There are travelers we choose, and travelers we don’t. Yet the longer I walk this winding road, the more I suspect that choice was never the point.

In an older Sunday sermon, Bishop Barron reflected on a simple but unsettling truth: we don’t always get to choose the people we’re called to love. Some arrive like sunlight — easy, warm, familiar. Others enter our lives like weather we didn’t prepare for, testing the seams of our patience and the sturdiness of our compassion.

But what if every person who crosses our path is placed there with intention?