Student Loan Dilemma

Today I return to the convent and all my beloved Sisters! It feels like I've been away forever, but at the same time it feels like no time has passed at all! I miss everyone so much though.

Currently, I have a bit of a dilemma related to my student loans. I have a few different options of what I can do.

Option 1: Stay in the convent I live in now (our provincial motherhouse) for the next year and a half, try to pay off my $20,000 of loans, and hopefully enter the novitiate in August of 2011 with the other two postulants who are currently with me.

Option 2: Stay at the motherhouse for the summer and work, then, if my old boss here in CT has a job for me at the daycare I worked at for four years, return here for a year and work at the daycare in an attempt to pay off the loans. I would return on the weekends to the motherhouse. Good plan, except I probably wouldn't be able to be a postulant since I wouldn't be living in one of our convents. I also may not be able to enter the novitiate until 2012, which wouldn't be the worst thing since there's another girl who wants to enter soon but has more loans to pay off than I do, so we might be in the same group.

Option 3: Move from the motherhouse to our infirmary and work as a nurse's aide in what is basically a nursing home for our sick and elderly sisters. I may still be able to be a postulant, since I would still be living in a convent. However, I'm not licensed as a CNA, so I would have to try to get that, which costs more money.

The other problems involved in all of this are:
- The loans are supposed to start being paid off six months after I am no longer a student. I was a full-time student last semester, but the various places that I have my loans with refused to acknowledge that fact, even after many phone calls and faxes where they told me the loans would still be deferred. I had originally thought that the job I'll be starting this week was going to be full time, but now I don't think it is, and so I was going to start paying the loans back in July (6 months from when the loans people say I stopped being a full time student), but without a full-time job, I don't know that I'll make enough money for it to work. I guess this means I now have to start all over again with the loans people. Heaven forbid they listen!!!!

- As I am no longer a student, I am no longer covered under my parent's insurance. We could pay a large sum to have me covered under their insurance, or we could pay a still-large-but-less-large sum to the Sisters so that I would be under their insurance (which is very good insurance). Once I either enter the novitiate or make first vows (I can't remember), I would be under the Sister's insurance for good, and they would pay it. But technically it depends on where I end up working, and whether I'm living with my parents or at one of our convents.

Ick. What a mess. My directress and I will be talking about all of this sometime this week, once everyone is home and settled. There are just so many questions that cannot be answered until I have other information, which makes it complicated because it's not a matter of just me making up my mind what I'd prefer.

After Mass this morning, I was talking with a couple people that I got close to through working with the LifeTeen group as youth ministers. They reminded me that if God wants me to be in religious life, He will make a way, the funding will come through. I have to remember that all is in God's hands, in His control. They also told me a story about Fr. John Corapi and how he hadn't had the money to enter the seminary, which I will put in here as soon as I can find it. I'd rather not try to recount it from memory, lest I get it wrong.

"You can lose everything else, but don't lose hope." ~Fr. Corapi