God doesn’t typically answer life-discernment questions in one fell swoop. The answers may take decades — particularly when the questions grow from a seed planted in childhood.
Mary Steinbicker’s journey from Falls Church to the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Malvern, Pa., took years to discern God’s continual raindrops of truth that finally filled her bucket with the answer.
“It has felt more like an accumulation of thousands of tiny little things that all add up to one beautiful picture,” said Steinbicker, who entered the IHM Sisters last month after a lifetime of witnessing the order’s constant presence.
Steinbicker attended St. James Church in Falls Church, where the IHM Sisters have served for more than 100 years. She later studied at Immaculata University in Immaculata, Pa., which is led by the IHM Sisters. She says her process of discernment began at age 5.
“Religious life has been on my heart since kindergarten, which has certainly made discernment its own journey to say the least,” she said.
“I’m really blessed to have grown up in a household where my mother is actually a convert to Catholicism. She converted the year I was born. My mother always made it very clear that she wanted what God wanted for us, even if she didn’t fully understand what religious life even meant.”
Steinbicker admitted that the continual presence of discernment at a young age is a hard concept to grasp while you’re growing up.
“You’re just trying to figure out who God is, and that’s a question that kind of accompanies us through our entire lives. I spent a lot of my middle and high school years wrestling, and for me, that’s been incredibly fruitful with this deep sense of peace and joy that really solidified me in those early stirrings,” she said.
“If I could say anything to young people out there who maybe started to think about this, give yourself grace and to wrestle, but to know that God’s never going to force you into something that you haven’t freely chosen and desired.”
Steinbicker attended the diocesan FIAT Summer Camp in 2023. Held every July at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmittsburg, Md., it offers young women a one-week encounter in community, which gives God room and encouragement in their discernment of religious life.
“I think one of the things that I learned toward the end of high school and beginning college is that you really can’t do discernment alone. God’s obviously involved, but having people who can help you kind of unravel the tangles that sometimes appear internally is very helpful,” she said.
Steinbicker, who was a cross-country runner at Immaculata, added that for anyone entering discernment, God can bring longer-form accompaniment to not only ease the process, but help root your spirit and grow in finding your true calling.
While a peer leader with Immaculata’s Campus Ministry, she met Amanda Bielat, the group’s assistant director who was simultaneously discerning religious life.
Last month, Bielat and Steinbicker joined the IHM Sisters together. They credit their friendship as a key piece of God’s movements behind their big, parallel steps into religious life.
“It’s kind of a wonderful thing when you realize that the person that you’re having wonderful conversations with, and has a lot of your shared values, is also interested in the same exact community that you’re interested in,” Steinbicker said. “Lo and behold, you both show up the same year. That is just an example of God’s providence.”
Steinbicker enters her postulant year, a year of discovering what the order calls “the purpose of community as a witnessing to Christ by offering herself, her gifts and her potential to Him” while discerning their vocation. It’s her first year in an eight-year passage before fully entering into the order.
While some might focus on what she’s losing by pursuing religious life and fully giving herself to Christ in this vocation, Steinbicker sees it differently.
“A lot of people have this impression that there’s a great sacrifice that’s going on there,” she said. “I guess it could certainly seem that way, but my mind has been on all the things that I’ve gained in the past couple weeks, as opposed to the things that someone might see as a loss.”
“It feels like coming home.”
Sorgi is a freelancer in the Philadelphia area.