Most people probably don't care about how or why a 20 year old girl from Missouri happily leaves college and volunteer a year of her life to service work in Kentucky. But in case someone wants to know the whole story I decided to finally write it all down. So if nothing else for my memory and perspective I'm starting from the beginning and ending to where I am now. Grab a drink, because this is going to be a LONG story.
I still don't know exactly where to start, so I'll start from the beginning... I was born, went to Public and Catholic Schools and grew up. Along the way I had some awesome teachers who helped shape me into the person I am today. In 7th grade I was preparing for my Confirmation and part of that preparing involved service work. It was the first time I ever recorded the amount of time and energy I put into servicing others and I HATED it. I remember telling my mom, "I don't understand why I NEED to write a WHOLE paper for every service work I do in these next three months. I do service all the time and I don't see it as service, no I see it as something I should do. How can I write three full papers about something I see as a part of my life?" Of course since I didn't want to upset anyone or get a bad grade I wrote those papers about the service I did over the three months I was preparing for Confirmation. I even remember what my service projects were, I helped my aunt move out of her house, I helped with Vacation Bible School with my Girl Scout troop, and I worked in a Food Pantry with my dad one Saturday. To think I was mad about writing the papers about these projects while kids in my class were just having trouble finding service work to do.
Lucky for me I went to Rosati-Kain High School and wouldn't have to record my service hours until I was a Senior. I joined the REAP team when I was a freshmen so I already knew what I wanted to do for my service work. However God had other plans (take note of this, because it seems like God ALWAYS has other plans for me). Instead of doing the same type of service hour plans for the juniors R-K decided to mix it up and change the time line for service hours. Since the Senior get out early in May, the plan was the Juniors would start their service hours the same time the Senior left. This was decided, because people felt the Senior felt rushed to finish their service hours and giving us girls a whole year to fulfill our service hours just seemed nicer. But you see this plan took away my plans of using the REAP Team as my service hours. There are not that many retreats at the end of the year, so I had to find a different place to do service. Lucky for me the girl I drove home from school told me about Our Lady's Inn. Our Lady's Inn was a woman's shelter for single pregnant mothers who needed a place to live. Most of these woman were actually within 1-6 years older than me and some had up to 4 children plus a baby on the way. I was so glad I found it, because my mom knew the woman who ran it and we she lived close by and she would drive me to and from Our Lady's Inn. I loved working there and I fell in love with the children and their mothers and the workers that were there. It was probably one of the best weeks of my life. Sadly I didn't get enough hours from that one week so I had to look else where for the last 40 service hours. I talked to the lady in charge of VBS (Vacation Bible School) at my parish and got to be the head teacher of the preschool for the week. I then filled in my last couple of hours doing what I was planning on doing with the REAP Team.
Of course throughout my four years of high school I did other service work things, but working at Our Lady's Inn was a huge turning point in my life. I knew that I wanted to do something like that for the rest of my life. Upon enter my Senior year of high school I had a plan, but I forgot about it within the first few weeks of school and continued my love of Science Class and my plans for being a teacher. Of course I only wanted to be a teacher, because in my mind it would be an easy major and it is an easy job to quit and start up again. When I graduated high school I thought about not going to college, but I felt like I had no other choice and so I went to William Jewell College for an education degree. My plans for the future were set and I was going to attend Jewell for four years and over the summer I would get qualified in special education and I would be a special education teacher by 2013 and I would be happy. :-)
Now isn't that great? I think it would have been awesome if I stuck with education, but within my first weeks of taking education classes I knew I was enjoying it and I wasn't learning anything, because I wasn't reading the homework, but I was still getting 100s on the tests. For me my education classes were easier than my high school classes and I couldn't stand being bored. I almost transferred twice, but instead I just switched my major to Psychology. My mom was not happy with this decision, so I talked to a professor in the Biology Department (I knew her because I worked in the Bio and Chem Department at my school) and she helped me decide that I could be a Biology and Psychology major. This made my mom a little happy or at least she pretended that she was happy.
I entered my second year of college with a double major to achieve and high hopes of a medical profession. I even remember telling my old Science teacher from grade school about my decision and how happy I was about it. I don't know why I was at my grade school, but I was and I do remember having high hopes. (I don't know if you caught onto a theme yet, but it is coming and it is very predictable) Here I was my second year of college and pumped for my future. There was a passion and a goal and I was not bored in my classes anymore. However I was lost. The last two science classes I took was my senior year and it was Anatomy and Physics. Taking Sophomore Biology classes and not having any of the freshmen entry level introductory sciences classes made catching up hard. Of course I added more stress and gave more of my time studying for my hard Biology classes by having two jobs, a boyfriend and joining a sorority. I will not say I stretched myself thin, but I will say if I could do it over again, I would have dropped one of my two majors and made my older pre-med boyfriend help me learn instead of taking me out to dinner on weekends. Then again I did enjoy those dates. In the end my relationship ended, my grades were dropping to depressing lows and I was feeling as lost as ever. In January I kept thinking I was missing something and that I shouldn't return to college, but I ignored it and continued on my double major. By the end of April I decided again to change my major. Before I made any rash decisions I called my Aunt and asked her about my options towards law school, working with people, and a Psychology major. This time I dropped Biology and took on a Non-For-Profit minor. I still don't know exactly what my plans were or what a Non-For-Profit minor was, but it did open the door to looking at service opportunities for the summer. I wanted to work with juvenile delinquents over the summer and asked a previous youth minister how I could get involved with service opportunities. She gave me this website (https://www.catholicvolunteernetwork.org/aboutus/index.php) I didn't find a job that involved working with juvenile delinquents, but I did find tons of service opportunities for the summer.
I was pumped and ready to go, but then I got the applications for the opportunities and they were not only scary, but way too up front about reality. I didn't fall away from my faith, but my relationship with God kind of started to die and I really wasn't in the mood to deal with it. I was not comfortable about writing paragraphs about my relationship with God and I did not want to admit that I had lost touch with my faith while I was at college. So, to avoid awkward feeling and unwanted reality checks I "lost" the applications to all of these amazing service opportunities.
I would have been sad about the loss. However, I had other things to worry about.... like my brother becoming a priest and needing a job to pay for college. I came home in May and before Memorial Day weekend I had a full time job at a day care and when it came to my future my only plan was to graduate college. Even though it seemed sad I didn't realize how upsetting it would be for me when I had to tell everyone in my family about how my life was going. My oldest brother Nick was becoming a priest and even though I didn't see it as a big deal, everyone else did. Over Memorial Day Weekend I saw more of my family then I have in all of my life. I guess wedding and funeral are an everyday events compared to an ordination. Just within that one weekend my feelings about switching my major and having no real plan went from bearable to feeling like a complete failure. I was so tired of people asking me about "my future" and I was also tired of having no future.
You know how I hinted about an on going theme in my life, well this is the time that I started noticing a theme in my life and started to realized how unhappy I really was. It was depressing to realize that I may have spent years of my life being completely unhappy and constantly searching for something. I was still avoiding God and trying hard not to listen to him, but God was getting tired of me ignoring him. During the time of Nick's ordination and all of his first masses and seeing him at his new home parish at some point in a homily a Priest said, "if you aren't following your vocation, you are just wasting your life." I know that he was talking to the newly ordained priest, but that statement jumped out and hit me. Right then were ever I was I knew that I couldn't keep running...
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