As I sat in the Adoration chapel, a welcomed reprieve from this crazy world, I noticed something glisten out of the corner of my teary eyes. Turning my gaze ever so slightly, I realized it must have been light reflecting off the large crucifix that sits on a table next to the monstrance. I hadn’t ever noticed this crucifix before, at least not in a way that made it memorable. I wondered if it was new or if I was just unobservant. I wondered how this beautiful gold and silver crucifix had never captured my attention before. And after the third or fourth time of losing my place in the…
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I sat quietly in my living room, embers glowing softly in the fireplace, as I felt a familiar pain begin to flicker in my heart. The kind of pain that wells up from somewhere deep inside and burns in places I didn’t realize had nerves – a throbbing heartache. My husband had gone to work, my workday was done, and an open evening lay ahead. There, in the dim light of the lamps and the fireplace, snuggled up in my favorite spot, I felt utterly lonely – a familiar feeling, a recurring experience in my life. “Why do I feel so lonely” I wondered. I’ve known the burning heartache of…
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“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” – St. Padre Pio Raise your hand if you’ve felt hopeless at some point in your life. I can’t see you as you’re reading this blogpost (thank goodness, right?!) but I’m going to dare to guess you probably raised your hand. Hopelessness is something that can feel painfully lonely but is not unique to any of us. Even lives full of great joy can be riddled by hopelessness. For some, hopelessness and despair are frequent and expected visitors. For others, hopelessness drops by unexpectedly like the occasional October blizzard. No matter on which end of the spectrum you find yourself, I want you to know…
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Have you ever felt distant from a dear friend? Maybe you used to text each other every day but now it’s been weeks since you’ve heard from them. Or perhaps you used to have long, easy conversations with them over a glass of wine but now you simply exchange a quick “hello” and “how have you been” and “we need to get coffee sometime” when you happen to run into each other at the grocery store. Maybe your friendship has morphed into a pleasant but totally operational one – you know you can rely on each other and only reach out when you need something from each other. And you…
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In a little white house with a red door and blue shutters a little girl snuggles in her bed and, by the light of a pink lamp, finds patterns in the popcorn ceiling above her bunk. Anxieties about school, tornadoes, friends, and the possibility that Cruella de Vil could be real bounces around her head until her eyes grow heavy. And she worries herself to sleep. 20 years later, in another white house on the other side of town, a woman tosses anxiously in her bed. Anxieties about pandemics, politics, futures, past mistakes and the unknown bounce around her head – a pinball game of worry. Just as the ocean…
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In a world recently ravaged by the unexpected and life-altering pandemic, an intense and downright nasty political cycle, and brokenness upon brokenness, I find myself asking “Lord, where are you?” more often than I used to. This question rattles me to my core. As someone who’s greatest fear is abandonment, the sense that I (and we) are down here alone on this little blue planet full of so much tumult at the moment, is a heavy one. It is an uncomfortable, unsettling feeling that I couldn’t seem to shake for several months last year leading to a significant drought in my spiritual life. But God’s glory is real and His…
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“Well, have you prayed about it?” my mother asks as she gently rubs her thumb over my eyebrow. My long blonde hair rests in little nests on the pillows on my parents’ bed as I lay on my back staring intently at the ceiling. With the utterance of her question, I feel my teenage eyes start to roll and I can hear my frustration sizzle against the cool blue sheets. “Why do you always say that?” I snap. “That doesn’t help me at all. I don’t know what to do and now you’re just telling me to pray!?” I can feel the words sting my lips as they leave my…
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It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m in the drive-thru at my favorite coffee shop. I’m currently under caffeinated and overly anxious about the million and one things I have on my to-do list. The impatient tap-tap-tapping of my fingernails on my steering wheel compliments the song lowly humming in my car. The bright morning sun shines through my windshield, warming the spot between my eyebrows. I stare intently at the clock. It changes to 7:52 and I frown as I contemplate the audacity of the guy in the blue Ford Fusion in front of me. We’ve both been in line for the past 20 minutes and now that he’s finally…
