Finding My Purpose

Romans 12:12 Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

By D’Ann White
Managing to arouse myself from the fog I’d been immersed in for several weeks, I noticed that my 13-year-old son, Ian, was playing his electric guitar.
“Shouldn’t you be reading the books on your summer reading list?” I yelled in an effort to be heard over the amplifiers.
He turned down the amps and shrugged.
“What’s the point?” he asked.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Well, you were an A student, on the honor roll, the National Honor Society. You did everything you were supposed to and look where it got you.”
Hmm. I could see his point. After nearly 25 years with the company, The Tampa Tribune laid me off in May.
As far as Ian was concerned, I was living proof that there is no reward for hard work, dedication and loyalty.
As an estimated 400 St. Stephen parishioners who have lost jobs over the past couple of years can attest, shock and grief doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling.
Intellectually, I understood that it’s a lousy economy, that I wasn’t the only one to lose my job and that it wasn’t a reflection on me or my work.
But emotionally, I wondered why the powers-that-be chose me and not the co-worker who didn’t have as much experience or didn’t write as many stories. What did I do wrong?
On top of all these doubts, I was consumed by guilt.
I carried all the health and life insurance for the family. Now what would we do?
I wondered if this was perhaps God’s punishment for my selfishness. You see, being a journalist wasn’t simply a career for me. I felt it was a calling. I truly believed that I could help and inspire others with my words, that I could make a difference in the world.
I could conceive of no reason God would allow my career to be taken away except He felt I wasn’t using my gifts to glorify and serve Him; I was using them to serve myself.
After the layoff, I couldn’t attend Mass. I couldn’t accept the Holy Eucharist. I felt as if I’d let God down and I was no longer welcome in His House.
Friends tried to reassure me. They would tell me that God has greater plans for me. But, no, that didn’t seem right. Something told me my layoff was God’s way of keeping me humble, of reminding me that, at the end of the day, what I do for a living isn’t all that important.
So, if what we do in life isn’t important, what is?
Surely God didn’t intend to give my son the message that hard work, loyalty and dedication are misguided virtues.
Then it occurred to me, perhaps that’s the problem. We all expect to be rewarded for hard work, loyalty and dedication.
But God never promised us riches, happiness, admiration, the love of others, health or any other rewards on earth. He only promised us rewards in heaven.
Remember, La Immaculata Concepcion reiterated this to Saint Bernadette in the grotto at Lourdes, saying, “I cannot promise to make you happy in this world, only in the next.”
As individuals, we are here for such a short time and, for the most part, our contributions are nebulous, quickly forgotten. A person isn’t measured by his fleeting accomplishments or successes.
Instead, as the saints show us, we are measured by our faith.
That faith gives us the ability to overcome adversity, to tackle innumerable challenges and emerge with our devotion intact.
That faith gives us the ability to know that, no matter what obstacles are put in our path; God will never desert us as long as our belief remains strong.
That faith gives us the ability to carry on and continue serving Him without expecting glory for ourselves here on earth.
That faith gives us the moral rectitude to accept life’s inequities without becoming bitter.
That faith allows us to strive for sanctity knowing that we’re imperfect and will have to forgive ourselves for our setbacks.
It took two months of prayer and soul-searching, but I finally had my reply to Ian’s comments.
I told him we must strive to be our best, to use our God-given gifts to serve Him not for how it will benefit us but for how it will benefit others.
Even if no one remembers what we did to serve God, the fact that we served God with passion, that we glorified Him in the way we knew best, is enough to give our lives meaning.
“So don’t you dare use my layoff as an excuse to be a slacker,” I warned him.

Don't Look For My Christmas Card

I wrote this column a few years ago but it was nice to see that certain things don’t change. Once again this year, Lenny was the first on the block to brave the dust and daddy longlegs in the attic and pull out the Christmas decorations.
This time he started the day before Thanksgiving, getting a head start on the entire neighborhood and earning scowls from all the husbands around them who weren’t looking forward to hearing their wives harangue them about spending their Thanksgiving weekend decorating the house.
I drove up just as Lenny was putting the finishing touches on his holiday outdoor artistry, which included a lighted plastic rendition of the Holy Family. A faithful Catholic, Lenny still believes Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Christ, and his decorations reflect that belief.
In my column a few years ago, I related his frustrations with a nonworking lighted “Merry Christmas” sign. Lenny continues to search for a working sign that proclaims “Merry Christmas,” but said he has yet to find one.
“If you see one, buy it and I’ll pay you back,” he told me, earnestly.
I laughed and reminded him of the column I wrote about his “Merry Christmas” sign. I then threatened to revive the column on my blog.
So, here it is:

Yarissa and Lenny were the first people on our street to put up their Christmas decorations.
Lenny began stringing lights as soon as his turkey and dressing digested. I told Yari she was making us all look bad but she explained it was out of necessity.
Lenny’s a Black Hawk helicopter pilot and was going to be gone for most of the month of December. If the lights weren’t put up now, she said, they never would be.
While Lenny put the finishing touches on his front-yard extravaganza, Yari and I headed to church for the first rehearsal of the Christmas pageant featuring the traditional nativity story starring the parish’s 5- to 10-year-olds.
I was assigned the unenviable, um, I mean coveted, task of directing the 4:30 Christmas Eve pageant. That’s typically the family Mass and, as predicted, dozens of would-be Josephs, Marys, innkeepers and shepherds lined up to be in the pageant, including Yari and Lenny’s two young daughters, Natasha and Alexandra. Both girls originally wanted to be angels but Alexandra, the youngest of the two, changed her mind at the last minute and opted to be a shepherdess.
Talent isn’t a factor when it comes to our pageant. Children are chosen for the roles based on who selects the number closest to what some adult is thinking. If we get lucky and the kid happens to have some acting skills, so much the better. However, I was prepared to accept the fact that my directing skills would be limited to reminding Mary not to hold Baby Jesus upside-down and prompting the innkeeper to remove his hand from his wee-wee long enough to point Mary and Joseph to the stable.
With about 40 children, including a barn full of pigs, sheep and cows, on board for the pageant, I returned home, anxious to see Leonardo’s handiwork. He’d taken Natasha to figure-skating lessons and Yari and Alexandra were excitedly awaiting the moment when darkness fell and the automatic timers took over, painting their front yard in glorious Christmas splendor.
Dismayed that the trend was to remove “Christmas” from what was essentially the Christmas season for the sake of political correctness, Yari was especially proud of her giant lighted sign that read “Merry Christmas.”
However, when night fell, the effect wasn’t quite what she was hoping for. Instead of remaining lit, all the lights were set on an intermittent cycle. You’d just spot poor Rudolph and his fellow reindeer in the front yard, and suddenly they’d disappear into a miasma of darkness.
But, for Yari, the biggest affront was her “Merry Christmas” sign. Two of the letters weren’t working so the sign read “Merry Chris as.”
“Merry Chris..as!” she protested. “That’s not the statement I wanted to make to the neighborhood.”
It looked like poor Lenny had more work ahead of him.
In the meantime, I hadn’t begun decorating, shopping or even thinking about decorating or shopping. It looked as if Christmas would come and go before my tree had a single ornament. I glanced at the Sunday fliers and was dismayed to see them advertising last-minute gifts.
The anxiety welled up and I couldn’t contain my tears of frustration at a gathering of friends that afternoon.
It turns out, I wasn’t alone. Far from it.
As far as my friends, Amy and Ivette, were concerned, I was way ahead of the game. You see, I already had a costume for my son for Tuesday’s school Christmas program. The theme was holidays around the world and my son’s teacher suggested I use the same costume I made for his All Saint’s Day report in November.
He did his report on Saint Isidore, patron saint of farmers and farm workers, an Italian saint who lived in the 1600s. I had no idea what an Italian farmer in the 1600s looked like and I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. I stopped by the party store and bought a long, gray beard (all male saints have beards, right?) and then on to Wal-Mart where I picked up some colorful striped discount fabric that I turned into a vest and scarf. A baggy pair of black sweatpants completed the look. As I was walking to the checkout, I saw some corduroy peasant-type hats discounted for a couple of bucks and the look was ideal for an Italian saint.
My son was delighted. The next morning he eagerly donned his costume and, voila! He looked exactly like Fidel Castro.
When my son’s teacher suggested he wear the same costume for the Christmas program, I thought she was joking.
“You want Fidel Castro in the Christmas program?” I asked her.
“Well,” she said. “You can leave off the beard. The rest is perfect.”
My friend Amy was envious. She doesn’t sew and her youngest son needed a shepherd’s costume. She bound his entire costume with iron-on tape and asked us to pray the costume wouldn’t fall apart the moment he walked onto the stage.
Ivette didn’t even know her son needed a costume. She found out Sunday, two days before the event.
As for decorating, my friend Mary assured me she won’t be winning any House Beautiful awards this year. Her son declared their Christmas decorations “the lamest in the neighborhood. Our reindeer’s butt doesn’t even light up anymore.”
My friend Lisa said she put up about half of her decorations and left the rest of the boxes in the family room, hoping she’d find time to complete the task. When she never found the time, she moved the rest of the boxes to the garage. No one ever suspected she didn’t finish decorating.
“I guess that tells you I didn’t need them in the first place,” she said.
At that moment I realized I had two choices.
I could be at home by myself decorating my Christmas tree or out shopping for gifts for the very friends who now surrounded me.
Or I could be with those friends, sharing moments like this -- frustrations, tears, laughter, comfort, joy, and the true meaning of Christmas.