Joe's Story
- Joe
There are so many facets of one’s life - so where do I begin, where do I end?
I thought about this after prayer and I asked Jesus, "What brought me to You?" To do this I suppose I would have to go back to the beginning, although so many things have happened since then.
When I was quite young I was first raised in Western Australia. My father owned a "trading post," as we would describe it. "Vincent's Tankard" was situated on the Tea and Sugar Rail Line which stretches across Australia east to west. The clientele of my father's post were adventurers, prospectors, and aborigines, (Abbies), and my job was to dig water wells by hand, and I was flown twice a week by bush pilots back and forth to St. Michael's School in Derby for my education.
I remember most an Abbie by the name of "Henry," who was a good friend to me and my father. He was an older man with very dark skin and beautiful silky white hair, and during this time he became a mentor to me and he was very much a Christian.
One night Henry and I were sitting on a rock out in the bush and I remember asking him how the evening landscape could be so beautiful. The stars were so bright they reflected a purple hue on the bush and as a child I was so in awe of this. Henry told me it was the "Breath of God." Night after night I would sleep under the stars that our Lord would breathe some kind of a future into me. I was lonely, yet I had no idea what was to come.
It was eleven months later that my father had purchased a restaurant in Beacon, New York, and before I knew it I was in America. The evening I arrived we landed at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and I remember being so fascinated at all of the lights I saw. It looked like the stars were below me instead of above me and I reasoned that the stars were below me of course because I was now in the northern hemisphere. I thank God to this day that I wasn't the one flying the plane.
We rented a bungalow in Beacon and my father went to work operating his restaurant. I was sent to St. John's Catholic School where I soon me Fr. Martin Connolly, who was to become the biggest influence in my life on earth and he introduced me to our Lord in only a way he could. I soon became his favorite altar boy, attended Mass every morning, and eventually was sent to St. Joseph's Seminary at Dunwoody in preparation of becoming a diocesan priest that summer and fall.
It was Christmas Eve, and I served at the midnight High Mass. I was to walk home alone early that morning and although I was only nine years of age at that time, I was seasoned enough to make the three mile trek home. I kept thinking how important it was that I get home before Santa got there. In those days it was acceptable to believe in Santa at that age, although in my mind I realized there was no Santa, but in my heart he surely existed.
Shortly after I left church it began to snow and it quickly turned into a blizzard. This was my very first experience with snow and I could never explain how the fantastic beauty of this affected me. I recall walking down Main Street at 1:30 a.m. in the middle of the road with not a person or a car in sight, and I spun around so many times at one point that I became dizzy and fell in joy as the snow falling blurred the beautiful Christmas lights that stretched across the street at each set of lamp posts. I remembered what Henry had once said to me that such beauty was the Breath of God. I got up and then fell to my knees and thanked Jesus for all that He had given me.
Since then, I have experienced the Breath of God over and over again. Acts 17:25, which I have come to know later in life, "Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all good things." In the years to come I would be Born Again.
I have breathed in His Name, and I still take deep breaths, and I still see the purple hue and the snow in which He has Blessed me for all time. -- Joe Devine
