reflecting, part six

I’m at this fulcrum point in my life, after having my first child. Everything matters now. And so, supercharged with this idea, what do I do? Nothing. I wish I was kidding. I just sat there, with this idea that everything mattered and there must be a God and I was put on this earth for a purpose. But for two solid years I suffered primarily from some sort of interior inertia.

Both a blessing and a curse, I suppose, that there was no Internet at this time of my life. A blessing because I may have gotten sucked down into a vortex of information I couldn’t process. A curse because I was frozen in ignorance. I had no idea where one turns when one discovers God and how everything matters. I had no one…NO ONE…in my life to whom I could turn to ask questions. Honesty, I didn’t even know what questions needed asking.

I am a single mom these two years of inertia. I am working part time, taking a couple of classes and walking a fine line between sanity and insanity.

Then I bump into an old friend from high school and a voice in my head tells me I’m going to marry him.

Wait. Gotta be clear here, at this moment in history I pretty much hate men. And if there is a man in my future, he’s gonna need a pony tail and a VW van and be ready to live in it. Hippie-girl. He’s not going to be this Mr. Conservative, upright citizen who manages a business and drives a sedan. A new one. Head voices clearly do not get me at all. But there we were, both of us just knowing.

It was serious from the start. For me, because I had a child, there was no casual dating on my horizon. And it got even more serious pretty quickly. He was Catholic, I knew that. He must know something about God and prayer. Surely. About a week into our relationship I decide to just ask him if he prayed. It turns out that this was a trigger question that rocked his world because he had never ever talked about prayer to another person. In a gesture that suggested he was letting me in on a little known secret and an embarrassing one as well, he told me yes, he prayed. He honestly didn’t know much about God. Or anything else regarding being Catholic. But we did make a commitment that very moment to pursue our questions together.

And here I am. Catholic now for 34 years. Next up…the conversion in a nutshell.