[Note: Names have been changed]
When I was in seventh grade, every now and then my P. E.
teacher, Mrs. Mitchell would make us run the mile which was several laps around
the field out behind the school. There
was no track, just a field, bordered on one side by the school and the river on
the other side. On some mornings, it
would be so cold that a fog would roll in off the river so thick that you
couldn’t see anything as you ran. You’d
lose sight of the school, of the river and if you were running an eleven and a
half minute mile like I was, you’d soon lose sight of the rest of the class.
It was an eerie if not scary place to be. You had no idea if you were going to run into
the river or run smack into Mrs. Mitchell, running into Mrs. Mitchell being the
worse of the two. Every now and then, in
this perfect hushed silence, someone would dart past you and you would know,
right before they disappeared in the fog again that you weren’t out there by
yourself.
At some point in your life, perhaps at many points in your
life, you will feel like you are running in a fog. You won’t know where you’re running to. You won’t remember what you were running
from. You’ll think you’re alone and at
that point panic will set in.
But what you need to know is that you are never alone. You need to know that even during the most
frightening times in your life when you feel discouraged, when you feel blind,
God is with you.
In the movie version of The
Diary of Anne Frank, the two families, the Van Daans and the Franks along
with Mr. Dussel are celebrating Hanukah in their Secret Annex, the hidden attic
in Anne’s father’s factory, where they’ve been hiding from the Nazis. There is joy.
There are presents. There is
singing and then a thief breaks in.
Everyone goes silent.
The lights are extinguished.
Everyone waits, holding their breath, trying not to make a sound to
alert this mysterious thief to their presence, but a noise startles the thief
and he runs, fleeing into the street, leaving the door to the factory open.
Mr. Frank decides to investigate, to leave their secret
hiding place behind the bookcase at the top of the stairs and make sure the
thief is gone and the factory secure. He
descends the stairs, followed a few seconds later by Peter and Anne.
But just as Mr. Frank reaches the outer door to the street,
an old man, walking late at night, notices the open door. Mr. Frank ducks behind the door just in time,
holding a hammer, his only weapon, tightly to his chest. The old man approaches the doorway. He is seconds from seeing Anne standing at
the top of the stairs.
Anne faints and Peter pulls her into another room just as
the old man turns away to call out to two soldiers and tell them about the open
door.
In that time, Mr. Frank and Peter, carrying Anne, make their
way back to the secret annex.
And everyone waits, once again, fearful, terrified, as the
Nazi soldiers make their way up the stairs searching for a thief, for hiding
Jews, for anything suspicious.
Earlier, with her husband and daughter having both left
their hiding place, Mrs. Frank prays.
Her words are from psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and
earth … the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee
by day, nor the moon by night.”
The Lord is the shade at your right hand.
God is always with us.
What you need to start doing today if you haven’t already is
begin examining your life. You need to
start finding those moments in your life when God made his presence known. Perhaps you dismissed these times as luck or
coincidence, but now that you finally take a hard look at them, see that God
was there. This is so important to be
able to see that God has worked in your life sometimes in great, big life
altering ways and sometimes in seemingly small ways.
When I was in third grade, my mother’s cousin gave me my
very first bow and arrow. This wasn’t
some cheap, tacky, plastic toy. This was
a real bow and arrow, the type that you never, ever give to an eight-year-old
because they will no doubt shoot themselves in the foot or put someone’s eye
out.
And yet my parents were okay with this, so I took my best
friend Mike and my new bow and arrow out to the field behind the elementary
school to shoot at some trees. I’m
pretty sure I didn’t get one shot off before Phil Dumphree dropped out of one
of the trees that he had been climbing. Phil
was in the same grade, but was … scary.
As soon as he saw the bow and arrow, his eyes got real big and he
immediately held out his hand and said, “Let me try.”
Now, I was a pretty quick kid and I knew that if I gave Phil
the bow, that he would either shoot me or Mike.
I had about a 50-50 chance there.
I also knew that Mike and I could just try and make a run for it, but
that Phil would probably catch us, pound us and then still have the bow—so I
went with the odds. I gave him the bow.
Fortunately for Mike and me, Phil decided to practice first
with a nearby tree and because he was Phil and had something to prove, he drew
that bowstring back so far, his hand was shaking. And because he had to prove how strong he
was, a miracle happened.
SNAP!
The bow cracked right in half, split right down the middle.
I had never been so happy to have something of mine break in
all my life.
Now was that luck?
Or did God have a hand in that?
In sixth grade, toward the end of the school year, I became
very sick. I had a fever, a horrible
sore throat and was so weak I could barely walk two steps without losing my
breath. Antibiotics didn’t help and I
would wind up missing the last two weeks of school.
But I wasn’t going to miss my sixth grade graduation.
I grew up in Upstate New York. It never gets very hot there, but the day of
our graduation, sometime in late June, it was warm and the auditorium, without
air conditioning was even warmer. I
think they actually measured the temperature on stage where all the sixth
graders were sitting at over a hundred degrees and there I sat, still sick and
having a hard time just sitting up.
Sitting next to me was John Mason. Now I had switched schools at the beginning
of sixth grade so you can call John Mason this school’s version of Phil
Dumphree. John had been in elementary
school long enough to have grown a mustache and by seventh grade the rumor was
he was driving a motorcycle to school. I
had once watched John, when the teacher stepped out of the room, put another
boy in a headlock so tight the boy’s face had turned red and then purple before
I ran out and grabbed the teacher across the hall.
John was scary … and sitting next to me.
I was ready to pass out, but then I felt this breeze on my
face, this blessed breeze.
John Mason, for whatever reason, had lifted his program, the
one we all had with our names and the order of the ceremony and was fanning
me. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t smile. He just sat there and fanned me for the
entire ceremony.
That’s another awesome thing about God. He can put cracks in even the hardest of
hearts and let kindness seep through.
God is everywhere and not just in times when you are
suffering, but in times of awe-inspiring wonder.
We went on a field trip in eighth grade to Quebec, up in
Canada and we visited a large church there called Saint Anne de Baupre. St. Anne’s is a beautiful church, also known
as a basilica. But it is not its beauty
that it is known for. Over the years,
millions of people have visited St. Anne’s and of those millions many have come
unable to walk, bound to wheelchairs and canes.
They’ve come to St. Anne’s and been healed.
And because seeing is sometimes believing, when you walk
into St. Anne’s, the first thing you see are two giant, massive columns
reaching from floor to ceiling and covered, every square inch covered, in
walkers and canes and wheelchairs of the people who have entered the church
unable to walk and left the church unaided on their own two feet.
I don’t think at thirteen, I walked into St. Anne’s
believing in miracles. The TV was full
of preachers who could lay hands on someone and supposedly heal them. It all seemed fake to me, but at St. Anne’s
there is no one to lay hands on you.
There are no preachers with TV cameras.
There was only—there still is only—God.
And realizing that at thirteen cracked open my own hardening
heart.
Here is the beauty of starting this journey. Here is what will happen to you if you begin
to search out those God moments in your life.
The more places you find God, the more you realize the part he has
played in your life, the more real he will become.
He will cease to be some invisible guy that you have to sit
and listen about for an hour every Sunday and he will begin to become a very
real presence in your life, a physical presence that you cannot ignore.
I was in second grade when I received communion for the
first time. That’s how it works in the
Catholic Church. All that year, Sister
Julie prepared me and the rest of my class for what communion meant and how we
were to take the wafer and while I knew it was all very important, it didn’t
really sink in. I was seven. I practiced giving communion to imaginary
parishioners at home with potato chips.
But Sister Julie was special. She was the nun I wished would adopt me and
take me home. When she gave me communion
on Sunday mornings, it felt different.
Years later, my parents would divorce and I would spend the
weekends with my mom who lived an hour away.
Sometimes though, on a rare Sunday, I would find myself back at St.
Bart’s and Sister Julie would be there giving communion.
And whenever she gave me communion, she always began the
same way—with my name.
“Kendra, the Body of Christ.”
And when she said that, when she said my name, it wasn’t
Sister Julie speaking, it was God, through her.
She had this connection to God that I envied and that was probably the
first time I knew that I wanted what she had.
Girls couldn’t become priests in the Catholic Church, but I dreamed of
it anyway. I wanted what priests and
nuns had. I wanted to serve God.
But much like the Israelites who wandered the desert for
forty years following their escape from Egypt, I wandered my own spiritual
desert for many years. From the time I
was sixteen, until just a few years ago, I searched for the right church, for the
one that would let me have that connection to God that I longed for and for
many of those years, I didn’t attend church at all.
But then I found Hope, here.
And before I was even confirmed here, I was taking the first
steps in becoming a priest, a process that I am still undertaking.
Fogs, deserts—there will be many times in your life that you
will feel lost and afraid, but you must remember that God is with you
always. He never leaves. He never has business elsewhere. You are his concern.
Find those God moments.
Search for them and hold onto them when you find them. They will sustain you.
