Positively (Im)perfect

I. HATE. WAITINGGGG!” I actually yelled this aloud the other day in a painfully weak moment {thankfully no one else was around to witness my crazy}. Despite all the reflections on Advent and waiting, despite getting my world rocked that morning by my friend Mave's incredible Blessed is She devotion about God’s timing , and feeling utter peace in my soul—proclaiming to the world that “Jesus is in the waiting!”—only hours later I was once again cursing the wait and having an internal tantrum that would put a threenager to shame. Because human nature is a fickle and powerful thing. I’m in this weird space where there simply aren’t enough hours in the day and I desperately need more time, yet I’m also just aching to skip ahead to certain days that my heart has been hanging onto—almost as if life itself depended upon it—days that, in my mind, will bring happiness, hope, and maybe even healing. But I realized something today—it all finds its roots in my desire for control. I’ve set...

It's strange sometimes how what's meant to be an inspirational snippet can become your complete undoing. One late summer day, I innocently watched a preview for a groundbreaking new show whose main character has autism. I was prepared to be touched and uplifted--but suddenly found myself shrinking inward as the reality of the subject matter landed a little too close to home. And there I sat, powerless, as an unwelcome emotional dam broke open to flood the depths of my soul -- a flood I thought I'd successfully ignored into dormancy, but whose currents apparently ran far deeper and stronger than I'd acknowledged. This particular dam goes by the name of "The ASD Mom Keeping it Together." ASD being Autism Spectrum Disorder, of course. And it's not a dam I pay much heed to or a subject I broach very often, here or otherwise — mostly to protect my son’s privacy, somewhat because I've learned over the years how to keep the dam mostly inta...

CLOSED! Congrats to our winner, Elisabeth S.! ADVENT. It arrives in two weeks, people. I have been waiting for Advent for {seemingly} ever this year, and we are FINALLY so close I can feel it. The reason I've been waiting so impatiently is, of course , the gorgeous Blessed is She Advent journal - a devotional called In the Beginning  designed by Erica Tighe and written by  Laura Fanucci , which invites us into that sacred, anticipation-filled "beginning"-- the origin of our being, the beginning of our faith journey, the gift of new life and a new year and new possibilities. 2017 Advent Journal Laura takes us through the beginning of each Gospel in a soul-stirring new way, and having snuck (more than) a few peeks, I can tell you that I.cannot.wait. for this journey! I also happen to have the inside scoop that this year, everyone with a journal will be able to participate and share the journey in a beautiful new way, together . It's gonna...

11.13.17 Sometimes you get just plumb tired of life. Tired mentally from the drudgery and toil of demanding routine, tired emotionally from the struggle, tired physically from the pain and exhaustion.  And there’s just no way around it {but through}.  I used to think I could {& should} tell myself to suck it up and power through and be happy anyway. {Talk about unhealthy coping mechanisms}. But I’m learning—between the hard work of dragging myself from bed on these life-tired days and the endless to-do list that’s never actually done—that purposefully injecting intentional joy into my day helps balance the difficulty of the “through” and energizes me to do more of the hard stuff in the end. Today, I had the presence of mind to go beyond the mental exercise and actually write joy into my schedule. Today, after centering my tired soul with morning prayer, I felt compelled to make joy not just a nebulous task, but a visual goal. I started with something as simple a...

ST.  JUDE  SIDE  CHAPEL  |  ST.  PATRICK'S  CATHEDRAL 10.30.17 I got stopped dead in my tracks this morning while listening to this line from the First Reading {Romans 8:15}:  “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into...”  ...and just as my brain tried to autocorrect the last word to “sin,” I heard a different word proclaimed, the very word my soul drags around like a weight just as heavy as sin: “fear.”  This verse, as you might know if you recognize it, goes on to tell us about our spirit of adoption in God. The one that invites—no, compels—us to call Him Abba. Daddy.  And words of the Bethel Music hymn ripped through me— I’m no longer a slave to fear // I am a child of God  I could almost hear God’s gentle chuckle. Because no matter how often I circle around it, no matter how much I stretch my spirit, no matter how hard I try and fail to wrap my mind around this Father-daughter ...

Fear. In this life, it seems just as inescapable as suffering. Both have long been my unwelcome companions, but it dawned on me recently that while suffering is a hallmark of the Christian life, fear and anxiety are decidedly not . The Word tells us in a thousand different ways to seek peace, to not let our hearts be troubled, that worrying won't add a single second to our lifespan. It also tell us to take up our cross in union with Christ's cross, and to rejoice in our sufferings--not out of some twisted masochism, but specifically for the fruit they will bear, and because they are nothing compared to the glory of the Kingdom that awaits. I think we all clamor to agree with this wisdom, even pressure ourselves to snap our fingers and be at the endstate already, without acknowledging the necessary process of learning how to get there. For the longest time I both ran from my cross and treated anxiety as something I could just ignore away, instead of learning to ackno...

Yesterday, my husband did the most exceptionally loving thing. He cleaned the windshield. You see, we were driving home from a weekend in the mountains, which had, naturally, caused our windshield to collect a fair amount of used-to-be-bugs. Also dirt: copious amounts from our time spent exploring the loveliest places on God's green earth--which, naturally, involved driving down some mud-puddle-covered, out-of-the-way roads. And on the way home we were going be driving past (or, rather, through) another one of these breathtaking places: a narrow canyon with rugged walls reaching toward the heavens, anchored at the bottom by a singing, snaking river. And, because I'm...well, me ... naturally, I wanted to get some good clear pictures and videos of it all. So I asked my husband in passing to run the wipers over the windshield smears or something of the sort, I can't quite remember. All I knew was shortly after we'd merged on to the highway with a fully fueled ...