Testimonies - Sr. Barbara Wells

At a time in life when people usually begin to wind down their careers and to wind up for retirement, I am beginning my religious life as a temporary professed, Sister of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd. How did I get from there to here, you might ask? There is a saying, God writes straight with crooked lines and that is how I view my own journey. I may have had some inner stirrings of the call to religious life when I was 14 years old, but I don't think I recognized it as such. In my own case, it allowed me to travel with God, the lines which He had mapped out for me and in retrospect, I can re-recognize God's presence in my past, sometimes silently and at other times, not so silently.

Growing up in a traditionally Catholic family on the east coast of Canada, I had attended Catholic schools and trained as a nurse at a Catholic hospital. My social life included dating and this lead to a courtship, the Catholic pre-marriage course and marriage. I was happy and when my son was born, I was delighted to become a mother.

As well, I continued to be active in my nursing career. As a younger woman, wife and mother, I did not expect to become a nun and I have since discovered that God oversees our lives and nothing happens by coincidence. I met Sister Theresa, a Good Shepherd Sister, while doing volunteer parish work and through her I began to know the congregation. We became friends because I discovered we had a similar interest in writing poetry about God and creation. When she invited me to attend a meeting of a group of lay people at the convent, the Lay Associates of the Good Shepherd, I could not have imagined where this would lead me. I became captivated by the charism of St. Mary Euphrasia, mother foundress and St. John Eudes, spiritual father, of the congregation. It added a new dimension to my own life and I remained active in this lay group for eleven years. Then I decided to join the Companions of the Good Shepherd, another of the congregation's lay groups and for three more years felt drawn closer still to the heart of the Good Shepherd. It was at this time, that I became a widow unexpectedly and I walked another of those straight but crooked lines with God.

I became more involved in volunteer and parish work. This lead me into work with an out-of-the-cold program and prison visitation. My son married a wonderful young woman and I became a grandmother twice and felt really blessed and happy about it. I did all the grandmotherly things and remain close to them. Yet despite all of this, I felt there was supposed to be more to my life and I continued to pray about it and then spoke to my parish priest. In July, 2000, I felt God's call in my heart and knew I had to act on it immediately. I refer to it as my decision 2000 because the discovery of this vocation filled me with a new kind of joy I had never experienced before. This invitation would radically change the rest of my life and thus challenged and stretched me. I knew it was a call to Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, because all indications pointed in that direction. I quietly met with the sister in charge of my lay group and waited for the next steps in the application process. During my initial interviews and assessments, it was decided that even though I was in my late 50's, my lengthy history with the congregation was viewed as an asset and therefore, I could be accepted as a candidate. I chose to do these things quietly and entered a discernment process and upon its completion, I discussed it with my family and found that God had been there before me and prepared their hearts to receive my news and accept my decision. This was reaffirming for me. I gradually resigned from my other parish and professional commitments and took an early retirement from a career in healthcare.

On June 27, 2004, after a process of intense formation and spiritual direction with on-going transformation, I made my First Religious Profession in the congregation. The charism and mission of reconciliation expressed through our fourth vow of zeal, (most congregations only have three vows) is a vocation that allows me to help others to know the joy of being loved by God. I recognized this call to the congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, to be needed in today's world and I am grateful to God to have been chosen for this noble mission. To see my son, daughter-in-law, my grandson and granddaughter happily participating in the ceremony of my profession, was God's gift to me. I love my vocation and feel I am in the right place at the right time in my life. You, who are now reading my vocation story, do you feel that God is calling you too?

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