The Nuns and My Vocation

I attended a small Catholic elementary school here in Oklahoma.  There were only three religious sisters that worked there, but I only remember working with two of them.  One's name was Sister Mariam.  She had a very deep devotion to the rosary, and so one choice for an elective class was making rosaries.

Making rosaries was my second favorite school activity.  My first was the obvious number one pick, recess.  As we made them Sister would talk about how important it was to pray.  Looking back, its one of my most favorite memories of elementary school.  I still have a lot of the rosaries I made even though we were suppose to send them to the mission in Guatamala.

Now the other sister was named Sister Mary Mark.  She was an old Carmelite Nun.  Upon finding out I had her as a teacher in first grade, my friend Colleen had to reassure me that she wasn't as bad as she looked.  But I beg to differ.  She and I would often but heads and it became so bad my parents were begging me to be on my best behavior.  They even gave me tips on ways to be more nice to her than I had been.  And so during art one day I decided "I know, I'll draw a picture of her and give it to her as a gift!"  So I worked very diligently making a perfect oval head and triangle body which I colored brown.  I gave her peach skin and black shoes, but the only thing I was never very good at was perfecting the face.  And against my better judgement of drawing eyes with a pencil I used a black crown.  This didn't work out to well because her eyes were bigger than the rest of her face.  And so since X-Files was one of my favorite t.v. shows at the time I decided to change the picture into an Alien Nun. I colored her face green and gave her Antennae.  And turned the picture in.  Little did I realize that it is frowned upon to draw your teacher as an alien, especially if she is a nun.  That was an automatic ticket to counseling for a short while until it was decided that I was normal.

Another incident that happened was during a spelling test after recess and a lot of the kids were still bickering over who won in kickball.  You could tell she wasn't very happy over the fussing and said "I can't wait until the day you all learn to spell community!" And since I was so great at tuning her out all I heard was "Spell Community."  Now for a 1st grader this must have been a pretty big deal and so she had me spell community for all the other teachers and most especially for the principal at the time.  I was also given a 110% on the test and was glad to see I had the highest spelling score in the class.  This was way back in the times of healthy competition in the class, with little regard to self-esteem.   I remember I was able to win a lot of arguments by pointing to that score above the chalk board, and saying "have you ever gotten a 110% on a spelling test?"

Now the reason I bring these stories up is because looking back they played more of a part in discerning my vocation than I had previously thought.  And every so often in my Sociology classes, which means the study of people in groups a.k.a. the study of community, I would think back to that event in my life and just be amazed that even then God was pushing me in right direction.  And finally it was the Rosary that kept me discerning my calling.  It was my prayer life and zeal for God that gave me the courage to speak up for the Truth in my secular sociology classes when everyone was in favor of abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and the like.

Thank you Lord for putting these religious sisters in my life!  Please pray for Sister Mary Mark and Sister Mariam as they are both alive but aging!  And one of the reasons I was prompted to recognize Sister Mary Mark in this post is because a friend over facebook messaged me not too long ago and said I should look up ol' Sister M.M. and show her how nice I turned out.  Which is actually normal for me to get messages like that.  I still have old teachers from elementary school coming up and telling me how nice of a young man I had become.

Thanks and God Love You!

(this is a little different than earlier because they erased this post and then I could only recover half of it in my drafts so please forgive me if it doesn't make as much sense as it did before)