Nearly A Decade in the Making

God’s Faithfulness and Unexpected ROIs

When I started working in youth ministry in 2015, I met two incredible young women (among many incredible young people!). The summer I started working as their youth minister, one of those young women was a rising high school freshman. The other was a rising high school junior.

I was a new youth minister straight out of graduate school. I was a decade older than the incoming freshman and eight years older than the incoming junior.

Walking with those young women and other students through their high school years and being invited into their college and post-college years through coffee chats, walks, and phone calls has been a gift I didn’t know I would receive when I accepted the position of youth minister nearly a decade ago.

Those students who were in high school the first year I started working as their youth minister hold a unique place in my heart.

In the nine years since meeting them, they have gotten drivers licenses, matured, graduated high school, matured a little more, and started their first full-time jobs. Several have married; several have met the person they plan to marry; several are preparing for religious life; and most are striving for holiness in all circumstances.

In these years, as they have grown into themselves and their callings, humbly inviting me in to listen, pray, and walk with them, they have had the unique window into my own journey of vocational fulfillment. Since meeting them, I have gone from dating to engaged, engaged to married, married to married with a baby…then two little ones…and pregnant with our third little one before choosing for my nine-year chapter in parish youth ministry to close.

Now, this very week, I have the honor of celebrating both of those previously mentioned young women as they enter their chosen vocations and begin their journeys of vocational fulfillment.

The young woman I met as a rising high school freshman got married this past weekend and is beginning married life!

The young woman I met as a rising high school junior is professing her first vows to a religious order towards the end of this week!

As I wrote each of those young women letters for their respective big days, teared up watching one walk down the aisle toward her new husband, and grieved not being able to make the 5+ hour drive to hear the other profess her first vows, it struck me how blessed I am to have been employed when I was, where I was, for the time that I was there.

What an unexpected joy that the ROI of a job I greatly enjoyed (and was unendingly challenged by), under the leadership of a priest from whom I have learned so much, is looking forward to a lifetime of walking alongside some of those early-year former students in faith-filled friendship.

JOURNAL PROMPT:

• What have been the unexpected blessings of one of your previous or current roles?