Living Life In-Between

 Originally Published for Live Today Well Collective e-newsletter February, 2022.

When I was a bright, young twenty-something, I very much could relate to the missionary heart of St. Therese of Lisieux. She wanted to do great things and travel the world converting the hearts of others to her beloved Christ. I even got to do this in my own ways back then. I spent two summers in my early twenties in Guatemala volunteering. After college, I traveled the U.S. for a year with NET Ministries. I lived out of a van with a suitcase and ten other young people who had an intense energy to pray and maybe an even overly zealous goal of conversion for others around them.  

 

And I didn’t stop there. In my mid-twenties, after serving for three years as a parish youth minister, I sold my car, quit my parish job, put my J Crew clothes in a box and donned a navy blue skirt and Oxford blouse and entered religious life. I spent hours in front of the Eucharist in chapels all over the country and world just hoping that if I prayed hard enough, God would make my vocation crystal clear and call me to great things.

 

But here’s the part that I had somehow forgotten about St. Therese’s life. Even though she had the heart of a missionary, God did not call her to do that kind of work. Instead, she was called to live in a cloistered convent and just love the sisters around her that she was living with there. She was not always successful. And she died at the age of 24.  

 

At the age of 27, I left the religious life that I had so intensely discerned and found myself - even still at the age of 40 - in what many would say is an “in-between” vocation. I am single. I am a teacher. I write things and record a podcast. Nothing out of the ordinary. However, I have come to be at peace with this in-between sort of existence and even to embrace and celebrate it.  

 

Fr. James Martin has said that “most of our lives are spent in Holy Saturday. In other words, our days are not filled with the unbearable pain of a Good Friday. Nor are they suffused with the unbelieve joy of an Easter.” When I started to grapple with this concept that most of our lives are lived in the Holy Saturdays the way that I lived my life and the view that I had on life changed. I was no longer seeking the highs and lows of missionary service and a religious vocation. I found myself in this very long Holy Saturday of becoming a middle school and high school teacher and living the single life and kind of loving it.  

 

I could write a whole essay (and I have!) on the pain of the single vocation being seen as an “in-between” or default vocation. Because for me, the single vocation is what has allowed me to embrace the call of the every day. I have learned how to make the most of the in-between that is not the peaks and valleys of a perhaps more socially acceptable religious vocation like marriage or religious life. I get to pray every day for as long as I would want. I get to discern and travel where I believe that God wants me to go. I get to model a life for my students that they, too, can be holy even in the “in-between” stages that they are in.  

 

As we enter into this Ordinary Time that is not the high peak of Christmas and not yet the valley of Lent, we shouldn’t think of this part of the journey as Ordinary. First of all, ordinary time doesn’t get its name for being simply “in-between” but rather from the weeks being ordered or numbered. The weeks are literally counted. So we should not discount them by deeming them just ordinary!  

 

All of us often find ourselves in the “in-between” of our day to day. It sounds trite, but I would ask us to consider where the beauty is in our everyday routines- in the smiles of our students or children, in our homes, in our friends- because as Father Martin points out, God is very much there. In Ordinary Time and in the Holy Saturdays, God is developing us and preparing us for the ministry that may or may not be peaks or valleys. And even if we, like St. Therese, find our vocation of being saints in the everyday, what beautiful, holy company to be in!

 

As I enter my 40s, which are literally the “in between” ages of life, I feel more prepared than ever to embrace with confidence the peaks, valleys, and the roads in-between. May we all learn to accept the roads that we travel in-between and even learn to love the conversations and challenges that happen along the way.