Silvia's Faith Journey- Part 8

Hi everyone! Today is a transition period of my faith journey. It was a time when God was putting the right people in my life to guide me to where I needed to be. Although the reason I mention some people may not make sense right now, God used these interactions/ relationships to do something important years later. As a result, I wanted to introduce you all to them earlier to give you context when there is a reference to them down the road. It is incredible to me how God weaves it all together. Enjoy!

Sometimes I believe we can get stuck in what I like to call the “uncomfortable comfort zones.”  It is a place where we are quite miserable but somehow, we are comfortable in it.  I think the comfort may be partially derived from the fact that we understand the stressors that are involved and even though they are undesirable, we feel we can manage them.  Stepping out into something completely different can be intimidating, even if it is an invitation to something better, because there are those fears of the unknown.  What if I do x, y, and z and it is somehow even worse than where I am now? 

Though I was unsure of what the right direction was, God was helping me.  God did this even though I was still angry and bitter with Him over Jared’s death.  My faithlessness did not stop His faithfulness.  God continued to watch over me and placed people into my life that would help me to get to the next step.  Charlie, Jared’s boss, was one of them. 

Charlie was very successful in science, but it did not come at the expense of the people’s lives in his lab.  He did not wall off his family from the lab to clearly delineate work versus his personal life as most scientists do, rather he took in his lab members as if they were extended family.  Jared was no exception.  Jared would spend time with Charlie’s family, knew his wife and children well, and would even go do workouts with Charlie and his wife.  When Jared and I were dating, I was able to be a part of all this wonderful time with Charlie’s family as well. 

After Jared was killed, Charlie made a point to tell me that I had not lost his support just because Jared was gone.  He wanted me to know that he was still committed to watching out for me.  I was not even in his lab, but somehow, by proxy, I got to be a part of his extended family for a while.  It was a huge gift from God.  When I started a nonprofit charity with some friends, Charlie’s wife and daughter joined in as board members and helped organize our major fundraising run.  His family loved me so well and, in a way, it was healing to be in the presence of others who also mourned Jared’s death so deeply.

When I was finally ready to search for an opportunity to leave my toxic work environment, Charlie immediately connected me to someone in industry that was looking for a scientist.  I interviewed with the company and things went well until they asked if I would be interested in taking the job… and I froze.  Suddenly I was not sure.  Fear took over because I did not know if I could handle the pressure of something new.  In my mind, industry was a whole different beast than academia.  Although it is a great field to go into, for years my experience was being told by professors that academia was better and that few people had what it takes, but I was one of the few.  It seemed like I was giving up something that I was told I was supposed to be, so I hesitated and did not follow through.  Charlie never got upset with me because I faltered, even though he had recommended me to the company.  

Through the process of interviewing with the company, I realized that what I needed was a place to do the science that I was interested in, but also a space where I would be able to mentally recover from all that I had been through.   I had spoken to both Charlie and my graduate school professor about doing cross-over work to combine my expertise in immunology with the field of neuroscience.  Though both agreed it would be a good way to advance my career, they both independently advised me that I would need experience in a neuroscience lab to accomplish that.   However, given the tight funding climate at the time, I was also told that it was unlikely that anyone in neuroscience would take on an immunologist.  Labs were less willing to take a risk on someone with a different scientific background when money was difficult to obtain. 

I was disheartened but then God opened the perfect opportunity.  

John, a good friend of mine from graduate school, was opening his own neuroscience lab.  One of the greatest struggles scientists face when we launch a lab as a new principal investigator is finding a good scientist to join your team at the beginning.  When we start up a lab, it is usually difficult to recruit quality scientists because we do not have a track record for publishing from our own program, simply because we just started that program.  However, the startup phase is the make-or-break phase.  It is a very sensitive time where if we do not have good people working in the lab to help us produce publications and get grants, we can go under in the first few years and our careers are over in academics.

What God had timed was an opportunity for both of us.  John would often say that he got all the benefits because I helped establish his lab, but I would disagree.  I needed to be somewhere I could do the science that I was interested in but be in an environment free of emotional abuse.  I needed time to regain myself.  To be honest, I think I got the better end of the deal.  Unlike the offer to join the company, this time I quickly accepted the offer to join John’s lab.

When it was time to move to a different state for my new job, there was one person whose reaction surprised me.  It was Maria.  Maria was the custodian on our floor.  She would take out the garbage in our lab during the middle of the day, so I would often see her when she came in.  I often made cookies for the people in the lab, and if I saw Maria, I would wrap some cookies up to give to her as well.  I would always say hello, but we did not talk a lot since I was not very fluent in Spanish.  (I only know how to ask for a beer and where the bathroom is in Spanish, so that conversation would not get me very far!) 

I ran into Maria on my last day of work, told her that I was leaving, and that I wished her well.  She immediately broke out into tears.  I was taken aback.  Surely, I could not be that significant to her to warrant those tears.  To be honest, I wasn’t.  She proceeded to tell me that no one ever thought she was important enough to say good-bye to.  People would just come and go and never think to acknowledge her.  It was a moment that was etched in my memory.  Her tears were over the desire to be seen when she felt like she was always invisible.  This story may seem random to include in my faith journey, but it is not.  God would use this experience to propel me to do something years later to lead me to something I needed to hear.  

Unlike Maria, my old boss saw out my final days with great stoicism.  I felt disheartened that he would not acknowledge all the years I spent in his lab.  I had produced high profile papers, won awards, and helped him organize and start up the lab when he moved across the country.  I thought there would be some acknowledgment.  This was not the case.  To the very end, it felt like a challenge of wills.  He did not miss a chance to inflict wounds.  During my final lab meeting, which was a day or two before my last day, he began announcements.  He started off by saying he wanted to talk about some very important things that were happening.  The first was that a new person was starting in the lab soon and he was very excited about that.  He paused and then said, “I am forgetting something important… what was it?”  Internally, I thought that this was the time that he was going to say something nice or at least announce to the lab that I was leaving, since he still had made no mention of it to my colleagues.  Then the pause was followed with him saying, “Bruce Beutler won the Nobel prize, and I am so honored to know him.  Okay, that is the end of announcements, let’s move to data presentation.  Silvia, you start.”

Ouch.  Perhaps I was and am being unfair in my thought process, but to me it felt like a test.  Will she cry?  Will she crack under the pressure?  Will she show any signs that she is hurt during her data presentation? Perhaps he honestly forgot that I was leaving in a day or two but somehow, I do not think so. I held it together, was professional, and presented my data as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  Though I admit that in my pride I was glad that I never gave him the satisfaction of crying or flinching in front of him, it really is not some huge victory.  In the end, there was just an awkward farewell.  Perhaps the wounds were too deep on both ends for it to be anything different. 

Looking back, I am thankful for it all.  I believe that God used my old boss to close all the doors to other faculty positions (long story I won’t get in to) and to even close the door to regret over leaving his lab.  God had something better for me.  Though I did not understand it at the time, the path of immediately launching into a faculty position would have likely led me to a place where I would have collapsed.  What I had viewed as setbacks at the time were part of God’s set up for a much better life.