Service Archives | Mercy Me! I've Got Work to Do

Sandwich Generation – Must be Bologna

September 22, 2025lpatangan

When I was little, I used to eat bologna, cheese, and mayonnaise sandwiches. So maybe that’s why I think of bologna when I hear talk about the sandwich generation – these middle-aged years where you care for children and aging parents. I suppose bologna is a good-enough metaphor considering the spectrum of variables that make up this stage of life – a little bit of meat mixed with more mystery than an Agatha Christie novel. Meaty, because raising children and honoring the parents who raised you is a chance to simultaneously pay it forward while also paying it back. The mystery varies from whether today’s jack-in-the-box will mean a pop-in visit to the ER with a parent or a pivotal conversation about college plans with a child.

The middle years involve wearing so many hats that you have no idea when the dull silvery thatches of gray hair sprouted. You only know you don’t have time to do anything about it and hope that everyone else’s vision has gone as bad as yours, so that the wiry threads will be mistaken for some hip new hair trend. There are days when I feel more like a parent to my parents and other days when I’m reminded that my children’s increasing independence was always the goal, even if it feels counterintuitive to maternal instincts that want to hold tight. There are no more trips to the zoo to ogle the long necks of the giraffe or marvel at the colorful beak of the Toucan like when they were younger. While they inevitably spread their wings, I reimagine my own nest. What do I want from these years between parenting and parental caregiving? These years that feel like a maybe, a chance to begin adulthood again – this time wiser, more merciful, and without the bulleted list of things to acquire or achieve. The middle years are another chance to ask myself what I want to be when I grow up, and hope my answer is even more fantastical than whatever I imagined as a child.

There’s a sweetness to these years that is nothing like bologna. I’m privy to the spectrum of life’s stages and can see more clearly how oblivious time is to our idiosyncrasies; our fixation on the past; our big plans for the future. We can mourn it, endure it, or celebrate it. Either way, time marches on. Its indifference is both maddening and liberating. Yet, sandwiched between two generations, I can see firsthand that I can’t afford to waste time with meaningless pursuits. Aging and death may be inevitable. Life may be full of challenges and have an unavoidable amount of suffering, but it has a miraculous quality. Forgiving, healing, and practicing mercy towards others transforms our hardships into something surprisingly beautiful. The human heart’s resilience to life’s challenges epitomizes hope and encourages compassion. This encouragement was passed to me and others in my life stage from a generation that is now struggling with life’s physical limitations. It’s the same encouragement we can offer to a younger generation by our example of care for the elderly.

Love: More Transformative than Wrinkle Cream

April 1, 2025lpatangan

A few years ago, my husband and I started volunteering for Meals on Wheels. He chauffeurs me along the route and completes the minimally required paperwork while I pop in and out of the car, giving away meals that I didn’t have to cook to people in need. I enjoy talking with the clients and petting random cats that loiter around doorsteps. It’s an easy breezy way to serve.

Recently, our route changed and I had new people to deliver to. While my husband waited in the car, I made my way through the maze of residences at a retirement home and hesitantly knocked on the first client’s door. I was exuberantly welcomed by an elderly lady who invited me inside. Almost instantly, she told me she loved me. I figured maybe she was confused and thought I was someone else. But she insisted she loved me.

I saw a picture of a cat on her wall and commented on it. Seeing how much I liked cats, she introduced me to hers with a grandmotherly warmth. We talked for a few minutes about how she was feeling. She asked me for a hug, and I left. Afterwards, I ran back to the car and excitedly told my husband how she loved me. “She was just like Jesus,” I said. “I didn’t even have to do anything. She just loved me.”

What struck me most about this wasn’t how rare it is to meet someone who exudes such love. Nor was it the reminder that invariably, when we help others, we get back more than we give. It wasn’t even that she’s a kindred cat lover, validating my theories that cat (and dog) people are the nicest people. While all of those things were in and of themselves significant, it was how much her kindness underscored the simplicity of our purpose — to love others as we wished to be loved, that most struck me.

The day before I met her, I was feeling angsty and existential about life. I questioned what I should be doing and lamented all I had not done. I longed for significance, thinking it would come from some new endeavor or challenge. Yet this elderly woman showed me the impact that we can have on others through the generosity of love. And, while intellectually I already knew this, it’s a different thing altogether to encounter it. She made me feel closer to God by reminding me of his extravagant and unconditional love. I went to offer physical sustenance to someone in need and was fed spiritually by the experience. God uses all of us to comfort, console, and share his compassion if we let him. She reminded me how much these mercies can transform lives – not necessarily because our circumstances change but because love changes us.

We Can do Better for Women and Children

September 20, 2024lpatangan

It feels impossible these days to discuss hard things. We’ve become so comfortable aligning ourselves with the same point of view that we’re sometimes hostile to listening to others. It reminds me of the seemingly innocuous playground game Red Rover I played as a child. One team calls out a player from the other team, and that player tries to run through the other team’s arms to break the chain.

Firm and rigid, no one wants to bend. Other points of view get plowed over or knocked down. It’s dirty and messy. People get hurt. Saddest of all, it makes us forget a fundamental truth about our humanity – that we belong to each other. In a primal sense, there is no other side.

Nowhere does division seem more obvious than the contentious issue of abortion rights.

This November, Floridians will vote on Amendment 4 which the ballot summary states “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

The language of this amendment might appear to put limitations on abortion as it states that a “health care provider” is required to determine if an abortion is necessary to protect the mother’s “health.” However, a healthcare provider is not synonymous with a licensed medical doctor, and the broad term “health” also includes, as determined by the courts, the mental health of the mother.

While the seriousness of mental health issues should never be downplayed, this amendment makes no mention of how significant these “health” issues must be. Presumably, any mother seeking an abortion has some level of anxiety as to her condition. As it’s written, it is hard to imagine any instance in which an abortion wouldn’t be allowed under Amendment 4. It essentially allows abortions on babies who could survive outside of the womb for health concerns that may be treatable and temporary.

Currently, Florida law requires parental consent for minors to have an abortion. Receiving “notification” significantly dilutes the existing requirement of parental consent, making abortion the only medical decision for which parents have no say. Considering the epidemic mental health crisis of our youth, Amendment 4 puts minors in the precarious position of making a pivotal life decision without a loved one to help navigate how their decision may affect their emotional well-being. This is a dangerous precedent and an infringement on the rights of parents that is not in the best interest of our children. Read more →

Lesson Learned: Education Is About More Than Good Grades

August 14, 2024lpatangan

The Sisters from Guardian Catholic Schools (Sister Susan is sitting next to me and my sweet mother-in-law.) I was nervous about hosting them because it meant cooking but they were so entertaining (and even gracious about my black chicken!)

As a student, if I had a good report card my parents would let me order whatever I wanted at Dairy Queen, instead of the standard five Dilly Bars for $1 my family always got. While picking something from the big menu was exciting, I realized that as extravagant as banana splits sound, the bananas are a mushy nuisance that distracts from the ice cream.

I decided the smart kids could have them and I moved on with my mediocre grades and discounted Dilly Bar.

The past few years, I’ve been a tutor at the Guardian Catholic School. While I had some experience as a substitute teacher, I was hesitant to take on this volunteer role because I didn’t want to be the reason a struggling student slipped farther behind. In short — I didn’t want to fail.

I knew failure as a student. In third grade, my struggle with math began and it peaked when I failed ninth-grade algebra. I remember the pleading eyes of teachers and tutors after they would explain a lesson. It seemed like they believed if they stared at me long and hard enough, I would understand how to reduce a fraction or cross multiply or find the square root.

Instead, I would just nod at them with a weak, embarrassed smile; too self-conscious from their intense gazing to think of math at all.

Sister Susan Reineck who runs the afterschool tutoring program at Guardian is nothing like that. She’s soft-spoken and encouraging. I’ve watched her teach. She doesn’t rush students or shame them. She’s patient and calm, and starts where the students are; not where they should be.

I’ve benefited from her instruction on ways to approach teaching and am awed by how capable she is and how capable she makes others feel. I sometimes wonder if I would have struggled so much in math if I had someone as patient and resourceful as Sister Susan teaching me.

When I tutor, I try to be mindful of my own negative experiences. I don’t correct every mispronounced word. I try to come up with fun or creative ways to explain different meanings of words and the emotions they connotate. Almost always, I show her pictures of my pets or tell a funny story about my life. We talk about our families, her best friend, places she has visited, and where she wants to attend high school.

We write summaries of the pages we read, and for weeks we practiced a speech she was assigned in one of her classes — writing it, rewriting, and learning to project her soft-spoken voice to the back of the room where I sat cheering. Once, I read her a column I’d written that appeared in the newspaper and she seemed in awe. Read more →

Grand Plans: Have You Made Yours?

November 27, 2023lpatangan

Most days I feel like I’m seventeen, only without the boyfriend drama and with a credit card that I didn’t “borrow” from my mom. Those are good days. Days where life still feels full of possibilities and bending over to pick up the clothes I’ve strewn about my bedroom doesn’t make me sigh or wince.

Then there are other days where I catch glimpses in a street window or store mirror and I’m so struck by the older version of me that I put my readers on and examine my reflection more carefully. I can’t help feeling betrayed like I just awoke from a sleepover where unbeknownst to me some mean girl drew lines on my face as some cruel practical joke. My eyes are puffier, my face thinner, and I try to reconcile these physical changes with the young, silly girl I still feel like inside.

And while I’m not quite elderly, I’ve aged enough to know that there’s nothing silly in this getting old business. It’s complicated. There are the pesky forms at the doctor’s office where you have to decide whether you want to be resuscitated; who you are giving power of attorney to when you can’t make decisions for yourself anymore; setting up wills and estate planning; who gets what and what the woo-ha do we do with the lifetime of accumulated stuff that the priest warned us we can’t take with us when we go but we bought anyway because it was on sale. Surely, God appreciates a bargain. Read more →

Thank You May be the Best Prayer Ever

November 21, 2023lpatangan

I love pretty stationary – especially the kind where my name is printed in scrolly pastel font that makes me look like I hold a fancy title in a foreign land where I live in a castle with 100 obedient cats. I know it’s hard to believe an ordinary name on card stock can conjure all that. Yet a blank notecard isn’t limited by possibility, only its weighty perimeter.

Gratitude is kind of like the stationary we write thank you notes on. It’s limitless in the places it can go. There have been countless studies that extoll the merits of gratitude. It has the power to not only reshape our brains but almost every aspect related to a meaningful life. According to an article at Harvard Health Publishing, “gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”

We hear so much about gratitude in the month of November. We even see the word written in its own scrolly font as if it too ruled over its own castle. It’s a frilly word and we are given all kinds of suggestions of ways to harvest it in our lives presuming that the sole reason for growing it is to keep it for ourselves. We are told to stockpile it, meditate on it, and use it to make our lives more fulfilling.

Yet like so many positive messages that get twisted into an emphasis on self instead of others, we often forget how important it is to share gratitude. It means way more when it’s given away than when we keep it for ourselves. Gratitude gives life meaning, grows relationships, and sustains us during the times between the hardships and the harvest. So often we are encouraged to feel gratitude because it makes us feel better, happier, and healthier. While most of our gratitude originates from those whom we are closest to, it’s often these same people whom we neglect to share our appreciation. Instead of giving gratitude to the people we love we sometimes take them for granted instead. Read more →

To Love and Be Loved

May 3, 2023lpatangan

Everyone asks you when you are little what you what to be when you grow up. Most kids I knew wanted to be something cool like a truck driver or a zookeeper. I just wanted to be a mom. This seemed like an ordinary vocation and so I was always trying to think of something more interesting. Mostly, I considered what I didn’t want to be. At the very top of this list – I knew with great certitude that I didn’t want to be a nun.

While I liked the sisters who taught at my Catholic grade school, I couldn’t wrap my head around the solitude of not having a family. More superficially, I didn’t like the clothes nuns wore or that none of them wore lipstick or cute earrings. Yet, in the years since, I’ve become so enamored with the concept of religious life that I tell my husband that I’m going to join a convent after he dies. (I just need to find one that accepts cats and pink lipstick).

I’m in awe of the sisters I know and know of – the remarkable things they accomplish; the way they glow with peace and joy; and their humility that belies the power they have to indelibly change lives. Of course, no one embodied this more than Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She showed me how cool it was to be a nun. She taught me that there is more than one way to be a mother and more importantly, what it really means to be beautiful. She was mercy plain, simple, and profound. She didn’t need frivolities because the beauty she exuded came from the purity of her love for God. It radiated.

She brought mercy into the mundanity of care for the sick and dying by doing small things with great love. And by extension, she showed the world how small things become big. Her appeal was universal and her legacy and influence extend beyond what the best statisticians could measure just in my life alone.

I recently read “To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa,” by Jim Towey. In the mid-1980s, Towey had the honor of meeting Mother Teresa while he was a congressional staffer and lawyer. He tells the remarkable story of their unique friendship and how it changed the course of his life. Towey handled many of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity’s legal affairs. He traveled with and helped expand Mother Teresa’s initiatives to care for the sick and the unwanted.

His book gives incredible insight and examples of this great saint that are so fitting with the aim of which she lived– simple stories of the magnitude of small acts. Certainly, Towey himself is one of those stories. On the day he met Mother Teresa and visited the Home of the Dying in India, he was sent to clean the wounds of a man with scabies. That’s not really what Towey in his starched white shirt and dress shoes expected and neither was anything that came after.

That’s probably the best part of the story – of any story that involves God working in our lives – whether it’s Towey’s life, Mother Teresa’s, my life, or yours, is that we really can’t grasp all of the ways God will transform us and our small acts of love. We are often too afraid of what comes after to take the leap of faith to fully surrender our lives to God’s will. Yet, the real takeaway of Mother Teresa’s life is that we can be saints too. We don’t have to join religious life or the Peace Corps or move to India. There are countless ways to practice mercy as an organic part of our daily lives regardless of our vocation. These acts of mercy fall like dominos changing life after life spreading love ad infinitum.

Whether we are nine or ninety, perhaps the answer to the question of what we want to be when we grow up should be the same regardless of whether we are truck drivers, teachers, mothers, lawyers, or sisters. We can be Saints. And, that has to be the coolest vocation not only in this lifetime but in the next.

Hi all ~ If you are in the Jacksonville, Florida area, Jim Towey will be speaking Wednesday, May 10th at the Carla Harris Performing Arts Center at Bishop Kenny High School at 6:30 p.m.

Either way, I encourage you to read his book for its insight into the nuances of Mother Teresa’s life and the beautiful friendship she shared with Towey. To Love and Be Loved is an incredible account of the enormous power of a tiny woman who saw herself as nothing but ordinary, who by example taught us the path of the small way to become extraordinary.

I hope to see you Wednesday. ~ Love, Lara

Power of Love and Example

June 27, 2022lpatangan

Hi all,

I have been hither and yon and I’m home again. All of my favorite people are here so there are lots of dishes and laundry. I could say there’s a lot of laughter and love too, but mostly it’s just some occasional pleasantries which all in all isn’t too shabby.

I know I have many readers who are grandparents and sometimes I wonder if they get just how much they mean to their grandchildren. Spoiler alert: You are so loved.

Regardless of who’s under your branches in the family tree, most of us have been blessed with the joy of that special relationship with a grandparent or aunt, or family friend. Whether you are currently on the giving or receiving end of that, I hope my latest post resonates with you. While it’s about my Granny, it’s really about that indelible mark of the power of love and example. The world needs both more than ever.

And if you feel compelled to share, please comment about someone in your life whose influence you still carry and whose love you still carry on. You can read my post here.

Love to you all ~ Lara

Truth Be Told: Accepting Mercy

October 11, 2021lpatangan

I had a yucky experience during a medical procedure. “Yucky” seems less traumatic than hearing the head of the department at a renowned hospital say, “I am not really sure what is happening to you. This has never happened before.” So, I am going with yucky because it sounds a little less terrifying.

But it’s not my physical reaction that was the most significant. I was my spiritual one — my resistance to accepting mercy when I know how other people’s compassion can bless both the giver and the receiver.

A friend offered to bring my family dinner. Typically, if anyone offers to feed me, I accommodate with the gluttonous joy of a counter-surfing Labrador. I don’t like to cook. I end up with splatter stains on my clothes, salmonella all over my counters, and an overcooked entrée that I worry is still lurking with salmonella. Yet when my sweet friend offered to bring us dinner, I immediately refused. Unlike me, my friend loves to cook and doesn’t neurotically overcook things to avoid food pathogens.

Still, I resisted. I resisted because accepting help sometimes makes me feel vulnerable. I resisted because I didn’t want to acknowledge how much my health issues over the last year have distorted my identity. I resisted because I didn’t want to admit how powerless I felt. I didn’t want to be on this end of mercy. It feels so much easier to give it. I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. I didn’t want any of this.

Yet, here I am. Read more →