Kristen Graham | A nun's highway to heaven included life as a truck driver

Rumbling down highways all over the East Coast, Annette Marie Gailey had an epiphany.

She liked being a trucker fine, but God was calling her to be a nun.

"The pull from the Holy Spirit was pretty strong. He said, 'Whenever you're ready to park this rig, I have places to take you,' " she recalled.

More than a decade later, the now Sister Mary Annette Gailey sat in an office in Nazareth Academy, where she has worked with students for the past few years, and explained her unconventional path.

She grew up in Greencastle, a little town in south-central Pennsylvania, where she attended a Catholic grade school and, at age 6, met a woman who made a positive impact on her - Sister Rose Imelda.

"I thought, 'I want to be just like her,' " Sister Mary Annette, 39, said. "It wasn't a conscious thought about religious life, though."

Early on, she talked of a different career. Her father worked for Mack Truck, and at company picnics, Annette Marie would beg to take a ride in the big trucks.

"I idolized my dad," the slender, thoughtful, quiet woman said. "I almost always wanted to drive a truck."

When she expressed her career ambitions to her father, he laughed them off as a little girl's dreams. In college, she studied education, and then took jobs as a teacher and in retail and computer work.

She was in her mid-20s when she realized it was now-or-never time.

"I knew I had nothing to lose, that I could become a truck driver with no risks attached," she recalled. "I wanted to live that life, endure what drivers endured."

Her parents were proud and a little afraid for her, but glad for her gumption. Their fears were unfounded - Annette Marie loved learning how to drive a big rig.

When she started truck-driving school, two other women were in her class. Both dropped out, leaving her and a passel of men to learn the road together.

"We were all cheering at a good backup job. It was such fun. It was a challenge - to do it well was an amazing thing," she said.

She passed her driving exam on the second go-round, then hit the road for a year of hauling books, cotton, machine parts, potato chips, liquor, and other goods.

She was 27, and the open road was thrilling to her.

"There's America's beauty to see, everywhere," she said. "I was never really bored. Every place I stopped, I met neat and very interesting people."

A self-described "high introvert," Sister Mary Annette said she learned simplicity. She learned it so well, in fact, that her cab makes her spare room at the convent at Nazareth Hospital in the Northeast look luxurious.

Life on the road suited Annette Marie, who mostly slept in her cab and ate healthy meals she cobbled together.

Most Sundays she managed to get home, but if she was traveling she would ditch her haul at a truck stop and drive her cab to find the nearest Catholic church.

It was in the silence of the road that her path to become a nun began. She thought about God and devotion and what she should be doing with her life.

"This whole experience of journey is in my blood," she said. "That was part of God's work - in that experience of literal journey, I knew I could give my life back to God."

Finally, she decided to explore a religious life, planning visits with vocation directors from the road and spending days off in convents. After a year on the road, she gave up trucking to devote herself to discernment, the formal process of determining one's vocation.

Eventually, Annette Marie fully committed to becoming a nun and took the name Sister Mary Annette. She felt drawn to the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, based in Philadelphia, because of her own devotion to families, and she took her final vows this spring.

For a few years, she served as Nazareth Academy's campus minister. These days, she works in the business office as a sister-of-all-trades, completing whatever tasks need doing, from billing to organizing programs.

She is studying for a master's degree in therapeutic recreation at Temple University with an eye toward working with the elderly and disabled someday.

Ask her about the high school, an all-girls' college preparatory academy run by the order, and she beams. Walk with her through the lovely Immaculate Conception Chapel on campus, and her enthusiasm sparks - did you know the whole student body can fit in the chapel? Do you know anything about the sisters' foundress, and their mission?

"The fact that it actually works is God's grace," Sister Mary Annette said of the school. "The girls are so close-knit and loving and respectful."

The Nazareth students don't really ask about her trucking days, she said. They are inquisitive, though.

"They ask if I sleep in my habit," Sister Mary Annette said.

And the open road? It hasn't left her blood completely.

"I miss being outdoors," she said. "I miss the sunrise on the road. Whenever there's a road trip, I'm game."