Time for another great vocation story.

This one comes to us from Louisville, where a young woman intent on having a husband and eight children (!) found her plans suddenly changed:

Sister Michelle Sinkhorn, a Sister of St. Benedict of Ferdinand, Ind., received the call to religious life a couple of days after attending the Archdiocese of Louisville’s Dinner with the Archbishop in 1996 when she was 25.

Certain that she was meant to have a family, Sister Sinkhorn had resisted several invitations to attend the annual vocations dinner and to explore religious life with the sisters in Ferdinand — located about an hour from Louisville off Interstate 64. But a little cleverness on the part of one Benedictine Sister, a simple prayer and emergency surgery made clear to Sister Sinkhorn: her plans were not God’s plans.

Sister Sinkhorn will relay her story to hundreds of young people who have signed up to attend this year’s Dinner with the Archbishop tomorrow, Nov. 21, at Holy Spirit Church. The young people will hear from Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, men and women religious and a priest about the vocational call to discover one’s God-given gifts.

Sister Sinkhorn will take her listeners back to a time when she was a carefree single person in the mid 1990s, intent on finding a good man to marry and with whom she hoped to have eight children. Eight was a number she had settled on for her imagined brood early-on, she said with a chuckle during an interview last week.

Her resistance to religious life had nothing to do with her faith, which was strong, she said.

“I wasn’t opposed to religious life,” she said. “I knew nothing about it, so I was ignorant about it. And it had nothing to do with having a husband and eight babies.”

Sister Sinkhorn attended Mass almost daily and spent most of her time working hard. While attending Indiana University Southeast, she worked as a pharmacy technician and on the backside at Churchill Downs — as a hot-walker and groom. She majored in education in college, but discovered too close to graduation that she had no interest in teaching.

After graduation, she became a nanny and realized she loved to be with young children. She also started volunteering at Mount St. Francis Retreat Center in Southern Indiana and helped her father and other volunteers build a hermitage there.

Her first step on the path to religious life came by accident when she was asked to help with a retreat at Mount St. Francis after two of three nuns who were supposed to help canceled. One was sick, and the other was injured. She found herself working alongside Benedictine Sister Theresa Gunter who showed up to the retreat wearing shorts, hiking boots and a T-shirt.

“That was not the image I had of a nun,” said Sister Sinkhorn. “She was good with the kids and vivacious. That kind of freaked me out.”

Sister Gunter, whom she calls “T,” kept in touch after the retreat and invited Sister Sinkhorn to visit Ferdinand.

“I liked the women” at the monastery, she noted. “But I was not impressed. I thought, ‘This is so crazy. What’s with all this bowing?’ It’s funny now, because all the things I thought were so strange, I hold dear now.”

In October of that year, Sister Gunter invited Sister Sinkhorn to dinner. It seemed to be a casual invitation — a quick dinner between friends. But Sister Gunter was actually taking Sister Sinkhorn to the Dinner with the Archbishop.

A little annoyed at this revelation, Sister Sinkhorn reluctantly agreed to attend the dinner. And when her friend stood up to talk to the crowd of young people about women religious, she made a simple observation. She said, “ ‘If you want to know what God wants you to do, ask.’ ”

“I thought, ‘Oh, what a concept.’ I never thought to ask God because I already knew what I wanted,” said Sister Sinkhorn.

That weekend, she had reserved the hermitage at Mount St. Francis as a little getaway. When she settled into the little house Friday evening, she said one prayer related to vocations.

“I said ‘OK, God. Here I am. You know what I want. I want to get married. I want a nice husband, and I want eight kids. A farm house with a white picket fence would be even better. If you want me to do otherwise, let me know. Amen.’

“I didn’t think about it or pray about it the rest of the weekend,” she said.

Then Monday morning came.

Continue at the link to find — as Paul Harvey would say — “the rest of the story… ”