I taught at a Catholic high school for eight years. It was only eight because at the end of that last year, the principal, a nun, called me into her office to explain a few things.
I had spent the previous summer returning to college and had earned straight A’s, and so, she said, she had concluded I was too smart to be a teacher. I would, she told me, be happier doing something else—as if she were the one to decide my career choice.
As I sat there in her office, I slowly came to the realization that I was being fired.
Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I wasn’t being fired. I was being let go. In other words, my contract was not going to be renewed.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Nobody had complained that there were any problems in my classroom. My department head was thrilled with my performance. In fact, often parents threatened to withdraw their kids from the school if they couldn’t take my classes. I was a devoted teacher who put in long hours above and beyond what was required. I had given my heart and soul to that school, and now I was being booted out?
My jaw dropped. I could scarcely believe that spending my summer vacation going back to school and scoring a perfect report card was being used against me. I wanted to know the real reason I was being let go.
I’ll never forget that nun’s answer: “You’ve been here long enough.”
I’d been there long enough? That’s why I was being let go? Because I was experienced?
Can you imagine anybody in a different career being let go from a job because he’s been there “long enough”? Imagine someone named Bob, for example, who’s called into his supervisor’s office at the phone company, being told he was losing his job because “You’ve been here long enough.”
That, of course, was not the real reason. The problem, I figured, was that I’d gotten up too high on the salary scale.
This was confirmed by the fact that I wasn’t the only teacher this happened to that year. Half the faculty was let go, including a lady who had been there since the school opened and wanted only one more year before she retired. I heard that the next year the other half of the faculty was replaced.
It was supposed to be a cost-saving measure designed to keep the school open. Instead, it was a horrible mistake. You don’t save a business by getting rid of your best people. It devastated the school. Where before there had been a waiting list of students clamoring to get in, within a few years enrollment dropped to the point that classes were not being filled and the school almost had to close.
In the meantime, though, I was out of a job. My mother, attempting to console me, said, “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window.”
I wasn’t so sure a quote like that was going to help. But Mom turned out to be right.
Because I had to find a new job, I had to move. And because I had to move into a new area, I met new people, including the man who would, within a few years, become my husband.
If I hadn’t been fired (excuse me, let go) from that job, I most likely would not have met the love of my life and wouldn’t have the two wonderful daughters I have today.
It was a terribly sour lemon that God sweetened into lemonade.
Today, while I’m still not happy about what happened, I can see, with the perspective of time, how everything worked out.
Today, I can be grateful to God that, as devastating as the ordeal was, He allowed it to happen. Turns out He knew, all along, exactly what He was doing.
Reflections on My Catholic Journey 