There's Always Another Side to the Story

In the last few months, I've found a renewed sense of religion. I'm not even sure if those are the correct words to describe it. I guess I should just say I'm going back to church. It's one of the unexpected side effects of some of the unproductive chances I've taken lately.

I grew up going to church every week. I was even a good Catholic and went to church most weeks my first two years of college. It was around my sophomore year that I started to realize many of my political and personal beliefs conflicted with those of the Catholic church. I eliminated that activity from my weekends for the last 5 years in the hopes I could figure out what I truly believe. Plus, I was just too busy. In the last half-decade, my career started. I had to move around and I worked schedules that were not conducive to making it to mass.

I think it's a mixture of things that's brought me back. In the process of taking steps towards a future I never had planned, I realize it's beyond my power to know what is going to happen. I know what I want to happen, and I know what I need to do to make those things I want a reality, but that doesn't mean it will all come true. Getting everything to gel together completely to work out in life like it does in my head is controlled by a power much greater than me.

Realizing that, I found myself praying a bit more and wanting to go to mass. It had wonderful side effects. The main being it was something Greg and I could do together. He grew up more Catholic then me (and by that I mean he went to Catholic school) and he would still find time to go to church here and there when I would scoff at the idea. For a good two months, we found time to go to mass every weekend and do couple type things after like going for breakfast and run errands together. We would try a different church each week. There are some great ones around Louisville and Lexington. As if it isn't peaceful enough taking that hour out of your week to meditate, mix in a loved one and it makes life feel perfect.

The real reason is I probably am realizing that I don't know what I truly believe and I need some guidance. Whatever the reason, I'm finding it helps me balance and rationalize my work and personal life. One week, I even found a story at mass. I ventured out to the Newman Center one Saturday night for their evening services. The Newman Center is a very contemporary church on the University of Kentucky's campus. Typically, I am a church snob and prefer cathedral-type churches (which is ironic because I grew up going to a very contemporary church), but something about the Newman Center is so welcoming. I think it's the college and educator type crowd. After mass, a woman stood up and talked about how she was working to find temporary homes for Haitian orphans who needed to get out of the country until their homes could be rebuilt. I approached her after church, got her number and pitched the story to my manager the next week. She actually let me do it too!

It's also given me the ability to find new meaning in my career. A few weeks back, the priest at the Cathedral in Downtown Louisville gave a wonderful sermon about using your talents for good. At the time, I thought that was a sure sign I would be getting a new career, where I could better use my talents. That is not the case and that makes me pretty happy because it's given me a new goal to find good in all the awful stories I end up reporting on a daily basis. I find myself fighting much harder to get to do more pleasant stories and if not, giving the best spin possible on the tough ones.

That gets me to my point and what I realized at Ash Wednesday services last night. During his homily, the Pastor talked about how he was called to UK hospital in the afternoon to give last rights to a 23 year old who would pass away from a car accident with a snow plow. The point of his sermon was to live life to the fullest and to the best, because you never know the time nor the place when it will all end. I got something more out of it then most, because earlier in the day, his sermon was a much different story. In fact, it wasn't a sermon, but rather a follow-up to a story we were running on our newscast about a man who got in an accident with a snow plow. At some point in the day, I remember my Executive Producer screaming across the newsroom that the man in the accident died and we needed to get it in the show. In news, it always sounds so insensitive. We don't mean it that way, but we trudge through so much awfulness during the day, you have to brush it off. But as I listened to the priest tell the story of giving this man his last rights, how his family wasn't present, but requested it and how he went out of his way to take some of his ashes off his head and give them to the young man about to die, I thought why can't I find that to tell? Unfortunately, and many times for good reason, we never hear that story. We never have access to that story. But to me, it is so much more worth it to tell that story on the news, then the dry, hard facts of what happened and how he died.

I don't know how, or where, but more often then not, I want to be somewhere where I am getting the unexpected side to the stories. I want the sides that truly inspire.