observations from school

I talked this morning with a man named Greg, who works as a facilities guy around Washington High School. He's a big blue-collar guy, works hard and seems like a man just doing his best to provide for his family and his kids and all that. He saw that I was reading my Bible and we started up a conversation about that. It turns out that he used to be studying to be a minister way back in the day, but something happened in the family that distracted him and his wife wanted the whole family to go to a Catholic church together. So now he said he gave up on that minister thing and converted to Catholicism, and he's doing that with his family. It looked to me like he felt that was his real calling or something but he couldn't do it because of what happened. Like maybe, he said, the devil realized he was going to be a good minister and did something to mess that up.

Then he started talking to me about how he teaches catechism to 4th grader's at St. Edward's, a parish in town. It was hilarious watching this manly man start to talk about a 4th grader named Mikaila that was frustrating him because she was starting to, as he said "develop. You know, get her 'girly parts' I guess you could say." I could tell he was uncomfortable just talking about it. I didn't know people actually said "girly parts."

Anyway I just wanted to share that, I don't have any special kind of lesson or anything from him. I just think it's interesting how people can have stories in them you totally didn't expect. And I feel like I almost ran into a sitcom character. Good hard-working guy, doing his best to be an upstanding Catholic family-man but real and honest at the same time, masculine and has difficulty talking about "girly parts" and all that. And then there's the twist of maybe he was meant to be something different. Maybe he was meant to be a church pastor instead of a facilities guy at Washington High School. Or maybe he could have been. Just thinking out loud.