Running the Race

When I was working at the Archdiocese of Chicago, I met some really wonderful, holy people. One of them is Alicia. She and I had many great conversations about authentic femininity, pro-life issues, and discernment of vocation. When we met she was discerning religious life, and I was recently engaged to Atticus.

Alicia really challenged me to continue growing in my faith, and we had some great fun times together too!

My friend wants with all of her heart to enter a religious vocation and give her life to Jesus and the Church. She felt called, along with a dear Franciscan priest and some others, to begin a community at the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago. The only problem? Alicia’s crippling $90,000+ of debt from her undergrad degree at Loyola. Most religious orders will not accept someone who has a lot of debt upon entering. Especially not an order that is trying to form for the first time. Which means, essentially, that Alicia has to wait to enter her vocation until she has paid off all of her student loan debt.

Imagine if we had to wait to get married until all of our debts were paid off! I’d be single until I was 40.

Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter, Alicia decided to do something about this. She signed up to run a half-marathon, and solicited people to sponsor her to run, in order to apply that money to paying off her debt and making her vocation dream closer to reality; thus the Nun Run was born!

Alicia has run several races since last summer, and I’m so excited to say that today she has less than $25,000 of her debt left to pay off before she can realize her vocation and enter the novitiate!

Since last summer Alicia’s story has been in several national newspapers as well as NPR. Her story has even been in several European publications!

I’ve included a link to her website, and I do hope you’ll take a look at it. She is such a beautiful, faith-filled woman, and with all the garbage out there about the Church these days, I just had to share something positive that’s going on.

Here’s the video from last summer that the Chicago Tribune posted on their site about the Nun Run. I cannot figure out how to embed it for the life of me, so please, please click the link!

God bless you in your vocation Alicia!