Wounds

Modern life is fast Dear Readers.

We are told that we have to figure out every aspect of our lives prior to starting undergrad. When we find our career path, we are told that we need to do everything as quickly as possible in order to stay ahead. Each job is just another box to check, not a stepping stone to the next promotion.

If we don’t finish as quickly as possible, we describe ourselves as failures.

It is fortunate that most of our lives can be this fast paced. We can contact someone right away. We can get a new job. We can get food at any time in any place. We can virtually watch any television show or movie with a few mouse clicks.

But life itself cannot be sustained in a state of constant activity.

And as we wait for life to catch up to our desires, we die a little on the inside.

I have spoken before on waiting(LINK), and how it is necessary for a good life. However, I did not cover what happens when we try to beat the waiting period and take complete control of life itself.

If we try to force life to move forward instead of letting it run its course, we do not progress, but rather we get hurt.

I found this out the hard way.

My lab has a big mouse project, and it is the focus for our upcoming publication. In some odd turn of events, this task was put on my shoulders. I could not be more grateful for such a great responsibility. I knew how important the project is, and I decided that I would not return to Nashville until I had completed the figure up to my advisor’s specifications.

There was a day when I could wait one more day, but I wanted to be done sooner. I would do anything to just be done.

So I went in to the lab late at night when no one was around, and I went to the Cryostat, which is an apparatus which is used to make tissue sections. Because I was so tired from trying to expedite the process, my arms were a little shaky.

I sliced my thumb open

Utlimately everything we do which hurts us, or those around us, is a direct result of taking life in to our own hands and taking complete control. When we decide to take matters in to our own hands and take life too quickly, we do not just hurt ourselves in the moment, but we also have to face the consequences of said action long afterwards. 

Nothing we do exists in a vacuum.

We lie to hide what we think may hurt ourselves or someone else, and we end up having to lie over and over again, only to be caught in the end. We choose not to do that assignment because we think it is a waste of time, and we end up failing an exam. We ignore a text because we think cutting people out of our lives without warning is the safest way, and in the end we cause unneccessary drama.

The pain we cause towards ourselves or others comes back over and over, just like my Cryostat injury.

This injury thankfully did not require stitches, but it has affected my life far more than I would have predicted. The cut is on the part of my thumb which is used for everything I do. I can’t text, type, or even use a microscope without feeling the cut underneath my bandage.

Many of us want to fix the problems we cause just as quickly as we created them. We want something to do. A conversation, an action, a public announcement, a resignation…anything to take away the discomfort.

We want stitches.

The thing is…stitches are not the fix. 

Our bodies heal on their own.

We use a stitch when the wound is too deep for the cells around the injury to do their job. A stitch brings the cells closer together. When the cells are close enough, they send signals to one another and share information about the injury. As the signaling cascade goes on, the neighboring cells respond as needed.

If I were to have put a stitch in my injury, my body would have responded the exact same way.  Biology, or life itself, takes time. Putting a stitch in an injury does not fix the problem. The only thing we can do is wait for the missing tissue to be replaced.

And it works.

With time, the remnants of our mistakes smoothe out, and there is healing at last.

Now what I need to mention is that this only works if the body is allowed to act as it ought to. Should the cut be infected or I have a rare genetic mutation, my cut would never heal, and I might have had other complications.

This is the same with the wounds in our lives.

We cannot force a problem to be fixed right away with a “stitch,” and we have to let life run as it is supposed to. People will respond however they respond to your situation. There will be confusion and a lot to work out. Regardless of the injury, there will always be a response.

And it’s going to take time.

And it’s going to suck.

But if we just let life run its course and do our best to be the best version of ourselves and allow others to become the best version of themselves…

Everything will be as it was meant to be.

What is True Love?

Imagine that you are in a dark room.

In this dark room there is a small bright light. It’s beautiful and strange, yet for some reason you know what it is. The light is small, but it is bright, brighter than any light you’ve ever looked at. You never knew light could be so bright.

The light is bright and beautiful that you forget that you are in a dark room. All you see is this perfect little light, shining strongly in to your soul. In that moment, everything makes sense, even if you can’t put the experience in to proper words.

But it’s only a glimpse

That’s all you get, and then you are in a dark room again. 

While you would love to look at the light again, something about the burning sensation in your eyes says that it is time to stop. The darkness is not particularly comfortable anymore, but you know that you cannot look at that little bright light anymore, no matter how beautiful it is.

So you flip the switch

And you are surrounded by light instead of darkness

This light is different though. Unlike the little bright light, this light has a mix of every wavelength in the spectrum. It’s not nearly as bright, but the massive influx of this mixed light overwhelms you. Panicked, you shut your eyes.

But the darkness you create is not enough to keep out the light.

As a result, you end up with a massive migraine.

This is my every day experience with the microscope in my lab. No matter what I do, the bright fluorescent light in my lab short circuits my mind, and once I’m back in natural light, my head burns with the broad spectrum of light.

As a result, I typically spend a half hour or so with sunglasses on in lab after I use our microscope.

Now this may seem like a highly specific experience, but I would like to invite my Dear Readers to look at this from a different perspective.

Think of a person who just saw the truest love in the universe: God’s love.

The darkness which surrounds us all, whether it be our sin, our crosses, or even our loneliness, seems completely normal. We are immersed in it, unaware of what may come some day. Then all of the sudden, we see a bright light, something strange yet beautiful. We know it, but we don’t entirely understand it. We forget our darkness in the beauty of this bright light of love.

He comes to us, and He invites to encounter Him in the darkest rooms in our hearts.

We can’t ride that high forever though.

No matter how Holy a person is, we cannot take the entirety of God’s love, not for very long, and certainly not in this life. Then we are in the darkness, and all we want to do is be in the light again. 

So we flip the switch on our hearts, and we let the light in.

But the love of this world, the light that we see around us every day, is merely an imitation of the beautiful and perfect love that comes from God. It’s imperfect, and it doesn’t look like the love we saw in the moment when God spoke to us. Our love is not as strong, and it has many different expressions.

But it’s still love.

Love is real, because God is real.

However, because the world is so strange and difficult, we try to run away. We close our eyes, and we bring in our own darkness. We ask for people to save us, to turn out the light on our hearts. We beg for the real light to come back.

It is not until we put on shades and look in to the light that we realize how beautiful our imperfect love can be.

You see, when you put on shades, you notice the contrast between the darkness and the light. It’s a subconscious acknowledgement, and yet it is clearer than our understanding of the bright light. The love of this world, while not the same as God’s love, is in fact, a contrast to the darkness that is our sin, our crosses, and our loneliness.

By understanding that there is darkness in the hearts of everyone, we can see just how beautiful their own unique emission spectrum is.

Have you noticed the particularly interesting part of this experience?

The light comes through the darkness. We put on the shades which reveal the darkness in this world, and yet the light penetrates this darkness. The contrast exists because the light will always be able to make through.

No matter how dark the world may seem, love will always be there.

Because God is always there, even if He doesn’t look like you expect Him to appear.



Christ’s love, revealed on the Cross, is the light which penetrates the darkness. It saves us from our own deaths, from our darkness, from our sin, from our own crosses, and from our loneliness. The love which we receive from God Himself is what allows each of us to shine our little lights. They are not as bright and beautiful as those of Jesus, but they are real.

No one is perfect, but the love that resides in each of us is perfect.

And then, once you’ve accepted that, you can take off the shades.

Some of my Dear Readers have beautiful faith, and so perhaps they do not need shades anymore to understand the beauty of imperfect love and how God reveals His love through each person. However, that does not mean that our experience is over. 

It means that we have to help those who stand where we once stood.

But how?

We have to help them put their shades on. For until we can see how God’s love penetrates even the darkest soul, we cannot understand just how much He loves us. Some say that bringing darkness in to the light is a bad thing. They say that it makes us look bad, that it discredits our faith.

But how can we say that Jesus saved us if we don’t know what He saves us from?

It is ok to share the darkness we have felt with those who are overwhelmed by imperfect love.

It is ok to let them know that there is nothing to fear.

It is ok to love them.

I’ll never forget the day that someone gave me a pair of shades. They were sitting with me on a couch, and they were sharing all of their darkness. It was this extreme vulnerability which gave me the darkest pair of lenses I had ever worn.

I saw love.

It was not my love, but God's love which rested in this little soul. While our love is not exactly like His, our love reflects God's very presence in our lives. Had I not been a witness to this vulnerable moment, I might not have seen just how stark the contrast is between God's love is from the darkness of this life.

And as I walked in to the light with my new shades, I recognized just how bright each little soul was around me.

God is with us

All of us.


I took off the shades, and life is much brighter. While not everything is as it should be, and it won't be until this world ends, true love is with us in every day. 

Conversion Every Day

July 2nd is a very special day for me because it is the day which marked my reversion. While I may never lost faith that God might exist, I did have to return to His love. That journey began on July 2nd, 2011. That is a story for another time.

Most of us think that once we declare Jesus as Lord and Savior that we don’t have to do anything else.

One conversion. That’s all we need.

The problem with this theory is that once we start “living in the Light,” we discover that there are many more heartaches associated with faith than ignorance. Life does not get any easier by becoming a Christian. Eternal life is possible, yes, but no our lives are just as much, if not moreso, a challenge as before.

We fall away.

Or...

We try to find what we think God wants for us.

I was not immune to this effect. In my senior year of undergrad, I decided to apply to be a FOCUS missionary. It only made sense that a campus leader who worked closely with the faith groups on campus would do so in the future. I could be a missionary for two years, and then I could go on and do science.

God changed my plan.

Right at the interview.

A priest suggested to me that I went to Adoration and ask God to let me see what my life would be like if I went to Graduate School right away or if I were a Missionary first. This is not to imagine things, nor was it for me to project my will on my Lord. Instead, I was called to just listen.

I started with graduate school, because I thought I already knew what I would see: science and academia.

Instead I was shown a few specific people, down to their very labs and hometowns. God did not show me lab work, nor did He allow me to think about my science or my school or really anything other than the people revealed to me in that prayer. Praying for FOCUS did not enter my mind.

I could not see myself as a FOCUS missionary prior to graduate school.

This troubled me greatly. I thought that God wanted me to serve Him through FOCUS. After all, I had been running bible studies and discipling students for a while. Everyone had told me that I would be perfect for that role. Why, then, would God take me from a position that would only glorify Him?

That moment of prayer left my mind, but I never let it leave my heart.

What came to my mind was my science, my work, my career as a vocation, my love life. I moved forward with a vengence, and boy did I get a lot of work done on the way there. If God was going to change the plan, then I would have to do everything I could to fit that plan.

Not His plan, but what I thought His plan was for me.

Like I said, when we do not allow Jesus to enter our hearts often, we do everything we can to try to fit the plan. We blame ourselves for not understanding. Many of us will blame God for changing our lives, flipping them, turning them upside down. I was the former; I had to do what I thought God wanted me to do.

Exhausted yet productive, I worked on my science. I prayed my prayers. I hung out with my friends. I even made jokes about my love life. I had so many questions and so many interesting experiments and stories.

I felt so cool.

This freedom was in part because my advisor had not given me any direction. He is a hands-off sort of advisor, which is great for a creative mind, however, that is not good for a developing scientist. In a world where much is known and yet little is understood, it is very difficult for a scientist to navigate through their projects intelligently.

I felt so cool

And yet…I felt so lost.

I figured I wasn’t doing the right thing, so I just kept asking God to help me get through graduate school. The prayers from that FOCUS interview melted away, the reversion on July 2nd, 2011 was a distant memory. I just had to fit the plan. I had to fit.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it” Matthew 10:39

On that day my advisor told me that he didn’t know anything about my work. He didn’t even remember my big seminar talk I gave a little over a month prior. All of my work seemed utterly unimportant, and my entitled millenial self felt completely abandoned.

My only consolation in that meeting was that my mentee’s work was still in the forefront of my adviors mind.

Even if my work wasn’t a priority, at least I had been able to make sure my mentee was important.

Hurt and angry, I rushed home to get ready for a concert that night, and a million thoughts rushed through my mind. I did what I thought God asked me to do: science. Each experiment I offered up to Our Lord, and He always provided with a result. I spent hours and hours teaching myself the material that everyone else already understood. I prayed in the lab, just like I remembered seeing in my heart.

If God brought me here, then shouldn’t I matter…at least enough for my talk to be listened to?

That evening I went to an Audrey Assad concert. It was an amazing concert, as expected. What I received was not in the music itself. It was not in the people who were among me. It was not in the beautiful smile of the performer. The comfort I received were from a song I sang.

“And You walk with me

You’ll never leave

You’re making my heart a garden”

~Garden, Matt Maher ft Audrey Assad

As I sang the song, I closed my eyes and repeated the phrase over and over, internally begging God to explain to me what was so important at Notre Dame that He would bring me here without making my science “matter.”

And I remembered a beautiful moment.

There I was, dancing like a fool down the basement hallway. There was a young man, one whom I had not seen smile in quite some time, standing at the end of the hall. He was watching me, and I saw the most unexpected thing:

He laughed.

His unexpected laugh came to my mind as I prayed that prayer. A person who I never thought I would see look so happy was genuinely happy watching me dance.

I was doing exactly what God had sent me here for.

God did not send me to Notre Dame strictly to find out what STARD9 does, nor did He make me a biologist because He wanted me to receive praise and accolades. Maybe I’ll be a Nobel Prize Winner someday, but it won’t be because God wants me to receive that Earthly reward.

I’m here because of who I am: Felicity Rose Newton.

I’m here because I am able to dance like no one is watching. I’m here because I can laugh at anything. I’m here because I am fiercely loyal. I’m here because I am a devout Catholic who just loves Jesus, my family, science, and food. I’m here because I am maternal. I’m here because I am analytical and motivated by deep thinking.

I’m here because I am happy.

More importantly, I’m here because I’m happiest when I am making other people smile.

There were souls crying out to God for His love, crying out for joy to come in to their lives again, mine included. And because God always provides for His children, He answered the prayers held deep in these hearts, even mine.

I wanted to show my love and joy.

I wanted that more than anything, and that was why I wanted to be a FOCUS missionary.

I did not want to be a missionary because of the title. I wanted to be a missionary because I wanted to share the love that God has for all of us. It was that love which brought me out of the darkness, and it was that love which lead me each day. 

I was always a missionary, just not in the place I expected I would be.

I didn’t have to do anything, not anything different on this Earth at least.

But I did have to make a change.

I had to turn my heart to Christ again. If His love is what gives me joy, then I should be more willing to spend time with Him, love Him. His sacrifice brought me to life in Him, and as I live in Him, I am brought to new places with new people and new experiences.

We have to be willing to turn around and look at Jesus again.

Our lives do not have to have a dramatic change in order to do so. All we need to do is look at the One who loves us and trust that whatever He may give us is exactly what we need. Whether it be a joyful moment or a painful realization, Jesus is drawing us closer and closer to Him.

It is up to us to go with Him.