Santonio Hill

I remember loving the idea of God and the idea of God doing things for me almost like a servant but never really loving the person of Jesus or any person of the Trinity for that matter. I grasped deeply for God my entire life without realizing it. Wanting to be loved by God but putting ‘other’ in place of Him led me to wander around. My god was many things; music, porn, community, family, culture, but my biggest god was football.

Fr. Scott Woods, was a priest that invested in me amongst other people at my parish back home. He asked me if I’d ever thought about being a priest and like any other public high school kid I said of course not. And he invited me to pray about it but I didn’t. Instead I had these dreams that made me think about God and my purpose and place in His grand plan. At the time I had a scholarship to play football and my dream as a child was to be in the NFL so now I’m in a conflicting state of choosing between God, who I never give attention to and football, my biggest love at the moment. I chose to go to seminary to discern the call to the priesthood. Why would I do something like that? Because even with the little I knew about God I felt as if He was choosing me.

During my time in Seminary I had countless opportunities to keep encountering God. I gradually started to fall in love with God as I would pray with the Gospels while in the presence of the Eucharist. My time in seminary eventually came to an end as I discerned out after 4 years. And so I chose to pursue more missionary opportunities in the states and abroad. I found my wife while on mission and our family is expanding.