Life with Christ

When I showed the Social Security Administration employee in Houma a Dutch passport, a British driver’s license, and an American bank statement, she asked the question many people have had since my arrival here, “How did you come to southern Louisiana?” My honest answer is “Jesus.” It is that simple, but not always that easy.

My name is JJ Hussem and I’m from everywhere and nowhere by now, but I am excited and grateful to be part of the mission here in the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux as God is always doing something new! (Is 43:19). I’d love to share with you the many ways God has been inviting me over years and what that has looked like logistically.

I am originally from the most southern part of the Netherlands, a small country in north-west Europe, wedged between Germany and Belgium. The Carmelite convent St. Edith Stein was taken from in 1942 is about 20 minutes from there, and the Passionist priest St. Charles of Mt. Argus hails from the same area as well!

I’m from a practicing Catholic family, a rarity in that part of the world, but God is faithful! We moved to New Jersey as a family in 1999 and back to the Netherlands a few years later. In America we encountered a public Christianity we were not used to, but God utilized it to keep us in the Church. Our sole reality of the Faith was no longer a waning, isolating, and often dysfunctional Church experience. Of all places, I ended up doing part of my undergraduate studies at Loyola New Orleans, then graduate school back in the Netherlands at Radboud University Nijmegen. A fun fact about that university is St. Titus Brandsma, another recent Carmelite saint, was the rector magnificus there in the 1930s!

After a year of full-time mission in Georgia with Life Teen, I discerned religious life for two years with the Brothers of St. John in France. While teaching English as a foreign language at a high school in the Netherlands, doors opened for me to move to the UK and work in youth and young adult ministry. I went to London in 2015 and remained there until April of 2024.

My job as part of the Agency for Evangelization & Catechesis for the Archdiocese of Southwark had a solid team, strong leadership through Archbishop Wilson, and was mostly remote allowing me much freedom. For three years I worked with them, pioneering a model of accompaniment with lay leaders who accompanied a person per parish in their deanery. My job here as a liaison ties into that experience, skill set and methodology, which is also allowing me to recognize the actual universality of the Church and be an active part in it.

Houma-Thibodaux has been on my radar over the years – through friends either coming to the UK or through me visiting Louisiana to see them. When this job opening came to my attention, I thought about all my years in London, the community, many friends and the flexible working schedule. The invitation stood. I had to choose, to discern between two goods. In prayer we are often invited to remember what God has done, to track His movements. I realized a few faithful people who had been in my life over the years were in Louisiana. I realized where I was living in London for the past few months wasn’t a place that was long term. I have been dating an amazing woman since last summer who lives in Missouri and we would be free of the time difference if I took the job. God had been preparing the way for me. My decision was my free will to step into that or not.

His providence is also practical. Since my arrival, good people have been generous with me using their car and letting me stay with them figuring out life as I’m starting from scratch. The Lord tends to use people for His glory who are radically docile to the Holy Spirit. Something is stirring in this diocese – are we aware? We have the same God here as in London, Holland or France.

My journey here hasn’t been easy, but it’s been good. I’m experiencing the balance between loneliness and solitude, the tension of living in full transition and feeling like there is constantly one loose end still left to tie. It’s also an opportunity to take new ownership, to step out and choose trust, to walk with clergy and lay leaders and go after what God has spoken here over the years despite hurricanes, changes in leadership and the lack of stability that can bring. He is the One who makes all things new (Rev 21:5).

“Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are ‘disciples’ and ‘missionaries,’ but rather that we are always ‘missionary disciples.’ If we are not convinced, let us look at those first disciples, who, immediately after encountering the gaze of Jesus, went forth to proclaim him joyfully: ‘We have found the Messiah!’” (Jn 1:41 - Evangelii Gaudium 120).

God is here, He is doing something new! Let’s help each other see, recognize, grow, move and bear fruit for the Kingdom. I look forward to meeting more of you!