Who am I?! Why am I here?! Why is God putting me through this? What is my place in the world?
Have you ever asked these questions about your purpose in life, who are you, what is the purpose in the world that you were sent by God to achieve? My grandparents on my father’s side, came from Ireland in the early part of the 20thcentury, signing the book on Ellis Island to assimilate into their new home. However, they were not together when they arrived. My grandfather, Timothy Lynch, was born in Cahersiveen and was the oldest of 13 children. When life got tough during the potato famine, he volunteered to come to America, to support his struggling family. My grandfather, who was a rookie Chicago cop, committed himself to sending half of his paycheck back to Ireland each month to support his loving family who raised him.
My grandmother came from Sneem, a small town in Ireland, to start a better life and she met Timothy for the first time at an Irish dance/celebration, where she shared some of her gourmet skills that she learned and mastered working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Chicago. My grandfather was a Chicago cop at the Schurz High School, the largest high school in Chicago. They married, had 4 children, Timothy Lynch, Jeanie Lynch, Tom Lynch and John Lynch. Timothy Lynch, my father, went into the seminary Catholic priest, and his older brother John was a pastor of a catholic church in Chicago. His studies and schooling took him all over the Southeast United States, first in Bardstown, Kentucky, Little Rock, Arkansas, and then the prestigious school, Notre Dame School of Theology in New Orleans. During the summer months when he was on “summer vacation”, he worked as the leader of music, playing the guitar for daily Mass and was the bus driver at St. Peters Home for Children, which was an Orphanage in Memphis, TN. He also was in charge of the counseling program which cared for over 300 troubled boys and girls and many challenging teenagers.
My mother, one of 8 children raised in Quincy, MA just outside Boston, whose grandparents also came from Ireland (my great grandparents on her side), decided to enter into the convent to live a life of servitude. Her training was in Nazareth, KY. As she became a Sister of Charity, her first mission was running St. Peters Home for Children on the corner of Poplar and McClean in Memphis, TN, the same orphanage that my father was responsible for managing the summer program for children. It was there where my parents, Tim Lynch and Lorraine Clare first met as colleagues working to take care of those family deprived children who were longing for something much bigger, and safer, than the life they were thrown into could ever provide.
It was during those years where my mom pursued a degree in social work and my father decided that he could serve people with issues, struggles, mental illnesses, etc. as a clinical psychologist. Tim decided that he wanted to leave the seminary after he completed his M.Div., one month before his class was to be ordained. He then came to Nashville, where he continued his studies and received his master’s in psychology from the University of Tennessee. It was a few years after that he graduated from Vanderbilt with a doctorate in Pastoral Counseling, and eventually his PhD in clinical psychology.
My mother, a number of months later, decided that this was not the life that she wanted to be and left the convent and went back to Boston, where she worked for MA Bell (Massachusetts Bell) and she also worked part time as the assistant director of a home for adolescent girls while sharing an apartment with her sister. At some point, months later, Dad was thinking about my mom during that time, and was wondering how she was doing, played a “wild card” and wrote a letter to see how her life was going post convent. They created a long distance relationship for quite a while where she would call later in the evening and chat with him, since she got all long-distance calls free for working at MA Bell. My uncle Tom (dad’s baby brother) was getting married in Florida, and my dad asked my mom if she wanted to go with him to the wedding. It was there where he proposed to mom, she said yes, and the rest is history!
Dad took a position with the Sumner County Tennessee Guidance Center as a psychologist in 1972, after he completed his master’s in psychology, and they moved to Gallatin, TN. They worked hard, tried to start a family, but due to healt issues, they were not able to conceive. At that point, dad reached out to a gentleman who he was in the seminary with, Bill Gahagan, who ran Catholic Charities in Nashville at that time, to see what could be done to start the process for adopting their first child.
After lots of formalities, mom received a phone call from Catholic Charities, telling her that she and dad needed to come down and pick up their 2-week-old son!! Mom went running out of the house screaming at dad who was mowing the yard that “it has happened!! We are new parents!! We have to go and pick up our new son!”. Dad was so excited he jumped off the mower and had to chase it through the yard because he forgot to shut it off!! It was there where Timothy Dennis Lynch Jr, found a new home!!
Read Part Two in the September issue and see how God was truly at work in this divine adoption
—Tim Lynch, Jr.
