I love a good vocation story — especially when it involves a deacon. And this one, from California, is a real inspiration.

Get a box of Kleenex and read on:

Tom Ciccarelli’s path to becoming a deacon for the Catholic Diocese of Stockton is a tale of tragedy, romance and changed hearts, with a little social justice thrown in.

Unlike Protestant deacons, Ciccarelli’s role at St. Mary’s in Oakdale is much deeper and broader. He celebrates Mass at the altar with the priest, holding the cup containing — as Catholics and Orthodox faiths believe — the holy blood of Christ. He can officiate at weddings, funerals and baptisms and give the homily, or lesson, during a service.

About the only thing he can’t do that priests can is offer the sacraments of the Eucharist and repentance (forgiving sins). And although he is married, if his wife should die, he must remain celibate as long as he is a deacon.

It’s a major commitment and includes five years of study before becoming ordained. Why would a successful agribusinessman, former director of Interfaith Ministries and current head of the United Way add to his busy schedule those years of study and commitment to the diocese and local parish?

“I was active in my church, but if you would have told me I would be an ordained minister, I would have laughed at you,” he said.

Ciccarelli only knows that for him, like other things in the past eight years, it is a calling from God, one shared with his second wife, Sherrill. And that story began in 1999, the year Tom’s wife of 30 years, Sandee, and Sherrill’s husband of 33 years, George Medeiros, both died of cancer.

“We’re taught in corporate America that we can control things and manipulate the process, if necessary. Your success is your salary and your title and your power. So to go through the cancer experience with my wife, that was the first realization that I didn’t really have any control. As we went through the three surgeries and the two chemotherapies, you have to say, ‘OK, this is serious. Lord, what do we have to do to get through this together?’ “

Sandee Ciccarelli died Sept. 9, 1999, four years after her initial breast cancer was diagnosed and treated and just a short time after it came back as ovarian cancer, Tom said.

“At the end, I put Sandee on life support just so the kids could get home to see her. I never believed before that the Lord spoke to your heart, but it started happening to me with Sandee’s death. As I sat in the lobby that night and wondering how I could ever take her off of life support, I felt the Lord say, ‘She’s not there. Sandee isn’t in that body.’ “

It was a tough time, he said, especially because he still had a young child. Three other children were adults and had been on their own for a while, but Christian was only 7½ years old.

“I was thinking, ‘Lord, how can you do this to me? How can you do it to my 7½-year-old son? We’ve got grandkids.’ There was a lot of emotion wrapped up in all that.

“After that, I kept asking the Lord, ‘Lord, send me an angel here because I’m not going to make it.’ Grief affects everyone differently, and for me, I couldn’t breathe. It was worse at night — I just had that horrible feeling that God had to send me an angel or I would die.”

A few weeks later, a friend stopped by, concerned that Tom wasn’t doing well. The friend said he knew of a woman who had lost her husband about nine months earlier and said the Lord had told him to take Tom to meet her so that she might shed some light on the grieving process and help him get through it.

“I told him it was a horrible idea,” Tom said. But a few days later, the friend showed up again, saying he had called Sherrill Medeiros and she was waiting to talk to them. She lived in Escalon; he lived in Modesto. They knew each other casually through Journey in Christianity, a weekend of renewal that both couples had experienced.

“When we got to her house, I heard this little voice say, ‘Behold your angel.’ It just spoke to my heart,” Tom said.

For her part, Sherrill said she had “been praying for a man of God. I said, ‘If that’s not for me, Lord, just teach me to be content in my solitude.'”

Continue on for the rest of the story. And God bless Tom and Sherrill.