Oftentimes, in pastoral conversations, the question of knowing or discerning what precisely it is that God wants us to do arises. Sometimes, the question comes due to the experience of confusion; at other times, it is provoked by boredom or even missteps in life. To the surprise of some, my answer tends toward a confident simplicity: God wants you to be a saint.

Understandably, this response can leave the questioner unsatisfied and certainly unresolved because, more than likely, the question seeks less of what God actually wants and more of what we want God to want in our lives. Perhaps a failure experienced is the prompt for this question, or maybe it is the haunting feeling of life not exactly living up to what we expected it to be. Another cause for this question might actually be an earnest desire to know what God wants us to do for Him or for His kingdom or cause or mission or however else we may think of articulating some holy function in life. However we articulate it, we often describe it with words of notability, significance, and action.

Here, Scripture offers us an exemplar of what it is to truly satisfy this question: Mary of Bethany.

We know very little of her other than she is from a village near Jerusalem, Bethany, and shares a strong sibling bond with her sister, Martha, and her brother, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the grave. Beyond these slivers of biographical detail, Scripture introduces us to a woman of saintly character, recognized as a model of deep faith, devotion, and love for Christ. Three times, we discover Mary located at Jesus’ feet, solely devoted to him. First, she is at his feet as a devoted disciple lost in his teaching. After her brother dies, Mary falls at Jesus’ feet, lost in her tears; Jesus responds with his own tears. And it is Mary who anoints Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume and then lowers her hair to wipe his feet, an act of love and devotion that foreshadows his death and burial.

Identity and vocation can easily get confused. What God wants most of us is concerned with who we are, not what we do. The latter can be a myriad of noble things from which good can come, but it is the former that satisfies God’s desire. In his letter to the believers at Philippi, St Paul knows this well in saying, Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. This activity of pressing on is a life born of the Spirit, a new creation made to be all that God desires each of us to be: a saint. This is a life of holiness and devotion to God. To put it simply, all else that we do in this life is certainly downstream from saintliness.