“The Lord has been so good to me”

Growing up as an only child in Enid, Deacon Alexander Kroll knew he was destined to be “rich and famous,” as he puts it.
 
His mother, Stephanie Willis, had her own assumptions about his future. Kroll spent his high school summers helping at her husband’s law firm, where Willis worked as a paralegal. As he ferried files from the post office to the courthouse, he befriended the local judges.
 
“They just loved him at the courthouse,” she said. “We just assumed he’d grow up and take over the business someday or take over his father’s farming business.”
 
God had “bigger plans.”
 
At a class to prepare for confirmation, Kroll listened incredulously to a Benedictine nun’s assurance that some methods of prayer could lead to a genuine dialogue with the Lord.
 
“She said that there were ways to pray where, if you talked to God, he would talk back to you,” Kroll said. “I thought she was nuts.”
 
Despite his skepticism, Kroll tried her suggestions.
 
One evening, as he prayed in his room, he asked the Lord, “What do you want me to do with my life?”
 
God responded: “I want you to be a priest.”
 
“I was like, ‘Oh no, Lord, you know everything, you know I’m supposed to be rich and famous. I can’t be a priest,’” Kroll recounted.
 
His mom said she also was initially “shocked and taken aback” when her son told her of the Lord’s words to him in prayer.
 
She asked him the usual question: “Do you realize you’ll never marry and have children?”
 
Kroll told his mother that while he’d dreamed of someday dancing with a little daughter who looked just like her, he wanted this more – and would need her support. She promised him he’d have it.
 
“Out of everything he could have chosen to be, he chose to be a priest for God, which still just blows me away,” she said. “I couldn’t be more proud or happy.”
 
Looking back, Willis realizes her son’s vocation, in a very real sense, “started before his birth.” Willis and Kroll’s father, Lynn Kroll, divorced when Kroll was young, but, during their early marriage, they struggled for more than a year and a half to conceive a child. One Sunday at Mass, Willis listened to the story of Hannah in 1 Samuel.
 
“I couldn’t help but think of my own struggle to conceive,” she said. “That day, just as Hannah did, I asked the Lord to give me a child and (promised) I would in turn dedicate and give that child back to him.”
 
Despite these early intimations of God’s call, as Kroll neared the end of his high school career, he still applied to several elite colleges and universities.
 
“I knew seminary was God’s plan for me, but I thought, ‘Well, you know, let’s just see if I get into these big, fancy schools,’” he recalled. “I didn’t get in anywhere I applied. It was sort of like God slapping me, saying, ‘Nope, get back to work. You know I have a plan for you.’”
 
Kroll interviewed for seminary and was accepted. He ultimately spent nine years studying to be a priest – four years at Conception Seminary College in Conception, Mo., and five years at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver.
 
Seminary proved to be “a time of tremendous growth” and of equally tremendous friendships, Kroll said, including a close friendship with classmate Deacon Zak Boazman. Along the way, priests at his hometown parish and various summer assignments strengthened him in his vocation, including Father Kevin Ratterman, Father Joseph Irwin, Father Rick Stansberry and Father Jim Goins.
 
Father Goins said Kroll’s priesthood “will bring all manner of people closer to Christ.”
 
“Deacon Kroll has a rare gift for holy and significant friendships,” Father Goins said. “People are drawn to his warmth, his humor and his kindness.”
 
Father Stansberry, who will preach Kroll’s First Mass, said Kroll’s “zeal and love for serving others is contagious.”
 
Father Irwin emphasized Kroll’s relatability: “Every assignment he has been at, people just rave about him and talk about his personality, his sense of humor, his intellect and his ability to be able to come up to you and speak to you and be a part of your life.”
 
For Deacon Kroll, though, the most significant relationship of all, of course – and the one that has sustained him from his first decisive experiences in prayer to today – is his friendship with Jesus Christ.
 
“I consider my own unworthiness. I’m not anything or anyone special, yet Christ has chosen to share his priesthood with me,” Kroll said. “The idea that, when I speak the words of consecration, Jesus Christ will obey and come down from glory at the right hand of God to become food for all of us is an overwhelming reality, an ineffable mystery.”
“The Lord has been so good to me in my relatively short life, so merciful,” he added. “If I can share just a small part of that as a priest, it still will never make any sort of return for the goodness he has shown me.”
 
Tina Korbe Dzurisin is the former editor and a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.