Waiting, Disappointment, and the Interior Work of Vocational Readiness

Elizabeth Busby works regularly with young Catholic adults navigating vocational discernment, and she names the wound that underlies most of their confusion: the fear of being overlooked. Not passed over by a particular person, but forgotten by God. In a recent interview with the National Catholic Register, she addressed this fear directly, telling readers: "God does love you. He has not forgotten you, and he has not abandoned you."[^1]

That assurance is a theological claim, and it reframes the entire experience of waiting.

The experience of being overlooked

The feeling of being overlooked is among the more corrosive experiences in young adult life. Everyone else appears to be moving forward. Engagements accumulate in the social feed. The liturgical calendar fills with weddings. And a person sits with the question of whether something is wrong with them, whether they have misread the signs, whether God's plan includes them at all.

Busby names this experience because it is so often left unnamed. The person suffering it frequently cannot distinguish between a spiritual trial, a psychological wound, and simple circumstance. All three may be present at once. What matters is what the waiting produces in them.

The Catholic tradition has always understood suffering as a potential site of encounter rather than evidence of divine absence. That claim requires a framework for understanding what the encounter is meant to accomplish, and the courage to let it do its work rather than escaping into resentment or anxiety.

The question Busby poses is this: can you suffer disappointment well? Disappointment reveals the structure of a person's interior life. It shows whether their identity rests on a stable foundation or whether it shifts with circumstance. It shows whether they can remain open to another person or whether they have begun to close down in self-protection — whether, in short, they are becoming capable of love.

Detachment as preparation

One of the more misunderstood movements in vocational formation is what the tradition calls detachment. It is not indifference. It is not the suppression of desire. It is the purification of desire, the disciplining of longing so that it is ordered rather than compulsive.

Busby identifies one of the central obstacles to healthy discernment as the tendency among candidates for marriage to believe, as she puts it, that "there is only one perfect person, which can paralyze them."[^1] That paralysis is a symptom of disordered attachment: attachment to a particular outcome, to a particular image of how life should unfold, rather than to the person of Christ and the freedom that relationship provides.

Thomas Aquinas observed that grace builds on nature. A person who cannot tolerate uncertainty, who cannot hold an open question in prayer without forcing premature resolution, is not yet free enough to make a genuine vocational commitment. They will choose from fear rather than love, and fear is not a foundation for marriage.

Detachment, properly understood, is the interior condition that makes genuine seeking possible. It allows a person to be sought by the Lord rather than simply demanding that the Lord confirm what they have already decided. John of the Cross describes the passive purifications of the soul not as punishments but as preparations — the slow removal of what the person clings to so that they can receive what they cannot manufacture for themselves.[^2]

The period of waiting is not wasted time. It is precisely the time in which detachment is either formed or refused.

Being sought

Busby draws on her formation as both therapist and ministry leader through Discerning Marriage, an initiative of the Theology of the Body Institute, and through "Ignite Hope," a retreat for young adults in different stages of vocational discernment.[^1] What her dual formation allows her to see is that the search for a spouse cannot be separated from a prior movement: the experience of being sought by God.

Karol Wojtyla, writing in Love and Responsibility, distinguishes love from mere attraction by its direction of attention. Love moves toward the good of the other. It is a choice sustained by habit, formed in freedom, and directed by will.[^3] A person who has not experienced being loved in this way — who has not allowed God's patient pursuit of them to become the ground of their identity — will struggle to offer this kind of love to another person. They will seek to be filled rather than to give.

The human person, in the Catholic understanding, does not construct identity but receives and discovers it. This is not passivity; it requires searching, freedom, and response. But it means that the question of who one is called to love is inseparable from the question of who one is. Formation for love is formation of the self.

Busby's counsel to seek "someone who is in love with the Lord" is not a pious qualifier added to a list of desirable traits.[^1] A person whose identity is anchored in a relationship with God brings a different quality of presence to human relationships. They are less likely to require a partner to fill what no human relationship can bear, and more likely to love from abundance rather than need.

Angustia and the structure of readiness

The Spanish word angustia has no clean English equivalent. It names a tightening, a constriction of the interior, a state in which the person cannot breathe freely because fear has occupied the space where hope should be. It is the experience that most directly undermines vocational readiness.

Busby observes that discernment distorted by fear produces a person who is not free: "if you're afraid God will take marriage away, you're not free to say 'Yes' to it."[^1] A yes made under the pressure of anxiety or resentment is a transaction, not a free gift.

Hans Urs von Balthasar writes in The Christian and Anxiety that Christian existence is characterized not by the absence of anxiety but by its transformation: the finite creature's fear is taken up into the Son's movement of trust toward the Father, and what was constriction becomes openness.[^4] That transformation does not happen automatically. It happens through the repeated practice of surrender in small circumstances, which is exactly what the waiting period provides.

Can a person receive a rejection without collapsing? Can they hold a disappointment without converting it into a narrative of unworthiness? Can they return, after a loss, to prayer rather than withdrawal? These capacities are not peripheral to vocational readiness. They are its substance.

The person who has learned to suffer disappointment without fear, without resentment, without angustia, has learned something essential about love: that it is not contingent on return. That is the love the vocation of marriage requires, and the waiting period is where it is either formed or refused.

References

[^1]: Elizabeth Busby, interviewed by Gigi Duncan, "Date the Catholic Way: Practical Guidance for Young Catholics Navigating Relationships, Discernment and God's Timing," National Catholic Register, July 6, 2026. [^2]: John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1990), Book I, chs. 8–14. [^3]: Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H.T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 73–100. [^4]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety, trans. Dennis D. Martin and Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 89–112.