Beyond Sunday. Teresa Tomeo

— when we attempt to put God in a box and keep him at a safe distance. When we keep him at arm’s length, or even farther, we make ourselves extremely vulnerable to influences, messages, and ideologies that can — again speaking from personal experience — “poison” us.

      If I was heavily influenced by the culture back in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — before we had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, hundreds of satellite channels, iPhones, iPads, iWatches, etc. — then how much more are we being formed by media today? It’s not that we are bad people, or that the people behind the messages we’re getting bombarded with constantly are bad, either (only God can judge hearts, after all). Yet the messages we receive from all sides are not designed to give us true joy and inner peace. They tell us that materialism, sex without attachment, and professional success (just to name a few) equal total fulfillment and happiness. But anyone who has gone down that road, including me, will tell you these things alone don’t bring happiness. Instant gratification is gone as fast as we attain it. And once it’s gone, we’re running on empty.

      I was running on empty and going nowhere fast. It wasn’t until my life was spinning out of control that I finally cried out for help, and things slowly began to change. The soul-searching, along with the job search, lasted for some six months. At that point, my husband and I realized things had to change. If we were going to save our marriage, we needed help. Most importantly — and I believe this was our Catholic roots coming to the surface — we realized that we needed God in our lives. We made a commitment to get some counseling.

      As I mentioned, my husband had already felt that we needed to address our fast-paced, and what proved to be empty, lifestyle. Since I was too busy at first to notice his discontentment, I went on my merry way, continuing at a very hectic pace. In the meantime, he was invited to a men’s Bible study by a mutual friend. It was a study that had a huge impact on his life and was actually the initial catalyst of our return to the Church. In the pages of Scripture, he rediscovered the Catholic Church and began to take classes at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Years later, this would eventually lead him to discern becoming a deacon. But that was a long way off.

      In the meantime, after I lost my job, even though I agreed that we needed counseling and also agreed that we should start to take our faith seriously, deep down I was angry with God. Seems kind of silly, don’t you think? I really had no relationship with God, but I was angry with him and secretly blamed him for my problems. The really big turning point came when I simply cried uncle. I was finally getting a clue that God is God and I am not. My prayer certainly wasn’t sophisticated. I just prayed really hard, out of desperation.

      God answered those prayers in a number of different ways, one of which was a job offer at another local TV station, which I eventually took. That’s when the real work began, though, because as my priorities changed and faith became the central part of my life, my career also changed. Joining the Bible study with my husband, getting back to Mass every week, and learning how to pray resulted in the scales falling from my eyes and me feeling very differently about the news business.