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Vince...

My name is Vince Huber and I was born November 30th 1981 in Kansas City, Kansas. I grew up in the Kansas City area in a catholic family. My father is a general contractor, my mother is a housewife and I have three little sisters. The Church was always a very important element in my life as I went to catholic grade schools and a catholic high school. I was an altar boy for many years and even talked about becoming a priest in grade and middle schools. However, everything came after my first love, baseball. Sports occupied the greater part of my childhood and I played everything from golf and tennis to football and baseball. My only dream as a kid was to make it to the Major Leagues

Unfortunately I quickly discovered in high school that my size and talent wouldn’t cut it for professional baseball and so I decided to go to the University of Kansas to study Civil Engineering. Math was my best subject in school and my family is full of engineers, including my dad, so I figured it was the obvious choice. My dad and my two uncles are the heads of a family contracting business in Kansas City that my great-grandfather started in 1903 which he passed on to my grandfather and then to my father and my two uncles. My plan was to study and then go to work with my family, find a nice girl to marry, start a family and live an honorable and upright life like I had seen lived by my dad, my uncles, and my grandfather.

However, while at KU, something within me changed radically. I found myself for the first time totally independent from my parents and faced more fully with the great questions of life. Why do I exist? What is the meaning of life? Where do I come from? Where am I going? What awaits me after death? Up until this point I had received all of these answers in nice little pre-packaged boxes from my catholic school formation. However, now that these choices were my own to make, I wanted to know if these answers were really true. One Sunday at Mass at the St. Lawrence Center (which is the Newman Center at KU) I heard the head catechist give a quick talk challenging the students to get involved at the Center, especially in the theology classes that were offered weekly for free to the students in order to deepen their knowledge of the catholic faith. I was very intrigued and decided I had to give it a shot. After all of the empty solutions the college life had offered, I knew that I could only find the answers to my questions from God.

It was at this point that my life really started to change. The more I learned about the catholic faith the more I loved it and knew that this has to be the truth. Going to this theology class became the best part of my week, I looked forward to it with great excitement. In my enthusiasm I started to put into practice the things I was learning. At a certain point at the beginning of my Sophomore year I was going to daily Mass, praying the rosary and a half hour of mental prayer every day!

I continued to grow and to learn and to read and to pray and by my Junior year I knew I wanted to consecrate my life to God. My old plan to become an engineer wasn’t enough for me anymore. The only question that remained was, where? The summer before my senior year I visited various religious communities but never found my niche and so I decided to start the application process for the seminary to study for my diocese. I knew so many great priests in my diocese that it was a really attractive option.

However my senior year our sisters were invited to come and open a house at the St. Lawrence Center (2003) which they did with three sisters. Through my contact with the sisters and experiencing their charism I really saw the beauty of this type of spiritual apostolate. In fact, it was the thing that attracted me most about the priesthood. I did a parish mission with them over Christmas break and it was this experience of actually being an apostle that made me consider this community very seriously. Not only did I love the charism, but above all, for the first time I experienced a deep interior peace with this choice, despite all of the difficulties I would have to face, like moving thousands of miles away and learning a new language. In June of 2004 I left Kansas to go to Rome and after only a couple of weeks living in community I knew that God was calling me to be an Apostle of the Interior Life.