Sister Thu May
I am Sr. Thu Mai of the Congregation of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Los Angeles. I serve in the Vietnamese Bilingual Religious Education and Vietnamese RCIA Program. I was born and grew up in Southern Vietnam together with my brother and 2 sisters in a Buddhist family. In 1991, my family and I came to the U. S. We first started our new lives at Monterey Park, Los Angeles. We learned the English language and for us a new culture in order to adapt into our second country. I have learned many new things. In God’s Divine Providence, I also learned a new Religion – Catholicism. In 1995, I was converted to the Catholic Faith and receive my call to the religious life at the same time. I became a member of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Los Angeles.
For the past ten years living in religious life, I have bathed in the ocean of God’s love. I enjoy countless bliss and blessing that God bountifully bestowed upon my life. Many times in my prayer, I asked God that what point in me that attracted Him that made Him love me so much and choose me. “What I am now is God’s gift to me. What I will be in the future is my gift to God.” I take this saying of an unknown author as the motive to live and to respond gratefully to God’s love for me.
Following the Lambertian Spirituality of Bishop Lambert de la Motte – a French Missionary to Vietnam, our Founder, I imitate Crucified Christ on the Cross in my daily life and serve God’s people in His resurrected spirit. I also admire and imitate the lives of Saint Cecilia and Saint Francis of Assisi in loving God and being faithful to Him to the end.
And this is my own thinking: I love green and purple. For me, green is the color of hope and purple is the color of faithfulness. The world I am living in is a broken world, yet I do not lose hope. I yearn for a harmonious, peaceful and whole world; and I unceasingly work for it. In daily life, I practice to be faithful in small things, each word I say and also I try to be a good sister and friend in order to be faithful to the end with all and especially with my invisible lover – Jesus.
When I take my Religious Perpetual Vow, I pray to my Lord that: “Jesus, My Love and my God, please make me an instrument of your peace and sign of your hope and joy.”