Fr Lim’s Story

When I was 11, I left my home in Leicester to return to Cameroon, where I was born, to begin secondary school. It was a boarding school for those who wanted to become priests.

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But I did not want to be a priest; it had never crossed my mind. I, like many others, was sent to that school because its students produced very good results after the Year 11 exams. But God has creative ways of drawing people to him.

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Our daily timetable had a lot of prayer in it - which I resented at first - but over the years I grew to look forward to the time I would spend in church. God also used my love for reading to teach me about the saints, and how they were extremely happy trying to follow God’s plan for their lives.

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I noticed that the priests I encountered, at school and beyond, were very happy. It also helped that around that time, many local priests were celebrating significant anniversaries, and I still vividly remember the beautiful homilies from those Masses on the priesthood. Eventually, when I was 14, I started thinking that maybe I could be happy as a priest as well, and maybe I could do the same things I had read about.

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But that was not the end of my vocation journey. Since then, God has led me to many other places I didn’t expect to go to. I returned to England sooner than I expected, then applied for seminary and was surprised to hear that the first year of my training was going to be in Spain. Over the next six years I would get great joy from working in schools, prisons, and even on ships. And I was ordained in December 2020, in-between two lockdowns.

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My advice to anyone discerning the priesthood is to remember that God is in control. He needs our cooperation, yes, but he’s the one who calls us in the first place. He has a plan. He knows where he’s leading us, and if we are open to where he wants to take us, then we’ll find ourselves on a wonderful adventure.