Life lessons

I mentioned in another post that my Handsome Husband has a new job. There’s a story (maybe 2 or 3) to this job, and a lesson. Maybe even an aphorism or two. 😉 Let’s start with a corny saying:

“When life closes a door, God opens a window.”

In this case, Handsome left his previous full time job early in the new year when a hip injury required him to avoid strenuous physical activity for a while. By the time he recovered enough to go back to work, the company was no longer in a position to rehire him. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what we’ve been living off of these last 8 months.

But during the time Handsome was sidelined by his physical condition, he found himself volunteering for a position he would NEVER have contemplated had he not had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with: chairing the parish building committee. Which was, at that point, pretty much non-existent.

Which leads us to the next lesson:

When you don’t know what to do, do what you love.

Taking on the building committee had no immediate tangible benefit for our family, other than giving Handsome a way to feel useful during an otherwise frustrating time. But my husband has a passion for old buildings, and a passion for his Faith, and this offered a way to satisfy both of those loves.

Along the way, we realized something else – that Handsome’s passions also qualified him to give more in that position than anyone else available. And that what the restoration of the church building really needed was someone with passion, someone with vision, and someone with the requisite experience and connections to squeeze every drop from the available funds. The task was (and is) a full time task and it needed full time attention from someone… like my husband.

It took 5 more months after that realization before Handsome was able to turn his volunteer position into full time employment, but eventually his passion convinced everyone involved, from the pastor to the diocesan building office to the bishop.

Which leads to the next aphorism:

If at first you don’t succeed…

…make another phone call. This one was hard for Handsome, I think. He doesn’t like to make a nuisance of himself or seem too needy. But with so much going on, even with the pastor in his corner, it was a constant effort to keep the process of creating a job position moving along. Three times we were told it was just around the corner…next week, or the week after…sure to be approved…the funds were in an account… each time we got our hopes up, each time we picked ourselves up from our disappointment and kept on, through diocesan politics (ick!), parish drama, and just plain human failing. My husband was incredible, working all the time at whatever small contracts and odd jobs he could find, keeping the building committee afloat and getting people excited and involved the whole time, until finally there came the time that it really was all final, here’s the paperwork, welcome to church employment. Welcome to our parish Sexton, the man in charge of the maintenance, restoration, and repair of our church buildings.

The best lesson of all:

God has a purpose.

We have been married for 5 years now, and so little has made sense during that time. Despite our faith that God has a plan for us, it has never been possible to really see that plan take shape. We fell into financial trouble in the very first year we were married, moved to our current location in the wake of those troubles, had a difficult landing here and some definite culture shock, endured soul searching as we looked for a parish home, went through a dry spell when we wondered when God was going to reveal His reason for keeping us here so far from our families, watched with trepidation as our new parish was thrust into the middle of a controversial diocesan parish restructuring.

But there is something exciting brewing, even outside of Handsome’s new job, although that puts us right in the middle of it. This parish is on the verge of a great renewal – not just the facade, the building, though that is shaping up to be part of it. And now it is easy to see what we couldn’t have seen before – how God worked to bring us to this place, to this parish, how He moved Hamdsome among the right people and the right places to learn everything he would need for this work, how God knocked him off his feet to slow him down long enough to open this door, and how He placed us among His people to be part of something larger than any individual piece.

This is an exciting time for us – exciting because of the new job, which is honestly a dream job in so many ways, a literal answered prayer – exciting also because of this glimpse into where trust and hope have brought us.

One last little note. A joke.

When Handsome was still pretty young, he heard God calling him to serve His Church. Being young, he assumed that the only way to answer that call was priestly ministry, and he spent years assuming that God would lead him into the seminary before God made it clear to him that He had other plans.

So now I joke that Handsome is sort of an inverted St. Francis of Assisi. Francis heard God call him to rebuild his church, and initially assumed that God meant him to literally rebuild a physical church, until God set him to rebuilding the CHURCH.

But Handsome thought God was asking him to build up the CHURCH and it turns out that what God had in mind was that he should rebuild a church, this one.

I’m sure Francis is amused. We certainly are.