He Calls The Broken

In the Fall of 2019, I was lost.

Being lost brings a special kind of despair. When life is tough, you have a battle to fight. All the bad things are a force to be reckoned with and a cause in and of themself. They’re tangible; they have names and faces and are easy to despise.

When you’re lost, everything is a vast landscape of gray gradient with endless possible paths, but no distinguishing characteristic to help you know which way to go.

So you sit still, and you despair.

I stumbled through the Fall of 2019, clinging to the structures in my life that at least kept me moving. When despair would strike, I would chastise myself and contemptuously dismiss the emotion as the overly dramatic sentiments of a woman having a mid-life crisis.

I wandered between the tiny moments of laughter, hoping that they would brush some color onto the landscape and tell me which way to go.

As my despair became more apparent, Pete and I started to have frank conversations about a direction change. We considered moving to another state for him to pursue different work. In February of 2020, we traveled to Cincinnati for the third round of an interview that we thought was the answer to our prayers.

When he wasn’t offered the position, it was devastating.

It was like finding a small trail of color that cut through the gray landscape only to discover that it circles back on itself and it hadn’t led anywhere.

I had nothing to tell him, no words of comfort that mattered, and no clue what to do next. I needed to comfort him, but I didn’t know what to say, so I suggested that we go to Adoration.

With a busy schedule, the only time we could find was late at night after the boys went to bed. We found a church that had 24 hour Adoration, and on a cold, rainy February evening we drove to the church.

The chapel was beautiful and when we walked in, Pete and I chose seats apart. After all, we weren’t there to be with each other.

I knelt for awhile, reciting prayers that had imprinted on my brain as a young child in Catechism. When the words dried up, I sat back and simply tried to be still. I drifted away, giving in to the fatigue that was down to my bones.

I was brought back by a whisper in my ear, “Trust Me.” I knew that more than anything, Pete wanted to make things okay for me, to pull me out of the despair that had enveloped me. Of course I trusted him, and turned around to tell him as much.

But he wasn’t there.

Pete hadn’t whispered to me, He had.

A couple weeks later, the world fell apart, and while many people were steeped in despair, I began to climb out of it. Right down the middle of my gray landscape was a brightly lit path.

I don’t know where the path leads, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter -I’m not in control anyway.

Last week, the Catholic world was abuzz with the news that Shia LaBeouf had converted to Catholicism. I knew that he had been preparing to play Padre Pio, and that many people were praying for his conversion. By the way, these prayers are not self-serving - it’s not so we can get someone on “our side”. Shia had suffered so publicly, and we know the salvation offered to the most broken souls through Christ.

I have now watched Shia LaBeouf’s interview with Bishop Barron two times. So much of what he had to say resonated with me - the power he found in trusting Christ, and the truth, beauty and goodness he finds in the Latin Mass.

Click Here to watch Bishop Barron's interview with Shia LaBeouf

I highly recommend watching it, and even if you aren’t struck by what he has to say about Catholicism, I hope that you would be struck by the peace and joy that he radiates. After watching him self-destruct on the world stage, the transformation is truly something to behold.