By Deacon Matthew Hecker, Ph.D.
Great Falls, Montana, where the Missouri River tumbles out of the Rockies, is “home” to Sarah Zook. The fourth of five children, and raised in a Lutheran family, Sarah admits her journey to becoming a Catholic school principal in David City, Nebraska, was unlikely.
Sarah attended and graduated from the public schools in Great Falls. She attended Montana State University-Billings, majoring in Spanish education, with math and business minors.
“My dream job was to return and teach at my alma mater, C.M. Russell High School,” she said.
As a student at Montana State-Billings, Sarah met and later married Shawn Zook.
“He was raised in the Protestant tradition in the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, area.”
After college graduation, the Zooks moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, where Shawn worked in retail and Sarah worked in the public schools. After several years there, in order to be closer to family, they relocated to Great Falls.
With the arrival of their first child, daughter Addison, the question of faith began to loom in the Zook household. They wanted faith in their life and for their children.
Sarah admitted: “We wanted faith for our family, but we didn’t know which one was right.”
They really didn’t know what to do. “We visited a lot of different denominations and non-denominations,” Zook said.
Yet uncertainty lingered.
“Shawn was working as a manager for Target and I was working as a teacher out of town… I interviewed for two jobs; my dream job of teaching math at CMR and a business/math teaching job at Great Falls Central Catholic High School.”
The Catholic school was newly reopened, having closed in the late 1960s.
Zook explained that for what would be her classroom, “They had taken two health rooms at a local Catholic university and divided them up into classrooms with temporary curtains, the stage, and they had two modular units out in back.” This hardly compared to the large multi-level, multi-building public school.
Yet as she sat in the Catholic high school building, waiting for the interview, Zook looked at the two or three gentlemen seated next to her, dressed in suits. She recalled thinking, “That’s what Catholics look like… I will never get this job.”
That very weekend the public high school offered Zook her “dream job.”
“I accepted it, of course, on the spot,” she said. “Then I got the call from the Catholic high school. Now I have a conundrum here. What am I going to do? And for no good reason known to me at the time, I turned down the job at the public high school and accepted the job with the Catholic high school.”
After taking the job, “I learned a lot about the Catholic faith,” Zook said.
“There were a couple of really nice teachers that helped me learn to attend Mass and would listen to all my questions about the faith: ‘Why do you do that? And why do you do that?’ I worked through all of my struggles with Catholicism: Mary, Communion, fertility, etc. When I finally ran out of questions, I knew I had landed at the Truth, and that was the Catholic faith.”
After three years of attending Mass at school and being immersed in the Catholic school culture, Sarah said she decided she wanted to become Catholic.
“So I went to the school’s chaplain and asked, ‘How do you become Catholic?’ He directed me back to the parish near our home.”
When her husband would work his retail job on Sundays, “I would take my little girl and sit quietly in the back of Mass and just soak it all in.”
“Finally, I had the courage to talk to my husband and said, ‘Well, I decided I want to become Catholic. And he said, ‘Can I join, too?’ So we both went to the parish and talked to the priest and found out about RCIA.”
The family entered the Church when Addison was 4 and son Finley was just 6 months old.
“So he was baptized, she made a profession of faith,” Zook said. “We came in, all in one… From there, it’s been like drinking from a hydrant, learning so much about the Catholic faith.”
As it can occur with converts to the faith, questions of consistency in the practice of the faith began to arise. They had settled in a very faithful, small parish, where the priest fed them beautiful Catholic teaching in each homily and at every activity.
But outside that parish, the Zooks wondered.
“We say the Catholic Church believes this but we didn’t see leaders and families following it. So we asked a few folks. ‘Is that how it is to be Catholic? That you say one thing but do another?’”
Zook said the disappointing answer they received was, “Pretty much everywhere, except for Lincoln.”
“And we had that answer from literally four or five different conversations with different people,” she said. “Finally, we asked, ‘Where is the Lincoln Diocese?’
The Zooks looked it up. While they were looking, they checked the website to see if there were any jobs available. During that time, Sarah had worked in positions from classroom teacher to principal at the Catholic schools.
Finding several possibilities for jobs, the Zooks made the 34-hour, 2,200-mile round trip to Lincoln, to interview and see the area for the first time. Sarah Zook was offered two jobs; one in the diocesan Education Technology Office and the other as the principal of St. Mary (now Aquinas) Elementary School in David City.
After seeing David City, Aquinas Schools and St. Mary Church, the Zooks decided they’d found where they wanted their family. Sarah said it was amazing to find schools with priests and sisters in the hallways, vibrant parishes with pews filled, and folks who were living the Catholic faith.
Despite the distance from family in Great Falls, Sarah accepted the position as principal and Shawn gave up his higher paying position in Montana to accept a lesser role in retail in Nebraska.
As with any transition, they had many uncertain moments as they worked to move their family to unknown territory. Every step of the way, Sarah said, the family thought this might not actually happen, but the Holy Spirit would intervene. There were no homes available, but a prominent local realtor showed them one that was not yet listed that worked out perfectly.
They worked through selling their home, getting Nebraska certification, finding child care, and learning all about the workings of their new community. At each challenge, Zook said, someone amazing in the community would step up and offer them a hand.
Upon arriving in David City, the school chief administrative officer, high school principal, high school business teacher, and fourth-grade teacher helped the Zook family unload a moving truck – on one of the hottest days in July. They walked in the new house to find a tray of cookies on the counter and a Runza gift card for dinner.
The former elementary principal offered assistance whenever needed, Zook said. This was a supportive Catholic community. These were the families that they longed to live with and have their children grow up with. Sarah and Shawn now have six children, ranging in age from a college student to a third-grader. All attended Aquinas Catholic Schools.
For her part, Sarah loves working in our Catholic schools and with people, “who live and faithfully teach the truths of the faith.”
“We have made some big sacrifices, but don’t regret them at all,” she said. “Because we chose to move here, we have met some amazing families on the same journey we are. They want to help get their children to heaven, too. We are so blessed to have this Catholic school community.”
Looking back, Sarah said, “The way things work out, this is such a Holy Spirit thing…. There was no reason for me to turn down the job that paid more at the public high school that I had always wanted; to take this job at this fledgling Catholic high school… It was the hand of the Holy Spirit guiding our family and for that we will always be grateful.”
