Second Calling by Dale Hanson Bourke

Author:Dale Hanson Bourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

BEYOND THE IMAGINABLE

Of course, not every woman gets to choose. A friend I’ll call Kay was living the life she had dreamed of as a little girl. She and Dan had been married twenty years. They weren’t perfect years, but they were good years, with four children, a nice house, two cars, and a dog. She and her husband were members of a large church where they sat in the same pew every Sunday. Dan had moved up the ladder in a business where he had recently been made a vice president. With their oldest two children in college and Dan traveling more often now on business, Kay was beginning to feel she had a little space to breathe. She joined a Bible study, signed up for quilting lessons, and prepared to enjoy the future.

She noticed that Dan seemed a bit more irritable, but she concluded that his new job was more stressful and her life was now less so. Maybe she just noticed his moods more now that she had more time to think. When Dan announced that he was joining a gym in order to get in shape, she encouraged him, thinking it would help him reduce his stress. After losing twenty-five pounds, Dan needed to buy new clothes. Then he got a new hairstyle. And then one day he told Kay what almost everyone else who knew them had suspected: he was leaving.

One year later, Dan married his much-younger secretary and started a new family. Kay was still in shock. She hadn’t worked outside the home since she became pregnant with their first child, and she had no marketable skills. Dan had been paying for much of the family’s expenses, but he had a new family to support. Kay had to sell the home they had lived in for years and move to a neighborhood where she knew no one. She felt humiliated, betrayed, and desperate. And suddenly she had to find a job in a market where everyone viewed her as older and without the basic computer skills or job history most companies expected.

Kay was bitter for a while. None of us could blame her. But then she pulled herself together, earned a teaching credential, and went to work as a substitute teacher. “I would never have had the patience or desire to do this job when I was younger,” she told me one day. “But now I try to come to school and use my mothering skills to make each child feel special and to make sure the students don’t get behind in their classwork while their regular teacher is gone.” In the meantime, Kay is taking a computer training class. In her late forties, Kay has a career for the first time. “I’m different from most of the other teachers. I’m twice the age of many and without all that impatience of youth. When they get upset about some change the administration is proposing, I can just smile and encourage them to give it a chance.

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