Thinking and Planning, Praying and Hoping

I've been meaning to post for a while now. I've started a few posts, but deleted them or couldn't find the words to convey the thoughts. You mel-phlegs might know the feeling, but to be honest it is one I'm neither used to nor comfortable with. (Side note: why is it grammatically incorrect to end a sentence in a preposition? That sentence makes perfectly good sense. Who cares; my blog, my life.)

I've been working on a project that I'm almost finished with, and I've taken pictures along the way and I can't wait to show you all. Lately I've been really good at starting projects and really mediocre at finishing them.

I feel like I had so much more will power when I was attending Mass more frequently. The world gets it wrong when they accuse Christians of blindly following Christ, not having opinions of their own, and ultimately not knowing who they are. Only someone who knows Jesus really can know themselves. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. The discipline it takes to be a Christian teaches so much about the dignity of the human person and the way we ought to live. Even the word 'ought' is a controversy now, it seems.

I've proudly taken a seat on the Downton Abbey bandwagon, and let me tell you, I love it. I watched the first and second seasons in the last week and now I'm jonesing for the third. It is just such good, true, and beautiful entertainment.

My life right now is quiet and simple. I don't like quiet and simple, though. I like loud and fun, busy and productive.

I'm working a lot, but it's not futile, and it is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. (I'm not saying that to convince you or to convince myself, I'm saying that because it is true. I think women have an easier time of this, where as men are more tempted to work for work's sake... do you agree?) I've already made great strides to get my financial life in order and pay down my student loans, and it's just going to keep rolling from here. My vocation, whatever that may be, will surely benefit from my hard work now, but sometimes I still wonder if I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. (Love of money, etc.). All of my friends from work put in the bare minimum, call it good, and go live their lives. I work much harder and longer, but I have a good reason for doing so, I think.

Thanks for coming along with me on this thought-vomit post, haha.

Pray for me, I pray for you!!

St. Ambrose, pray for us!

Breaking the Chains

So this month I've been working very hard. My job is salaried at 40 hours per week, but we're non-exempt, which means that anything over 40 hours we're able to get paid overtime for. This is highly beneficial for someone like me who has no social life and a lot of debt. I've been putting in around 40-50 hours of overtime per month, and riding that wave all the way to the bank.

Today I did something that I've been working towards for a while. I paid off my credit card. I'm not accustomed to relying on a credit card and I really try not to use it at all. When I was between jobs and moving across the southeastern United States, I used it for gas and food, student loans, and new work clothes. At the time it wasn't a big deal because I had a steady paycheck just weeks away, and my credit card was interest free until May. One thing led to another, throw in a plane ticket and a new watch, and it was almost maxed out in May (which is originally when I wanted to have it paid off by.) Thankfully, I was able to work a lot of overtime and I paid the whole thing off in just three months, all while accruing just $25 in interest. (Not bad... trust me.)

Now, I've got a good handle on my debt snowball, and I'm ready to watch that thing go. Have you heard of the debt snowball? It's from Dave Ramsay... he's super legit. I read his books last summer and was really inspired to get my financial life in order. (Obviously that took a while.. I wasn't fundraising as much as I should have been..) His motto is this: Live like no one else now, so that later, you can live like no one else. He means to be frugal now and live below your means so that in the future, you really can live like no one else. I think it's a revolutionary idea for this day and age. In a world of instant gratification and charge cards, he "preaches" a life of moderation, hard work, and humility. If you can't afford something with the cash in your pocket, don't buy it. Easy as pie!

Now that I've got my foot half way in the door of my financial career, I can see where some of Dave's principals don't make sense for me. For example: paying off a house with a 3% interest rate on your loan doesn't make sense because there are many investment products that earn a much higher return. (Why pay someone 100 dollars now when I can wait 20 years and pay them 130, if I know that all along I can earn 10 dollars per year on my hundred bucks?)

I digress.

I like the idea of living like no one else. Isn't that what Christians are called to do? How many people do you know who have died for the Gospel of Jesus, or even been persecuted for His sake? If we're going to be His we have to be prepared for persecution and the Cross. We have to be ready to live like no one else.

St. Matthew, pray for us!

Running in Place

You've probably heard this song on the radio. It goes, "I'm in a hurry to get things done, I rush and rush until life's no fun, all I really gotta do is live and die, but I'm in a hurry and don't know why."

I feel like that line describes my life pretty well right now. I'm running around to get all this stuff done, but I don't feel like anything is actually being accomplished. I don't feel like I'm going forward. Maybe it's because I don't keep a calendar like I used to. I go through the motions, get up go to work, come home, do whatever, go to bed. It's so boring. I like being at work, so I work a lot. I try to be good at my job. I won two awards for excellence this month. Plus the extra cash is nice to pay those student loans down. I have things I'm looking forward to.

I don't know.. I guess I just don't think this is what Jesus had in mind when he told the apostles that He came so that we could have life and have it abundantly. This is not abundant life. This is mediocrity. It's a special kind of Hell for an extrovert, I think.

Pray for me!

Strangely Dim

So the past few days this song has been on repeat on my phone, radio, computer, etc.

I've been a huge Francesca Battistelli fan since I first heard "Free to be Me" when I was 20 (like the girl in the song).

When I listen to it I think of all the outrageous experiences Jesus has blessed me with sitting in that tiny chapel in Auburn at the old St. Mike's and then again at the Mitcham House in Adoration of our Lord. I used to just look at Him and He would tell me everything I needed to hear.

Have a listen:

St. Peter, pray for us.

Costly Grace

Recently I've been reading excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was a devout Lutheran who tried to stand up to Adolf Hitler's Nazis in WWII, and ultimately found himself condemned to death by hanging in Flossenburg Concentration Camp just two weeks before the camp was liberated by U.S. 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions. 

While reading Bonhoeffer, I am inspired and curious. Post-reformation Christians are subject to an extremely different point of view than the philosophers I am familiar with, and it is interesting how quickly the ideas of Protestantism took root in their world views. 

Bonhoeffer says, "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church... Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock."

Valid points. Love it.

He goes on to discuss the victories of the Reformation: man's realization that he NEEDS God, that the call to follow Jesus is written on his heart. He also talks about a few ways that Luther was misinterpreted. He says, "The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of the sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship... But do we also realize that this cheap grace has turned back on us like a boomerang? The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition... We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard... Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing of the world than this?"

Reading this makes me proud to be a Catholic. The Reformation, from the outside, looked like a successful counter to the Industrial Revolution. But is Christianity today any better for it? It's hard to say. The Catholic Church takes a lot of scorn for being so slow to change. People inside and outside of the Church are constantly saying that She needs to "get with the times." But that's one of the things I love most about Her. She moves on God's time, according to His grace.

Part of me wonders if one of the central contributing factors to our society today is the idea that "at the bottom, man is seeking his own interests." Underlying the text in this sermon is the notion that at the core, man is bad.
Has this idea pervaded our society entirely without our being aware of it?  If you can't do anything to become holy, because Jesus will cover your sins (or He will choose not to anyways), what is the point of even trying? Let's all throw off the burden of pretending and go lie, cheat, and steal! Extra-marital sex for everyone!

Thankfully, we're made in the image and likeness of the Only Trinity. Who could look at a direct reflection of the living God and call it anything but good, true, and beautiful?

I sincerely wonder what Luther and Calvin hoped for when they first got started. I doubt they planned for nearly 50,000 sects of Christianity.

Pope John Paul II, pray for us and for the unity of all Christians. 

A Breath of Fresh Air

Today at Mass, after I listened to the Gospel reading and the priest stood up to give his homily, I made a quick and desperate prayer, "Lord, I need to hear something TRUE."

He certainly is the God of answered prayers. I didn't hear anything that I hadn't heard before, but that's okay, right? The Christian life, particularly the Mass, isn't about hearing something new and exciting, it's about reliving an event that happened nearly 2000 years ago. The Church, her teachings, and the scriptures are ever ancient, ever new.

Father talked about the need for the New Evangelization; he said that in order to evangelize we have to first be evangelized. He talked about the importance of a relationship with Jesus being the number one priority, especially in the context of family life. He said that we necessarily are not Christ's disciples if our lives look exactly the same as they did before we met Him. We have to be changed.

Preface: I know that I'm overly critical. I couldn't help but think about how much more effective Father's homily (about keeping Jesus at the center of our lives) could have been, if only Jesus in the Tabernacle were at the center of his Church. Instead, Jesus is hidden away in some side chapel with less than ten seats.

Regardless, it was a joy to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ, and an honest exhortation coming from a pulpit, which so recently seems to have fallen victim to the "I don't want to offend anyone" sect of relativism, err, I mean.... Christianity.

Jesus, teach us to walk on water.
St. Peter and my little doubting St. Thomas, pray for us.

Miss Dependent

So I've been thinking. (That's how nearly all of these blog posts being... with the exception of this one, which I'm still obsessed with!)

Have you ever known the person who gives advice to their friends but never takes his own? I think I'm that person. I've never really considered myself an advice-giver.. I usually don't want to be associated with all of the drama that comes with being someone's "go-to" for advice. But I have some advice for myself tonight, and maybe you could use it too.

Dependence is often considered a vice in our society. People are dependent on drugs, on alcohol, on the government, on technology, on their parents. Why are we so quick to desire independence? Teenagers can't wait to turn sixteen to be able to drive or then to go to college and learn to make it on their own. 

Sometimes it's a good thing. But what about when it's not?

A few months ago at work, one of my colleagues told me that he doesn't like to receive gifts because he doesn't want to feel like he owes anyone. We discussed how sad it is to live a life afraid to owe anything to anyone. 

When it comes down to it, we're all really dependent on one another though, aren't we? I drive a car and I put gas in that car... but if no one knew how to get oil from the ground and refine it... well I suppose I'd walk a lot more. I got bit by a dog near my jugular when I was little... I'm sure glad someone went to medical school and knew how to sew that bad boy up! It's summer in Texas and my well-being is 100% dependent on the guy who just installed our new air conditioner. 

There are people who depend on me too. It's a good thing. 

I wonder why I am more comfortable depending on another human than I am depending on Jesus. When was the last time I needed something and I prayed, "Lord, I really need _____. I trust in you to provide it for me. If it's not your will, change my mind and my heart. Amen."
I know I've prayed that prayer before, but I'm not sure if I ever believed in the words I was praying. 

Maybe one of the reasons we're so uncomfortable with religion is because we're uncomfortable depending on God... we're uncomfortable owing Him everything. 

In one particularly important moment of prayer I experienced in college, I remember meditating on the Cross and wondering why He had to die. I remember thinking, "I'm the guilty one... why couldn't I die so that He could have lived?" I remember with clarity Jesus prompting my heart with the notion that my death wouldn't have been enough. He asked me to allow Him to die for me. But then, wouldn't I owe Him my whole self? 

Jesus was nailed to a cross, that is a historical fact. But have I really allowed His death to be for me? If I had, wouldn't I be more comfortable relying on Him with my every single need?

In the Memorare, it is said of Our Lady: never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. How much more so with the Word Incarnate?! 

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.