Faith in the unexpected

By Dr. Kyle Myers

I think that most people of Faith can agree that when it comes to your relationship with God, hindsight is 20/20. This has been no different in my own life. The struggles and crosses in my past that seemed so daunting and created so much anxiety have oftentimes become the biggest blessings for the future. Only in retrospect was I able to see that each trial was a step closer to a relationship with God.   

I was born and baptized into the Catholic Church, but my parents fell out of the Catholic Faith by the time I was in grade school. While I lived in Scottsbluff, we attended Methodist services. After eighth grade, my family moved to Lincoln, where my father took a new job. We had to plan on what high school I would attend at that time. This was stressful, as I was leaving all my friends and (foolishly) my main consideration for the new school I would attend was being able to see my old friends. This led me to pick Lincoln Pius X as my future high school (the smallest school in consideration, in the same athletic class as the high school in my old town). Little did I know, divine providence was working through my juvenile considerations! I learned so much about the Catholic Faith by attending Pius X that by the time senior year was over, I was relatively certain that I was going to convert to Catholicism. 

During high school, I was also working hard to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, as it was a dream of mine to be a pilot. Part of this process was undergoing a physical exam to make sure I was qualified to be a pilot. At the time of the health exam, I assumed I had passed all the requirements and continued the application process. However, I learned months later that I was rejected for a spot because I had “failed” my vision test and this was why I had failed to get accepted (In fact, I didn’t fail my vision test. I have 20/20, full-color vision, and later the academy confirmed that the report was wrong.) However, this very stressful failure for me led me down a different path in life – to the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), where I would further strengthen my Catholic Faith, meet my wife and start a career in medicine.  

While at UNK, I came back frequently to Lincoln to attend spiritual direction from my religion teacher during my senior year of high school, Father Brian Kane. I was given a dispensation from attending RCIA classes since I had gone through four years of religious education at Pius X (and thankfully had good grades in those classes!). My friend group further strengthened my Faith in the Catholic Church, as my roommate was Catholic and took his own Faith life seriously as well. He introduced me to the Newman Center on campus, and I got involved. My girlfriend in college was also Catholic. It seemed that God finally had me surrounded! I could do nothing but surrender to his will, and I was confirmed into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil Mass my freshman year of college. My previous failure had now brought me into the Church.  

During college, I majored in chemistry, and my goal was to become a physician. I did well in school and felt I was a strong candidate. I traveled to several medical schools and felt I had done well in the interviews. I was checking all the boxes; I had planned my entire life around getting accepted and had daydreamed about what kind of physician I wanted to become in the future. You can imagine the devastation I felt when I got the rejection letter in the mail from every medical school to which I applied. What was I going to do with the rest of my life now? I had no more plans, not even for a summer job after graduation. Thankfully, my Catholic college roommate encouraged me to take classes to become a certified nursing assistant (CNA) and work in a nursing home. I didn’t know at the time how important the experience of working in the nursing home was going to be for my future life. That year of experience was likely instrumental in my application for medical school getting accepted the next year. The experience was also important for me personally and spiritually. It allowed me to witness firsthand what the end of our lives looks like: how our body fails us, the humiliation that many people endure as they totally rely on others for the basic functions of eating, toileting, dressing, and moving from place to place. It showed me the utter loneliness and boredom the elderly endure as their friends die and their families slowly forget about them. After getting into medical school, I felt these were important experiences that led me into a career in family medicine. During this working year, I also met my future wife, and it seems obvious to me now that my initial failure to get into medical school was really Providence working, as she has been the most important blessing of my life.

After graduating from medical school, I began to look at various potential locations to start my practice. I was initially interested in a rural town in the eastern half of Nebraska, and I felt that I had a good shot of landing the job. The town also had the strong Catholic community that I was looking for. However, another candidate was interested as well. This town only had one spot for a new physician, and they opted to go with the other candidate, as they felt she was a better fit for the needs of the clinic and had more ties to the area. While disappointed, this failure led me to take a job in Kearney, which is where my wife’s parents live. This allowed us to develop a better and stronger relationship with her parents, and over time I have met other strong 
Catholic families in the area. I feel like the catholic community in Kearney has become much stronger over the last decade, and in retrospect it seems that I was being called to participate in that. 

I now view the stressors and failures in my past as some of the most forming experiences that have led me to a deeper Faith. My move from Scottsbluff caused me to lose friends, but I gained education in the Catholic Faith at Pius X. My failure to get into the Air Force Academy caused me to lose my dreams at the time but led me to Kearney, where I was surrounded by strong catholic influences and was able to pursue my future career. My failure to get into medical school allowed me to meet my future wife, who continues to push my Faith and make me better today. It also allowed me to have the experience of working in a nursing home, which allowed me to see the utter loneliness that the elderly go through later in life. My failure to get the first physician job that I wanted led me to stay in Kearney, build a family here dedicated to our parish and build a Catholic friend group here that has changed my experience of the Catholic community. All the previous failures, when looked at in hindsight, seem to me to be God’s Providence working to bring me further up and further into friendship with God.