“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
~ Meister Eckhart
LENT DAY EIGHT: I am thankful for impromptu kindness.
This article is such a stunning example of impromptu ways that we good humans show love. The more simple an act of love is — the more beautiful it seems to be.
LENT DAY NINE: I am thankful for life’s twists and turns. It’s never easy to deal with the unexpected, the unwanted, or what feels like the unbearable.
It’s hard to walk in faith when we can’t see the next step. But sometimes the twisty parts of life have a miraculous way of turning into something beautiful.
Trust the twist to bring you something better.
LENT DAY TEN: I am thankful for small businesses that give back to the community.
No glossy public relations material, no recognition in the newspapers, no oversized checks or inflated sincerity – small, community-minded businesses remember their roots. They are vested in and genuinely care about the people they serve. Often giving in-kind, from their own products or resources, or by donating their services, they remind us that we belong to one another.
It isn’t about how much they have to give but their willingness to share when they can. It’s not corporate responsibility, it’s just caring.
Picture of Raymond Solomon of Solomon Ventures, whose generosity to different people and organizations — particularly Catholic Charities Jacksonville Camp I Am Special, has been such a gift to this community.
LENT DAY ELEVEN: I am thankful for a heathy body. In my early thirties, a good friend of mine had terminal brain cancer. She was a young mother whose whole life should have been ahead of her. But it wasn’t.
At the time I was an avid runner. I ran for her because she couldn’t. I didn’t always love it. Some runs were hard, hot, and endlessly long. Still, I remembered what a gift these hard runs were – it meant I could feel the thump of my heart, the strength of my legs, and that my breath was ever precious.
It reminded me that I am alive and healthy and not everyone gets that. It gave me pause to stop running and just be grateful.
LENT DAY TWELVE: I am thankful for Bishop Estevez. During a newspaper interview in the quiet of an empty basilica, we talked about Jesus, immigration, and the role of the church and the individual. Everything he said was worth quoting. More so, it was worth living.
I could have sat there forever in the presence of the holiness he exuded. He made me realize how badly I want to sit with Jesus someday, how much peace there would be then, and how the words we say are nothing compared to the conversation of hearts joined in God’s love.
LENT DAY THIRTEEN: I am thankful for mentors. People who have nothing to gain that are willing to help someone who can never repay it are remarkable examples of Jesus’s selflessness. Endless good comes from those who share their time and knowledge. One of the most impactful ways to change the world is to give someone the tools necessary to do it.
LENT DAY FOURTEEN: I am thankful for transformation. A dead tree becomes a work of art. Hurt enables compassion. Defeat is a catalyst for determination. Sinners repent and become Saints. Faith sows the bloom of a divine eternity. Possibilities are endless and no one is without hope.
What are you thankful for today?
Spiritual Growth
This category is about spiritual growth, growing in our faith, how to grow, self-acceptance, dealing with life, accepting others, and self-improvement.
The Search is Over: Finding Love in Him
I was in my car when the 1985 song, “The Search is Over,” by Surrender came on the radio. I had not heard it in years and for a moment it reminded me of being a 13-year old girl pining over some boy or another who refused to acknowledge my existence in a reasonable way like a bouquet of flowers, box of chocolates, or a boom box blaring a romantic song outside my bedroom window. (Then I remembered it was my Whitney Houston album I played at such somber times of adolescent angst – not Surrender.)
Lost in thought about those days when I would cocoon myself within my four lavender bedroom walls and lament my imperfect body, wardrobe, and life’s entirety, I had a most random thought of a certain guy. He was never my crush, or who I fixated on when I drowned myself in pity, or whom I even had a fleeting thought when I sat idly and listened to sad songs about people who once knew love. I heard the lyrics “The search is over. You were with me all the while,” and I thought of God. I was surprised at how my brain went from unrequited teenage infatuation to the essence of total and complete love that is God.
Yet it made sense to me because in the time since record albums were replaced with cassette tapes, and cassette tapes were replaced with CD’s, and CD’s were replaced with music subscriptions, and music itself degraded into some sort of homage to one’s booty — I’ve searched for many things. I have searched for the perfect man, house, job, couch, school, church, outfit, plant, publisher, vacation, vocation, doctor, and dog. I have spent so very much time on a search of some sort. What I found is that none of it compares to my relationship with God. In all of the searching that so often felt paramount to my satisfaction, to any chance of happiness, all I really needed was what I already had. An abiding God, who faithfully stood at my side, humoring my distractions, patiently awaiting my many detours, and holding me upright despite wayward falls. “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain,” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Read more
Resolution: Every Moment Anew
All of the hoopla of a new year — a new decade can feel overwhelming like the throngs of crowds who enthusiastically greet it in celebration when the clock strikes midnight. This year I slept right through it. Partly because it makes more sense to start anew with a proper night’s sleep and mostly because I am just not that into the hype of a new year. I’m not interested in goal-setting or resolutions or crushing it (whatever “it” may be.) It’s not because I’m complacent or lack ambition or betterment. It’s just that for me, resolutions never seem to be the way to affect genuine life change.
By nature, I was always a rules person. I played by the rules. I made countless rules. I was disciplined (and neurotic) enough to think the criteria I set for my life was paramount to achieving success or at least to maintaining order.
Not in the span of a day or even a year, but in incremental shifts and small seemingly insignificant moments, I realized that however well-intentioned my resolutions were, they were feeding a mindset of unworthiness. Instead, I began to consider the threshold of unconditional love that is the basis of Christianity. I tried to wrap my head around the enormous truth of being loved right where we are and I started to question the motivations that ruled me. I came to know mercy in a meaningful way. I didn’t use it as a crutch to allow myself to do whatever I pleased. It wasn’t an invitation to complacency. It was motivation to stop putting emphasis on the worldly and pay more attention to the worthwhile. It was permission to let go of the perfect and find grace in imperfection. It was possibilities made endless through the merits of forgiveness, the boundless pursuit of compassion, and the insurmountable power of love.
Under the Tree: Overrated
It was Christmas Eve and I couldn’t wait for Santa to come. I am not even sure I believed in Santa at this point in my childhood, but I believed in presents and that was good enough. I had trouble sleeping, and hearing the rustle of last-minute gift-wrapping upstairs only heightened my anticipation. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, I prowled the attic, my mom’s closet, and any other place I could think to snoop. The idea of being surprised was overrated. Practically speaking, I could just as easily be surprised by looking inside a plastic bag while standing barefoot on the attic’s plywood floor. I felt certain that I had watched enough television to feign astonishment on Christmas morning. I even fantasized about my Emmy-award winning performance. It would be as bright and colorful as the lights on the tree that would spotlight me.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for during all that prowling but that’s part of the journey of discovery, right? It’s the thrill of seeking, of what could be, — maybe even of finding something better than we imagined. In my case, what I found didn’t compare to the curated wares hawked in the Spiegel catalog I carefully perused as a pastime. There was a Tootsie Roll piggy bank filled with chewy chocolate jerky. Meh. Fun socks — as if those two words could possibly go together. Toys that were obviously for my brother. I certainly had no use for G.I. Joe. He was too short to use as a suitable partner for Barbie. Then there were a few miscellaneous clothes that I hoped were for my sister because they weren’t quite cute enough for me.
I wanted a fur coat like the one I lovingly pet in the department store inspiring a lecture from my mom on animal cruelty. What seemed crueler was her begrudging me this accessory that I was certain would make me look as glamorous as Sue Ellen on the Friday-night soap-opera, Dallas. (If they didn’t want children to watch such smut, they should not have run it after an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard). I would have settled for a rabbit’s foot keychain like some of the other girls at my school had. They were supposed to bring good luck. Who wouldn’t carry around two inches of a dead animal foot in exchange for a little luck?
Battling Between Balance and Busyness
When my son was seven years old, he was trying to balance. One minute he was excitedly saying, “Look, mom, I found the spot!” Moments later, mid-wobble, he said, “Oh, wait. I lost the spot.” Of course, it was losing it I related too.
Somewhere in the zig-zag of daily life is the sweet spot where we teeter in balance between work and rest, fun and fulfilling, and, social and silence. It seems sometimes like we live in a world of extremes. We have tiny houses and McMansions, hoarders and minimalists, and fast food and the slow-food movement. There is polarization in almost every category of modern life. Perhaps it is our obsession with busyness, where this extreme has become most evident. Busyness has become a badge that says my career is at a crescendo, my family is an extracurricular expert, and my personal life is a page-turner. But are we really living a harlequin-romance novel amidst kids and career, or are we huffing and puffing from here to there, texting our spouses our agendas and their assignments, as we scurry our kids to their next activity?
The other day I was rushing my son to an orthodontist appointment when I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the car window I was squeezed between. To my dismay, I was only wearing one hoop earring. I looked like a rogue pirate without the talking parrot companion. Instead, I had a teenage boy who doesn’t speak as my counterpart. He only repeats “okay,” “I know,” and “fine,” as a series of responses. “Polly wants a cracker,” has become, “Mamas going to go crackers if she doesn’t hear a complete sentence soon!” (But that’s another conversation for another bottle of wine, as a good of friend of mine likes to say.) Read more
Fear, Fullness, and Underwear
I never understood the advice on public speaking about imagining your audience in their underwear. Maybe it’s because I don’t multitask well but I can’t imagine talking about God’s mercy while also trying to focus on an array of undergarments. Besides, it’s just creepy. While the intent may be to make the speaker more comfortable, I can’t think of anything more uncomfortable than a room full of people wearing only bras and briefs.
I considered the absurdity of that advice while trying to identify what would make me most nervous about public speaking. I figured if I addressed any unease, I would be better prepared. I wasn’t overly concerned about a word stumble and since I fell on my face in Kindergarten, I figured I had gotten that out of the way. What I realized made me the most nervous was that I would hurry through, wish the moment away, and just get it done. The worst thing that could happen would be that I would miss my own talk by not embracing every moment with my fully clothed audience. It is a gift to speak about mercy. I wanted to be present. I wanted to experience the joy of it.
It made me realize how often in life I have shrunk from the fullness that God created. I have held back. Blended in. Been too careful. Too many times, I have listened to fear over the only one who can deliver me from it. “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer,” (Psalm 18:2). I’ve always had a relationship with fear. Maybe on some level, I thought if I kept it close, it would keep me safe. But fear doesn’t keep us safe, it keeps us small. It keeps us living in the shadows when God has called us into his light. By trading fear for trust in God we can live in the freedom of his truth. “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety,” (Psalm 4:8). With God, we don’t need to be afraid. He is strong enough to carry us through our suffering and merciful enough to heal our hurts. Having a relationship with him doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen. It doesn’t mean that we won’t fall on our face or some creepy person won’t picture us in our underwear. It just means that with him, through him, fear is a farce of the devil’s making. We don’t need strategies and sayings to make us courageous. We simply need to trust that God has us in the right place to carry out his plan in our lives.
You’ve Come a Long Way Baby
Virginia Slims cigarettes used to have an empowering ad campaign directed at women, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” If we ladies had come a little farther they would have left off “baby,” but it was the seventies and that’s as far as we had come: an anorexic cigarette, marketed specifically to our gender, empowering us to “bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.” (That was another ad campaign for Enjoli perfume).
Personally, my idea of “coming a long way” has nothing to do with being someone’s baby or frying bacon. Our world perpetually bombards us with messages meant to define the standards by which we measure our worth, success, value, and attractiveness. These cultural norms permeate everything from what we put in our coffee to what we ink on our bodies. A renaissance woman’s body would be considered chubby by today’s trends, just as the waifs of the eighties are considered a wisp of the athletically acceptable body type of today’s ideal woman.
And where is the God in any of it?
Would he measure how far we have come by what we smoke? Or how we smell? By how we look in a pair of lululemon leggings? Or how capable we are of having a successful career while we fry bacon for our families?
Sin: Hold the Mayo
I am not sure how it started. I think there was a picture frame hanging on the wall that I thought was too small. In an attempt to fix it, I moved every single piece of furniture in my living room and adjacent dining room. Even though I feign weakness when there is something to lift that weighs more than three pounds, if there is furniture I want to move and no one is around to help, I become the unknown twin sister of the Incredible Hulk. Of course, it’s not pretty to turn the color of the jolly green giant but to be able to move ginormous slabs of wood around the room, one has to sacrifice vanity for vein-popping strength.
I know you aren’t sure where this is going because that’s how it is when you move furniture from wall to wall trying to see what looks best. You try one thing, decide it’s meh, flex the muscles, and drag it in a different direction. It’s really a lot like life. One little crooked sin that we tell ourselves is just a small defect becomes a catalyst for chaos. We ignore it and focus on all the righteous things about ourselves – we don’t beat our children, we call our mothers, and we return the shopping cart to that little island that is nowhere near our parked cars (most of the time). There are a lot of things we do right – that makes us good people. Since we figure sin is inevitable, we minimize our particular habit of hurting God. What’s one measly sin – usually the one we make over and over again – really going to hurt?
After purging the china cabinet, armoire, and buffet of their contents so that nothing would break when huffing and puffing furniture to different walls, the house looked like a hoarder’s delight and a husband’s horror. But, I knew it could be made tidy again and began the tedious work of putting tchotchkes in their place. That’s when I noticed a giant scratch traversing the floor from my living room to my dining room. It read like a road map of a wayward wife who watched too much HGTV. So smitten with all that I had done right in the room – the balance, scale, and symmetry I created – I ignored the scratch.
Wrinkles in His Will (and some tips on boiling corn)
I was talking to Jesus one night before bed and told him that his will for my life appears fairly willy-nilly. What are we really doing here, God? This? That? Does it even matter? It’s as if he thinks I can read the signs he sends. I can’t even read a map much less fold one, so why he thinks I can discern his will is a mystery to me. Still, I come back to that longing to know. It’s like a kid the night before their birthday trying to figure out what their gifts will be. It’s a sleepless mix of exhilaration and anticipation and longing for the relief of just knowing. What a gift the knowing would be.
The next morning, my son had an appointment to have his high school senior pictures taken. I had reminded him the night before that mama doesn’t iron and he needed to have his clothes ready. When I saw him half-dressed in a half-ironed shirt, I was wholly annoyed. He explained that he had ironed his shirt and the wrinkles weren’t coming out. He said he was going to wear it a bit and that would make the wrinkles come out. Lord Jesus, I am supposed to send this child to college in a year? I told him to give me the shirt and I would iron it.
It’s not that I am unwilling to iron, it’s just that most things that have to do with domesticity fail me. The day before I texted a friend to ask how long to boil corn (10 minutes). It’s frustrating to do things that we aren’t good at. When I was a little girl, all I wanted to be when I grew up was a stay-at-home mom. I know in today’s world that is terribly lame but that was my wish, my will. While I’ve been able to do that and mostly love it, I can’t say I am particularly good at it. So, there I was ironing the already-ironed shirt wondering why the heat and the pressing and the willing weren’t working. Since we were running short on time, I called a friend for advice. She reminded me she was in a different time zone and still asleep. I explained my domestic emergency and necessary disregard for her slumber. She suggested that I spray the shirt with water. It turns out the spray bottle under my sink is a mix of soap and water so when I sprayed the shirt it bubbled up like a wound doused in peroxide. I just can’t imagine things like this happening to June Cleaver.
Mercy at the Bus Stop
I was doing my teenage Uber driving duties and thinking about the advice that encourages parents to talk to children in the car. After all, they are a captive audience, don’t have to make eye contact (because God forbid, we have any of that), and both parent and child are physically restrained –that might not have been among the reasons listed but it does seem worth noting. We were on the return portion of our journey into silence and I was lamenting the misery of it when I looked out the car window and saw a man sitting on a bus stop talking to himself. Our eyes met and for a moment he silenced.
He was smoking a cigarette in the mid-day Florida heat. I checked the temperature on my dash and it read 98 degrees. I considered my relative comfort in the air-conditioned car and the ice cream in my freezer I planned to eat when I arrived home as a consolation from both the heat and the unwelcome hush of angst that tormented my drive. I recalled the smoking man in the intolerable heat, sitting in solace, speaking to himself. I thought of that moment our eyes met, and how for the first time that day I felt seen. It mattered not to me what I was seen as or how I might have looked or what he might have thought of me. The moment reminded me of the universality of God’s mercy at a time when I felt somewhat desperate for connection. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but through him, I saw a reminder that suffering is not the only thing that is universal, God’s mercy is too.
While I consider my circumstances are likely better than his – the reality was at that moment, I felt as miserable as I perceived him to be. It’s easy to compare ourselves to others. We have standardized what we consider justifiable levels of loneliness, pain, emptiness, and grief, and if it doesn’t fall on the spectrum of horror or woe that we heard on the latest podcast then we feel like we need to buck up and go write in our gratitude journals. Before I understood the mercy of God, I would have thought the same thing. There were so many times that the pain and challenges in my life became a wedge in my relationship with God because I didn’t think I had the right to seek his mercy. I didn’t bring God what appeared to be trivial and trite by the world’s definition of suffering because it felt too small and I had been given too much. The problem with that thinking is that it separates us from God and from the mercy that heals, comforts, and forgives the wounds in our heart. We may not be worthy of God’s mercy or deserve it. Regardless, it pours out of him – a gift of unfathomable consolation that we choose whether to accept.