Margot's devil still occasionally spoke to her, usually trying to tempt her into a party when she had an important lecture the following day or sometimes telling her to think about things that she no longer wanted to think about. Such as just how beautiful the second year student that she bumped into yesterday was or how good it would feel to flirt, just a little bit, with the young doctor at the training hospital.
It was different today. Margot always tried hard not to listen to her devil because she had learned through bitter experience that the end result was always bad. Over the years she had thought about other analogies, but her devil was the best way to describe that impulse to just do something and let nature take over rather than thinking through her actions first. Not listening to her devil had been so easy when it was small temptations, easily defeated, and as the years went by his voice had become quieter.
That was why it was quite a shock for Margot when she realised that she had spent the past fifteen minutes thinking about ways to put off joining the Order of Blue Nuns rather than reading her neurology text.
It was not a lack of faith or vocation. Margot had always felt called to serve God in some way and it seemed right to use her natural skills and inclinations towards medicine in that goal. The God that she loved and worshipped was not a God that used people to sow harvests or leave the world if their gifts took them in other directions. Her God demanded that she use her gifts to provide help and relief to others because they were the gifts that he had given her.
Margot put her pen down and sat back, trying to work through her feelings with logic and insight instead of raw emotion.
She wanted to take her skills to places that needed her. That was without question.
Yet taking holy orders, the act of committing every aspect of her life to God, terrified her if she examined it too deeply.
It had not terrified her when she was eighteen. It had felt like exactly the right thing to do, the thing that God wanted for her and had been whispering in her ear for years even while her devil was trying to shout over Him. How had time changed her so much?
Not for the first time, Margot missed her sisters. Their three years together in Oxford had been almost like an extension of their childhood, a beautiful free time where they could forget that one day their lives would separate. Len had married three days after her graduation and lived with Reggie near their mother. Con had returned to Switzerland and her first book had been published six months ago. Only Margot had stayed in Oxford, finishing her medical training and without her sisters for the first time since she moved to Canada with Aunt Madge.
The loneliness had been dreadful for the first months, worse than anything she had experienced before. At least in Canada there had been cousins and the prospect that she would eventually be reunited with the rest of her family. Here there were friends, but even the closest of friends could not replace sisters.
Margot glanced at the photo of Len and Con that sat on one corner of her cluttered desk and then picked up the other photo frame, a posed shot of Emerence with her first daughter.
Would this loneliness be her life forever?
Margot sighed and put the photo down. The sound of people and bicycle bells drifted up through the open window of her tiny study and she barely considered for a moment before grabbing her handbag and coat with decisive movements.
***
It was perhaps inevitable that Margot's feet eventually directed themselves towards the church. She dipped and crossed herself without thinking and knelt in one of the pews. The church smelled of incense and candle wax, a familiar smell that calmed and soothed her soul. Margot's prayers were not structured by words or ritual this time, she simply waited, open and hopeful.
Some time later, though she did not know how long, Margot felt a disturbance in the air around her and she looked up. Father Peter sat on in the pew next to her, his bright green eyes filled with concern. Margot suppressed a groan as she rose to sit beside him and her bruised knees protested.
They sat in wordless silence for a while, staring at the altar. He was young - barely a few years older than she was - and she had always felt that he understood her better than the priests at home.
"Have you ever doubted your vocation?" she asked eventually.
"Of course," Father Michael said.
Shocked, she turned to him and he smiled.
"Perhaps I should say, I have questioned my vocation at times," he said.
"And you still took your vows?" Margot asked.
"Asking questions of myself allows me to re-examine why I am here," he said. "Faith should be blind, but one must be sure that it is God drawing you towards something and not human arrogance. Each time I question, God reassures me that this is my path and I understand more fully why He sent me here."
"Doubt makes your faith stronger?" Margot asked.
"Questioning myself and allowing God to show me the path I should follow makes me stronger," Father Peter said. "You are struggling today?"
Margot was silent for a while, wrestling with her need for guidance and her shame at questioning her own vocation.
"I am," she said softly.
"What has triggered these questions?" Father Michael asked.
"It's silly," Margot said.
The priest smiled gently. "It can't be that silly if it is making you question your path. I have rarely met a young woman so certain of what God wants for her before."
Margot shrugged uncomfortably.
"Perhaps you think that I will think it silly," Father Michael said. "I assure you that I won't."
"It's...do you ever get lonely?" Margot asked.
Instead of laughing or chiding her for having worldly fears, Father Michael was silent and thoughtful for a time.
"Sometimes," he said eventually. "Are you asking whether I regret giving up the chance of a wife and children? I don't. My parishioners are more important than a family for me. I could not serve God and serve them fully if I also needed to split my time and love. A wife and family must be the centre of a man's life, first in all his thoughts, and a priest must have God and his parishioners first in his life. Perhaps some men could balance all those lives, but I cannot and so I follow God's plan for my life without regret. If you ask about friendship, well that I never lack for and not just because of our greatest Friend. I have always have friends that I can call upon when I need, God did not ask me to make that sacrifice, and they give me love and balance when it is needed."
Margot frowned in thought.
"Let me ask you a question," Father Michael said. "You have known your vocation since you arrived in Oxford. Why did you feel drawn towards it? There are many places in this world that you could serve without taking orders and you would be an excellent doctor. What led you to decide on work as a medical missionary rather than following in your father`s footsteps at a great sanatorium?"
It had been a long time since Margot really thought about it, deeply thought and remembered all the arguments that she had given to her parents and friends in support of her plans. It had simply been something she had accepted as God's plan with that deep sense of inevitability that can grow with long-held plans.
"It is easy to fall into habits," Father Michael said. "Asking yourself why you are on this path and calling on God for guidance or simply a reminder of why He asks this of you is something you should not be afraid of."
"I hadn't thought about it like this before," Margot said. "You're right, I had fallen into habits without thinking."
Father Michael smiled, a fatherly sort of smile that was at odds with his young face. "We all do and, at some time, we all need to remember why this life was chosen for us."
"Thank you."
Margot stayed in the church for hours, thinking and praying and regaining that faith in her future that she had lost for a while. The woman who left the church late that night was calmer and more focused than ever before and she vowed to remember that day for as long as she lived.
***
There were other times when Margot's faith wavered, when she wondered why God had chosen this for her and why she had followed His path. When her first patient died, when she had to watch helplessly as a hundred babies died from an illness that she could have cured if the drugs had arrived, when her refugee camp was raided for child soldiers, Margot asked God why He had sent her and each time she remembered that afternoon in the church. The answer was always the same: that was where she was needed and God had a purpose.
As for loneliness, it would be wrong to mislead. Margot sometimes felt a pang for a child of her own, but then she would gaze at the cots filled with tiny miracles that had somehow survived everything that a cruel world could throw at them and she realised that she could not have cared for them and raised her own children with the dedication and attention that Len, Emmy and even Con eventually showed. The men and woman that she cared for became her family and she became adored Aunt Margot to children scattered between England, Switzerland, Africa and China.
Eventually Margot had that same conversation in another church, this time with a young doubting novice, and she found that God helped her just as He had helped Father Michael those years ago.