spent the first half of my life doing it my way, trying to chase the dreams that I thought would bring me happiness and fulfillment. It took a spiritual shipwreck for God to show me that happiness and fulfillment can only come through doing His will.