Tracy Earl Welliver, MTS, with Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church said she believed saints to be "larger than life people." | Unsplash
Tracy Earl Welliver, MTS, with Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Morton, Illinois said she believed saints to be "larger than life people," according to the church bulletin.
"Growing up, I thought saints were larger than life people with extraordinary stories," she wrote in the bulletin. "The thought that I could one day be revered as a saint by anyone seemed crazy. I wrote my essays on different saints every year in Catholic school right around All Saints Day. These were stories about people I had never met, and I assumed I would never meet anyone like them going forward."
But Welliver said she realizes how wrong she was as a child.
"I have met many people in my life that I would call living saints," she writes in the bulletin. "They are holy people who give all of themselves to God and others in profound ways. Their relationship with Jesus is evident and they live their lives in ways that people witness the transformative power of love. As a child I was wrong about saints, but even more importantly, I didn’t fully realize that all of us are called to be saints. Me, a saint? Holiness is not something simply studied in books. It is the way of life we are all called to live. The call comes from Jesus Christ and each of us must respond. If we are still thinking like children, we may choose to stay silent and live accordingly. If we are more mature in our faith then we might not only respond, we might one day have a school child write a report about us."