Maddie Hornikel was a Seton Teaching Fellow in Cohort 10 and now teaches 7th and 8th grade Language Arts and Social Studies at Romero Academy at Resurrection, where she served as a fellow.
In a recent conversation with my spiritual director, we discussed how this Lent has been full of my plans being turned upside down. “Well, you remember the saying,” she said. “We plan, and God laughs.” He’s never laughing at us, though. He laughs with us, rejoicing when we’re able to see how His plan was for our good. As I look back on my Fellow year, I can see so many times where God and I laughed at each other’s plans, how His (as always) ended up being what I needed, and how they ultimately led to my vocation.
“I can see so many times where God and I laughed at each other’s plans… and how they ultimately led to my vocation.”
If you told me five years ago that I’d spend my first year out of college serving as a Catholic missionary, I would have been the one laughing. Five years ago this Lent, I was preparing to enter the Catholic Church after growing up Baptist. I was eager to follow God’s call home, but at the same time, I looked around at my cradle Catholic friends and felt so inadequate. Me? Teach people how to be Catholic? You’ve got the wrong girl.
Still, God works in the unexpected. After many gentle nudges my senior year of college, I finally listened to the Lord’s call to discern, apply for, and become a Seton Teaching Fellow. As my Fellow year approached, I began to dream about what it would look like. My students would always be attentive and ready to receive the Gospel, right? Community life would surely always be smooth. And formation? I’m an RCIA alumna, I’ve got this!
“Still, God works in the unexpected.”
Oh, how Our Lord must have chuckled at my expectations. Spoiler alert: bringing Jesus to middle schoolers can be hard. My community was wonderful, but living intentionally like that for the first time stretched me in ways I never expected. Spiritual formation brought me so much further in my life as a still-new Catholic, but was also an opening for the Lord to poke at the parts of my Fellow life that I wasn’t living to the fullest. Moving to Cincinnati meant uprooting my life and moving to a place where it felt like everyone I met had some generations-long foundation here. While some of my 8th graders were applying to the high schools their parents’ parents had attended, I felt out of place in my new home.
Even so, I still have to say that if you put me back in my senior year of college with the decision looming over me, I’d choose the Fellow year every time. My difficulties in the classroom taught me to meet my students with love, even on our hardest days. I am 100% a better teacher for having been a Fellow, and I now have the blessing of getting a front row seat as my students are formed by the cohorts of Fellows who have come after me. Community life taught me so many things – how to mediate conflict lovingly, how to step up when someone I love needs me, and how to ask for help in humility when I need it myself.
“Even so… I’d choose the Fellow year every time.”
The Lord also answered my longing for roots here in Cincinnati in a beautiful way. I deeply desired to stay in Cincinnati after my Fellow year, and by God’s providence, a position opened up for me at the Romero school where I served. In November of that first year of teaching, I met my now-fiancé. We quickly bonded over so many things – our conversion stories, having the same birthday. The first time I told him what school I taught at, his jaw dropped.
“Wait, Resurrection? Like in Price Hill?” He explained that Resurrection had been his grandfather’s parish – his grandfather and great-grandmother had both gone to school here. A few weeks later, we’d dig through his family photos to find a picture of his great-grandmother standing directly in front of the rectory…which is now the Bosco House, the home where I spent my Fellow year. When we got engaged, I knew the Lord must be laughing at the fact that there would finally be a Lyons walking the halls of Resurrection School again. I asked Him for roots, and He certainly delivered. I think every day of how my late in-laws spent so many years in the same building where I now teach, how the cafeteria where I have lunch duty was once the church where my fiancé’s great-grandparents were married.
“The Lord also answered my longing for roots here in Cincinnati in a beautiful way.“
What would have happened if I hadn’t heeded the Lord’s loving laughs at my plans? I would have been a much worse teacher, for one. I would have missed out on the wildest, most wonderful year of my life thus far. And, my marriage wouldn’t involve such a crazy, beautiful deepening of my love for the neighborhood where I still serve. In our limited human conception, our plans must be so funny to the Lord. But oh, what beautiful, mutual joy there is when we’re able to step back and see how He has allowed everything to fall into place.
