When You Know It's a Sign
Because there's no chance this is anything but supernatural.
Let’s continue this roller coaster of a ride. If you are joining for the first time, welcome! This is part of a much longer miraculously filled story that begins here. If you desire a shorter read, try this little miracle, or this piece about encouragement, or this funny story. And consider subscribing for a direct story every Sunday morning.
Two of the final productions I was in before the agent of change made her entrance helped me descend the slow spiral of worry and despair over my mounting problem within. One lovely production was a sweet musical in North Carolina. Luckily, I was not yet bubbling out so much that I couldn’t successfully hide what was growing inside (reminder: not a baby). But as one actor confessed to me one evening after performance - in that way that only the instant theatre family member could without having to say anything specific - “I’m worried about you...” The end of the unsaid sentence was: “getting fat”. Because I’m a petite person. Even more so back then.
The final horrid experience was another musical, this time in New York City, where I was dressed in more semi-formal cocktail attire. Luckily, the scrunching style was all the rage and it did (somewhat) mask my not-a-baby-bump-belly pretty well. Or I thought it did until a fellow actress, roughly ten years senior to me, told me outright I looked pregnant – right before places for the top of the show. How’s that for mentorship!
Actresses can be such bitches.
Here’s a picture.
Pretty bad, huh.
Of course my posture doesn’t help. Note: this was two years before any of this would be seriously addressed. Two years! Do you see how big it already is?! Two years for it to grow and double its speed with which it would wreak havoc on my insides and begin to deform my outsides.
Now I will do you all a big favor as I leap from October (when Peter re-entered my life and we shared compatible wild dreams) to my continuing to go to Mass at the church next door. Peter and I continue to email, then talk, then the unthinkable happened – I flew to NYC, a place I swore I’d never return only eight months after leaving, to see him for the first time in 28 years.
By February we were engaged, and I marveled at how I was directed (kicking and screaming) to that Catholic Church next door before my reunion with Peter who was and had remained Catholic and how I was now eager to take RCIA classes1. Conversion imminent along with marriage. Dreams I didn’t know I had taking flight.
Jesus was, indeed, showing himself.
But He wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
It would take another series of articles (maybe one day I’ll write them) to tell you all of the steps that happened in this miraculous picking up of what seemed a lead ball with Peter and me. But for now I’ll reveal one story regarding our long awaited reunion from his perspective.
One year, almost exactly to the date, before Peter and I connected again, he found himself talking with a friend of his. A priest. The story goes that the priest could see on Peter’s face a sadness this day and asked more or less, “Why so glum?” Peter related that he wanted to be married. And Father said, “Ok! Let’s get you married. I know some women…”
“No,” Peter said, I already know who I want to marry. I have always known. And he told Father the whole story.
At the time I was easily searchable because of my career as an actress and had a website as I do now. So this priest went to my site as Peter told him about me.
Then Father said something extraordinary (which must be taken in the context and sentiment that is meant) “I’m going to make this happen,” he posited, “I know of a saint….”
He had been friends with a religious sister who had passed away whom he believed to be saint. She specifically, as he would relate, granted intercession or favors having to do with the vocation of marriage. He would pray for Sr. Daniel Marie’s intercession over Peter and I.
His prayers for us were answered one year later. With one well-timed dream.
Father told this story at our wedding one year later in which he officiated.
Peter asked me to marry him on February 5, 2014. We married that September. Just as had been prophesied two years earlier: Peter had almost lost hope.
Meanwhile, one month after our engagement, on Ash Wednesday as it happened - Why do I remember this date? Well, because Ash Wednesday, and because this is the date that Hope wildly entered my life in the way I only beg-dreamed about for years.
Jesus made a major chess move.
I had been thinking about that nurse practitioner in my class more and more. I had known her now for several months. And now I had this bit of information that her husband was a surgeon. Maybe, just maybe, there was an answer there.
I was getting more and more anxious, as if time was running out – or I was running out of hemoglobin.
This is a day that is so clear to me for it was the kind of synchronistic domino play that can only be chalked up to the holy supernatural.
I had to teach an evening class – 5:15. The very class where my nurse friend would be. I packed up my paperwork with the report of what was going on in my abdomen along with the disc of photos from the HAAM radiologist.
I remember driving to work talking it over with God out loud.
Please God, I don’t want to overstep. I don’t want to put her on the spot or make her feel uncomfortable. She’s coming to class to make music with her little girl not solve my health issues. BUT. Lord, IF this is okay with you… THEN SHOW ME A SIGN THAT IT’S OK TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THIS. (All in caps because I think I said that part several times just in case God didn’t hear me the first time.)
What happened that night is the stuff humility is made of.
I began class. First sign: Jane*, the nurse practitioner was there. (Which is no small sign when you teach families with toddlers. There are constantly absences because, well, toddlers.)
The class was 45 minutes long. At about the 15-minute mark the door swings open from directly across the long rectangular room in front of me. And what I saw not only froze my insides but also gave me the very sign – more than I could ever have dreamed up on my own – more than I could ever have imagined – that I’d asked for several times over.
In walks nurse practitioner Jane’s husband.
The husband who never attends class.
The husband who is a doctor with the Texas Institute for Robotic Surgery.
In full green scrubs.
He strolled forward to sit beside his wife on the floor. And as he turned away from me for a split second, I saw one word printed on his scrubs:
Surgery.
Thank you, Lord.
Is this really happening this way? I mean even if he walked in with cargo shorts and a UT hoodie I would’ve been all in.
Now I just have to squeak my way through the final half hour of class, which is feeling the equivalent of one month per minute, because my stomach and vocal cords, in addition to fibroids, along with my pounding heart, are now all residing in my stomach too.
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, a Catholic class where you learn what Catholics (actually) believe and all about the Mass. It is the first step in discernment for entry into the Catholic religion.