Jimmie and Linda

By Eileen Love
It was the kind of phone call you know is coming, yet it still takes you by surprise. Jimmie was dead. The voice on the line belonged to one of the women in my ENDOW group, and she was calling all of us to share the news that Linda’s husband finally ended his battle with cancer.

I first met Linda at an ENDOW gathering a couple of years ago. It was an informational meeting. There were one hundred women in the room that day and all were captivated by the description of John Paul II’s teaching on the genius of women. Some of us banded together and that day was the beginning of our own little ENDOW group.

With the love of our faith as the common bond, we all quickly became friends. We learned about each other’s families, dissected our struggles and discussed successes. Always throughout, we prayed for one another.

Linda, the extrovert, and Jimmie, the quiet one, were married for forty years and were entirely devoted to each other. When Linda shared with us how sick her husband was, I was struck by the language she used. When she spoke of the doctoring and the hospital visits, she always used the plural, as in…“We’ve never had cancer before…” and “We told the doctor we didn’t feel good…” In our group, Linda often prefaced her comments with self deprecating disclaimers like, “I don’t know much but …” and then a priceless gem would drop from her lips. She had the faith in her heart and loved stretching intellectually. And she had the theology of Christian marriage down pat. She knew, better than anyone that the task of Christian spouses is to help each other along in the path of holiness.

This she did all during Jimmie’s long illness. When our group did our latest study on Salvifici Doloris (The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering) Linda could not always be with us because of the demands of caretaking her husband, but when she could steal away, she would come to our meeting, one of us would fetch her coffee, and we would read John Paul II’s message on the redemptive power of suffering. We all took in the words and pondered their meaning, but it was Linda, with her quiet courage and untiring love, who made the message come alive.

At the funeral Linda looked beautiful. She was dressed in a pretty green top and wore a faint smile much of the day. Serene during the Mass and stoic during the ceremony at Fort Logan, we, her friends, knew she was taking comfort in the knowledge that her beloved Jimmie was now beginning his eternal life. If you have a quiet moment this week, please say a prayer for the repose of this good man’s soul. It would mean everything to Linda.

A Little Help from My Friends

By Terry Polakovic

I am lucky because I live in a house that has a great front porch. I have spent hours on that porch sharing stories with family and friends. It was the inspiration for this blog. However, I quickly realized that it wasn’t much fun sitting out there by myself. I needed a little help from my friends.

So, over the next several days and weeks, you will start to meet them, and I am sure you will come to love them just as I have. Many of these men and women helped to found the ENDOW program, and all of them have made it what it is today ~ a fast growing, educational program for women based on the teachings of the Catholic Church. I can honestly say that it has been a grand adventure for all of us and it is our greatest hope that a few people have benefitted along the way.

Now a little bit about friendship…taken from ENDOW’s Discover Your Dignity: A Woman's Journey through Life, Part II study guide:

“…True friendship is one of mutual love and goodwill. Communication is an essential component. True friends want to share the most important things in their lives; they want to do the same kinds of things and do them together. They want their lives to coincide in a very real way. As Aristotle put it, they must “eat salt together.” This kind of friendship means helping each other grow in virtue and communicating to each other that we are lovable. It means taking the time to really know one another for who we are and looking beyond each other’s shortcomings to what we can ultimately become. Essentially, true friends help us to see ourselves as we truly are and they give us an insight into how God loves us…”

Perhaps more than ever, today we need to sit on the front porch with our friends. Both the porch and our friends remind us that we are human. We need to be reminded. Never before in history has our humanity been so severely tested. In a world that has lost its affinity for closeness, we need to remember that we were made for relationship. Frances Weaver, the author of The Girls With the Grandmother Faces and a friend of mine from years gone by once wrote, “The fabric of American life began to disintegrate with the disappearance of the front porch…When we moved to the patio in the backyard, then to the TV in the house, we lost important human contacts.” She was right. Let’s do our best to recapture them.

Born to Lead

By Terry Polakovic

When my children were small I had this quotation framed and then hung in the hall: “There are two lasting things we give our children. One is roots and the other is wings.” Maybe I should have hung it in a less public place. My children have taken that “wing” part very seriously.

Today my son is leaving for Officer’s Candidate School with the Marines. Even though this part of the training will be combined with his last two years of college, he will be a different person when he returns at the end of August. I have no doubt he will have grown quite a bit. From personal experience, I know a thing or two about growing. First of all, it can be challenging (painful) and secondly, it is worth it.

However, as his mother, I am stuck on the painful part. No mother would willingly send her child into a challenging situation without a little bit of her heart packed in the suitcase. Maybe that is why I had to retell my favorite story about him to the group that had gathered last Sunday night to wish him well. I just couldn’t stop myself from sharing the fact that for the first five years of life, he rarely (never) took the McDonald’s “Happy Meal” bucket off of his head. No kidding. This child walked around with a bucket on his head for years.

I confided to my friend that I had shared this story. She consoled me by telling me that most families are unwilling to let their relatives evolve. Possibly; but I think in sharing that story, I am confirming in my own mind what I have always known. This child is different; he is not a follower. He was born to lead.

One day I will see him in an Officer’s uniform. Will that new picture replace the picture of the child with a bucket on his head? I can hardly image relinquishing it because I have hung on to it so tightly for all of these years. My hope is that I will be able to see them side-by-side.

Please pray for him and for all of the brave men and women who serve our country.

It was the Holy Spirit

By Terry Polakovic

So, what inspired you to start ENDOW? I get this question fairly frequently, both from people who are actually interested and from those who are not. The truth is, it was the Holy Spirit. Even though it is certainly an option, it just isn’t easy to say “no” to the Holy Spirit.

Eight years ago, I knew there were a few things in my life that could use some tweaking, but I didn’t necessarily think I needed an entire overhaul. The Holy Spirit thought differently. Out of nowhere, He started introducing all of these new people into my life. I was a bit uncomfortable at first because they spoke a completely different language. Their conversations revolved around Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the “New Feminism”, and a woman’s conference that had been held in Beijing. At the time I remember thinking how appropriate that was, since all of these concepts seemed like Chinese to me.

However, I was drawn into these conversations in a way that I had never been drawn to anything before. As an avid reader, I could recognize a good book when I saw one. Unexpectedly, however, my literary tastes started changing. Even the most riveting novel didn’t compare to the writings of Pope John Paul II. There was so much to read and I just couldn’t read fast enough. I started looking at every single thing differently.

By God’s grace, the same thing was happening to a couple of the women whom I had only recently met. That is the goodness of God; He sends you exactly what you need. I needed people who were being transformed in the same way I was. It would have been too frightening for me to go through it alone.

The three of us didn’t know very much, but we knew that what we were experiencing was real. We wanted to share it with other women, and we were just naïve enough to think we could. There is a saying, “God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.” That is what He did for us. Again, thanks be to God. He sent all of the right people – an excellent Archbishop, the Religious Sisters of Mercy and literally thousands of women who were as hungry as we were. He sent us great authors, a great staff, and lots of good counsel. There is something beautiful about being a little bit clueless. You have to depend on other people. I am not saying it has all been easy, but every bit of it has been worth it.

As I said earlier, each one of us has the option of saying “no” to the Holy Spirit, but I wouldn’t recommend it. My life today is so much better than I could have ever imagined. I will be forever grateful that He thought me worthy of this gift called ENDOW.