I really got thrown for a loop, earlier this month. It’s not often I become short on words. I was a guest speaker at St. Thomas Business College in a business class, taught by a colleague, also on the Trinity Sober Homes Board of Directors www.trinitysoberhomes.org with me. In attendance, an outside observer, who wanted to sit in on the class, approached me afterwards and invited me to breakfast to delve deeper into the subject of the class. In getting to know one another, we discovered similar paths through job histories with one stark difference. He professed to be atheist, after 53 years growing up Lutheran. He shared a story that caught me off-guard. In recent days, he was sitting in St. Philip the Deacon congregation for a Sunday service and during the recitation of the Apostles Creed, it donned on him that he didn’t believe a single word of what he was reciting and got up and left church and has yet to look back.
In answering what he thinks happens after we die. He said, “Nothing happens, we’re just dead and our body gets eaten by worms”. So after 53 years of being Lutheran he just stopped believing, all together. I further asked what’s there to look forward to and he said, “Just living life to its fullest extent”. That’s when I got the deer in the head lights look. Out of common courtesy, I offered to weigh in on my faith perception and journey and he said he was perfectly comfortable with where he was at and preferred not to hear anything about my take on religion. He wanted to meet to discuss some of the material I covered in class regarding sales techniques that I was taught over the years, the topic I broached with the “Tommie’s”.
What an abyss that would be to look into the future and see nothing. It’s unimaginable to me. Are folks getting barraged by so much negativity that they just throw in the towel and stop believing? Here was this highly educated, unemployed man looking for answers in his career path to the future void of nothingness. Without going into psychoanalysis issues this fellow clearly must be dealing with, I practically bit my tongue off, in lending my many opinions that I was eager to share.
How lucky we are to have our faith, our Catholic principals, our HNOJ church community, our KC Degree’s that bond us together with nearly two million other Catholic gentlemen throughout the world. All I could think about is the time I broke the fiber in the 2nd Degree and watched others attempt and fail to break the cable. So close to founders day of the KC’s, how many guys broke their fibers, since the inception of the 2nd Degree Ceremony. It’s comforting to know that we are all there, in UNITY for one another.
God Bless,