Jeff was raised Southern Baptist and my being Catholic didn’t lend itself for room to compromise. So I continued to maintain my quiet relationship with God. We would toss the idea around of trying to find a middle ground or even going to a Lutheran church but never did.
I had been working at Holiday Treasures for a couple years without any type of benefits. I remained active within the Miva Merchant community and thought I had a couple of leads there, but they didn’t pan out. I had posted my resume on Monster and watched for job openings in Birmingham. Flipping through the channels one night I stubble across EWTN and Mother Angelica was doing a catalog show. Electronic catalogs and ecommerce are my “specialty” so I went to checkout the EWTN website. They had job listings posted – one was for a Web Designer. At the same time, I found a job listing for Web Developer at the Baptist Health System (here in Birmingham). I wound up interviewing with both of them around April 2001 and then went into the “hurry up and wait” mode. The running joke was “who would get me first? The Baptists or the Catholics?”
Turns out that one of the site owners for a site I built, had ties with EWTN. He came over to me one morning, asked if I still was interested in working at EWTN and gave me a phone number to call. I wound up talking with one of the people who was part of the interview time from when I came in back in April. I went back to EWTN for a second interview with the webmaster – he gave me a great tour of the campus. I went back to my car and cried – I felt like I wasn’t “Catholic enough” to work at EWTN. Little did I know they were trying to find me so I could have a third interview with the company President. So God WAS trying to tell me something – I got the job at EWTN.
I started October 1, 2001. In the spring of 2002, we went to the EWTN Family picnic that was held at the monastery in Hanceville. The picnic included a family Mass. Jeff had never been inside a Catholic Church – it was quite a moving experience for him. He was so full of questions – now I know why I had put at EWTN. He started attending RCIA classes and I started the painful annulment process (I’ll save that for another time). It was a long process – Jeff was finally able to join the Church this past June 2005.
Looks like this may have to be one of those continuing threads.
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