Addressing thousands of young adults gathered for the SEEK conference in Denver, CatholicVote President and CEO Kelsey Reinhardt delivered a deeply personal and theological reflection on human dignity, relationship, and God’s unwavering pursuit of the human heart.
SEEK, one of the largest annual Catholic conferences in the U.S. organized by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) brings together tens of thousands of college students, young professionals, clergy, and religious for several days of prayer, formation, and evangelization. This year’s gathering, held simultaneously in Columbus, Ohio, Fort Worth, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, from Jan. 1 to 5, is centered on the theme of seeking and responding to God’s call amid the noise and fragmentation of modern life.
Reinhardt opened her talk with a personal note, thanking the audience for welcoming both her and her unborn child to the stage.
“One day, he will learn that he had already given witness to a SEEK conference while still in the womb,” she said.
After leading the audience in a prayer to the guardian angels, Reinhardt noted that her son, who will be baptized James Dominic, was, in a sense, already participating in the talk. That image, she explained, served as the starting point for a deeper reflection on how every human person enters the world and what that reality reveals about God.
Reinhardt invited the audience to consider the simple but profound fact that “every person present began life in the womb,” unlike other conceivable ways human beings might have come into existence.
“In the womb, the child lives in continuous connection with the mother, a bond of mutual awareness and trust that deepens until birth brings the child into the light,” said Reinhardt, suggesting that this pattern mirrors the way God relates to humanity: sustaining life, drawing near, and inviting relationship long before human beings can claim identity through achievement.
Drawing on the opening lines of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Reinhardt recalled that God, infinitely perfect in Himself, freely chose to create humanity out of love, desiring to share His own life. For that reason, she said, God is never distant. In every time and place, He remains close, actively drawing each person to himself; including those gathered at SEEK.
Reinhardt illustrated this reality through family stories marked by both loss and healing. She spoke candidly about the suffering caused by broken or absent relationships, as well as the deep longing for connection that shapes the human heart.
She also referenced the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who once described God and humanity as two lovers who missed each other by arriving at the wrong place and the wrong time.
Reinhardt suggested that Beauvoir’s lifelong agnosticism “reflected a tragic misunderstanding: that God could be wrong about the time and place to meet the human person when it mattered most. God never misses the encounter!”
Reinhardt explained that God always takes the initiative. He seeks the human person first, while the human response is to seek, know, and love Him in return. That longing, she noted, resembles the instinctive human drive to search for a father when His presence is absent.
Turning to her own experience, Reinhardt, a former NCAA Division 1 basketball player for Notre Dame, recounted how the sport once defined her sense of purpose and future.
Though faith was present in her life in grade school, it was not central. However, a serious injury abruptly ended her 8th grade season and derailed what appeared to be a clear path toward collegiate competition, including a potential opportunity at Notre Dame.
She recalled the encouragement of a “little old church lady” from her parish who urged her to trust that God could work miracles with faith as small as a mustard seed. Reinhardt said she took those words seriously, praying persistently; and eventually experienced healing.
God’s action, she explained, was not punitive. Rather than withdrawing basketball as a form of correction, she came to understand God as a loving Father who restored the gift, not to affirm misplaced priorities but to remind her that she was loved first.
“Many of you may just be here, strolling through life, not visibly empty. Some of you may be in that moment of loss, some of you are now being invited for the first time,” she said.
Then Reinhardt said, “Let me be that church lady to you and repeat to you those same words:
If you have the faith of the size of a mustard seed, God can move mountains in your life.”
She concluded by returning to the central theme of her talk: Human beings are created for relationship, with the God who brings them into existence and with one another: “As St. John says so beautifully: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’ So, you, son, you, daughter, have come to the right place to seek. But you have come to a filled room. God is already here seeking for you. You and Him are at the right place and at the right time. God bless you!”
The post Kelsey Reinhardt at SEEK Conference: God is always ‘at the right place and at the right time’ for you appeared first on CatholicVote org.