Life has MANY ways of testing a person's will

This has been a difficult week for all of us at St. John Vianney High School. One that has required a lot of personal reflection. One where our faith has been tested and needed.

I find that inspiration for my writing comes at different times and through a variety of channels, and this week was certainly no different.

As I reflected this week I have received many heartfelt and thoughtful emails, texts, and calls from the Vianney community and other area administrators and schools, offering words of encouragement and prayers. Please know your sympathy for our community this week has not only been appreciated, but helpful to us all.

I also came across a quote on Twitter that immediately spoke to me in a time when I needed something to speak to me the most. It read:

“Life has many ways of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once.”
I quickly copied the quotation, as I knew I had found my inspiration for this week.

This week we lost one of our Vianney Griffins far too soon. As principal this required many

messages to families, faculty, and students. It required many answers, most of which I

learned I was ill-equipped to deliver.

Perhaps that's been the most frustrating. As a school leader we are often looked to "have the answers" or "fix the problem." Yet, the moment I learned on Saturday night that our student had passed, I knew I wouldn't have answers or a solution to the problem.

“Life has many ways of testing a person’s will”. This week has certainly done just that.

We had to do so many things this week that I had wished we’d never have to do in our school. Our principal’s council went to work throughout the night on Saturday and into Sunday evening to try to prepare to care for our kids who would, just like us adults, struggle and grieve and have a million questions we could not answer.

We began preparing prayer services, communion service, prayer cards, communication plans, counseling strategies and handling the many issues that I now understand come from a student’s passing. Expectations of work have never been an issue for me, but doing so with a heavy heart seems abstruse.

Yet in the darkness, I saw again what makes our community so amazing. I saw that even with heavyhearts and their own struggles and questions, our team would not let the passing of our student damper their compassion or their attention to detail, so I would like to record here my profound appreciation of Scott Brown, Michelle Steeg, Linda Sodemann, Rob Staggenborg, Kim Mohr, Father Tim Kenney, Mike Loyet, Terry Cochran and those who in your own small ways have been there every second of every day balancing the needs of our students when they needed us most.

I realized this week that it isn’t death in itself, however, that is tragic, even if it is always sad. As adults we are accustomed to announcing deaths, as we say goodbye to long-serving faculty or staff members or alums who have gone on before us to God’s heavily kingdom, mostly after full lives, and typically marked by as much joyous remembrance of their achievements and contributions to the world and their families as about regret at their passing. The Vianney Book of Remembrance similarly records the ending of lives, shorter or longer, among our family members and loved ones who we lift up in prayer.


We also have the pleasure of announcing happier events like births and marriages.

But it is a different and much sharper sadness when it is our young who are being mourned. While we can and should focus on the positive aspects of our brief interactions with a young soul now prematurely departed from this world, we are also deeply aware of the promise unfulfilled, of all the good that they might have done in the world. There is no getting around it: there is little more melancholic at a school, a place that normally glows with the incandescent energy of youth, than the early extinguishing of one of its candles.

So as we prepare to lay our student to rest and say our final good-byes on this earth, until we meet again, I’ve also thought about what I want for all of our students.

My prayer is that our young men leave Vianney for their next stage of life with a passion for all that they do, a curiosity that inspires learning, and the courage to step outside their comfort zones.

By courage I mean that I know that life never presents us with a straight path; that each one of us is faced with times when we find ourselves without an answer, without a direction or, alternatively, with too much coming at us at once and no clear sense of what to do next.

While being able to problem solve is a fundamental key to success, it is even more important to work to ensure confidence and courage during the uncomfortable stages prior to solving a problem or dealing with a dilemma.

“Life has many ways of testing a person’s will.

And I also hope and pray that our students and community will continue to watch out for each other, and if you yourself are having difficulties, don’t hesitate to talk to someone.

Vianney does love you; our faculty and staff, as well as your friends, are here to listen and help.

And though the road in life is never straight, by choosing our path, we choose our destination.