A message I needed: Three white petals of faith

Christmas Eve. The eve of the celebration of the most momentous birth in all of history – the beginning of the salvation of mankind. Christmas Eve marks the last day of anticipation – the calm before the storm. 

As a child, the day before Christmas marked the last day of looking at the wrapped presents under the tree, wondering what could possibly be hiding beneath the gilded paper. Now, as an adult, Christmas Eve holds a different meaning: a reminder of the uncertainty facing the Holy Family and their reliance on their faith in God.
 
This year, in the midst of my final fall semester as a Ph.D. student, I’m in amazement that we’ve reached the end of December. In what has been perhaps my most chaotic and crazed semester, time has seemed like a blur. I’ve blinked and missed the past four months. During Advent, I’ve pondered the passing of time and my need to plan. As a doctoral student, life seems to be all about planning. We plan our undergraduate grades and coursework to reflect the possibility of applying to graduate school. In graduate school, we plan our projects to get us into a doctoral program and eventually, perhaps, an academic job.

At the beginning of the semester, my advisor asked me to create a sort of timeline that looked into the influences that have led me to where I am today. It was an interesting task that was, presumably, designed to help me craft personal statements and documents on the job market. But what it revealed to me was just how intricately planned my life has been – and not solely by me.

As I thought about all of my extracurricular activities and interests from grade school until today, I realized that my path had always pointed in the direction of a career in literature and research. Plotting the points of my own personal timeline, I saw the influences that my family had upon my trajectory – encouraging my creative output and supporting my love of reading and books, but I also saw a greater path.

Everything happens for a reason. Anyone who has read my columns since I began at the Clarion knows that I firmly believe in that statement. This semester, as my time in graduate school comes to an end, I’ve begun questioning what happens next. What I see is a question mark. Applications have been filed, and the results are now out of my hands. My timeline clearly showed that.

What happens after May? I have no idea. Since August, this uncertainty has plagued me, resulting, certainly, in stress and anxiety, but also in questioning and doubt. Lately, I’ve been praying, but without a sense of direction. The question of what happens next seemed to have no answer. And then it did.

I was recently with my husband and a close friend walking out of a movie theater that happens to be in the bottom floor of a hotel. As we walked into the theatre, we passed what looked like the breakdown of a wedding ceremony. Tables and linens were scattered, a wall of flowers was being torn apart. We were dangerously close to the start of the movie, so we were rushing to get seated and had little time to stop and look closely. In retrospect, that sentence seems like the story of my current semester: no time to stop, just keeping moving forward. Afterwards, as we were leaving, the room was clear, having no sign of the event or the cleaning that had taken place. I thought nothing of it, until we were walking out of the revolving glass doors. Right in my path were three white rose petals.

I stopped and looked at the ground in awe. Three white petals. It was my answer. Everything happens for a reason. St. Therese has long been the saint to whom my family turns in times of crisis.

I don’t need a definite answer to the end of my timeline: all I needed were those three petals. For the first time in months, I slept throughout the entire night. I felt peace.

Three white petals was all it took for me to understand the same lesson that seems to be repeated throughout my life, and it’s the same message that we hear in our Christmas story. My timeline is not in my hands. There is a greater path – at the end of each of my turning points, there has always been a sense of uncertainty, and God has always taken care of me. Those rose petals were there for a reason. They are reminders that everything, in the end, has a purpose, and that no one’s timeline is set in certainty.

Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at [email protected].