I have a dear friend who has hosted an exchange student each year for the past five years or so. She and her husband are energetic, generous people — we truly could not have done as good a job with our kids had they not been so supportive.

This year the exchange program has not gone as well as in years past. They had to have a student moved to another home. When this happened, something prompted me to ask …

“Have you ever considered taking a teenager from the foster care system? You know, one that wouldn’t go back at the end of the school year?”

She smiled and nodded. She had thought of it, more than once. Maybe an eight year old or so. All she had to do was to convince her husband.

Now, her husband is a large part of the reason I think any foster kid would be lucky to have a home with them. This man is a harder worker — and more “handy” — than most other men I’ve known. He built their home nearly single-handedly, and is constantly looking for ways to improve their property. Any kid who lived with this couple would come away knowing the satisfaction of hard work.

But of all the reasons I pray for this couple to consider adoption, the most important reason is this: I see in my friend a natural mother, a nurturer who at present has no natural outlet for her gifts. It’s sad, really, for someone with so much love in her heart not to have a child with whom to share it.

And so, Lord, today I remember ALL those couples who are groping their way toward parenthood. Shed your divine light upon the way that you have planned . . . until every little soul in need of a family, has a forever home.

In the name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen!

Last week Michelle at Scribbit posted this extraordinary post about 10 truly unusual deaths in history.

Today we remember those we love, who have gone before us in death. Grandparents, and in some cases parents. Old friends. Even children — including those who never saw the light of day.

For the Christian, the pain of separation from our loved ones in death is very real . . . and yet, we also know it is only temporary. Confident in the love and mercy of God, we can entrust the souls of our loved ones into His almighty hands, knowing that he loves them even more perfectly than we can. And, if it please him, we will all be together one day again.

Today I offer this prayer for those who never expected to find themselves in purgatory . . . and whose loved ones do not believe in the necessity of a final purgation for those destined to see God face to face. I wrote this prayer shortly after the death of my dear friend, evangelical pastor Charlie Shedd, with whom I worked on several projects when I was an editor for Servant Publications. Oh, how I miss him!

God alone knows the mysteries of life and death; He alone holds these things in His hands. Still, He commands us to pray for one another – brother and sister branches in the one true Vine. Charlie, if you’re still on the way, this one’s for you . . . If not, please pray for me!

Heavenly Father,
we offer up to you our heartfelt intentions,
united with the merits of Your precious Son,
whose death ransoms and restores
every soul who calls upon Your name.

We seek Your mercy,
not only for ourselves but also for those
wandering in darkness, mystified and alone.
Send Your angels to guide them through
the water and the fire, till every blemish fades.

And when we meet again,
may we rejoice eternally not because we were right,
but because You are righteous. And may we adore You
not because we escaped the fires of hell,
but because You are the true and lasting light.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
especially those who did not believe in life
that they would need our prayers in death.

Dear Jesus, be with those we love.
Especially those imperfect souls we loved best
while they were with us.

(c) 2006 Heidi Hess Saxton

As Father Chas reminded us today, All Saints Day (November 1) is to remember not just the “famous” saints — our brothers and sisters in faith whose life stories and writings are found in hundreds of books, whom the Church has officially declared to be in heaven — but the “little saints” remembered only by a handful of people … and some, not at all.

Today my mother-in-law passed the name of one such person on to me. Her name was Irena Sendler, and she worked as a plumber/specialist in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.  Here is what we know about Irena, who recently passed away at the age of 98.  May she rest in peace.

During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ‘ulterior motive’ …  She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize … She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.  

Eternal rest grant to her, oh Lord, and may your perpetual light shine upon her.
May her soul, and the soul of all the faithful departed, by the mercy of God rest in peace.

Today I came across this article about a scholarship of $2000 to $5000 for families hoping to adopt a special-needs or other harder-to-place child.

This week I’ve been thinking about blissful ignorance — the kind of willful blindness we sometimes embrace in our humanness because seeing the truth is just too painful, or unexpected, or unsettling, or, well, icky.

Among believers, it can become a kind of spiritual schitzophrenia. The kind that sees with blazing clarity the splinter in the eye of those outside our immediate spiritual circle, but cannot bear to acknowledge our own shortcomings. Scriptures twisted and pulled like so much salt water taffy, or isolated into submission like a single stubborn branch on a topiary.

There comes a time, however, when we have to ask ourselves: What is TRUTH? And how can I be so sure that I have a handle on it? Have I reduced everything to what makes sense to me — or is there something more, something greater than what one tiny human mind can conceive? Am I being entertained . . . or transformed?

In today’s Gospel, a man who wanted nothing more than to see encounters ultimate Light, ultimate Truth. “Have pity on me, Lord. Son of David, have pity on me…”

Like blind Bartimaeus, this posture of humility and dependence is necessary. So long as we think we have all the answers, our ears are deafened to the truth; so long as we believe we view the world exactly as God sees it, we will be blinded to the present realities just beyond our field of vision. So long as we are busy telling God exactly how to run the world, we cannot be still enough to listen to his heart, or understand what he wantsof us.

Lord, help me to be more like that blind beggar in Mark’s gospel:

Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”
Immediately he received his sight
and followed him on the way. 

Image credit: More Things.com

My sister Chris sent me this YouTube spot today about a woman who adopted an abandoned horse, and was delivered from a life of isolation and alcoholism through the experience.

It is eight minutes long . . . but I smiled through the whole thing. I hope you do, too.

Did you go apple picking this weekend? We did … I’m up to my neck in Granny Smiths. Much to my family’s delight! (They suck up the peels like the ticket-taker at Chuck-E-Cheese. Delightful.)

Today head on over to Scribbit, where Michelle has a delectable recipe for … drum roll, please …

Caramel Apple Bread Pudding!

Need I say more? No? I thought not. Enjoy!

If you work all day, and you never get paid … you know who you are!  (Can’t get the thing to imbed properly. Check out the YouTube version here!)

A busy week ahead … I wanted to run a couple of “classic” posts that have themes I think bear repeating. In this one, I address the question of why terrible things happen to us . . . and how the God who “makes all things work together for good” redeems even the darkest moments of our lives. This one originally ran in “Canticle” magazine.

The snow fell – first gently, then with greater urgency – as I turned my car towards home. Having all but flunked out of my first semester of college (my newfound social life had taken its inevitable toll), I took my parents advice and got a job until I figured out what I was going to do with my life. Clearly, engineering school was not “it.”

The gently rolling hills of northern New Jersey have a few steep stretches, including one mile-long incline I had to navigate downhill on the last leg of my journey. As I neared that section of road, I almost stopped at my boyfriend’s house. But we’d recently had a falling out, so I took a deep breath and kept driving.

The last thing I remember was the flash of a yellow light, warning of the blind signal ahead. It said nothing about the solid sheet of black ice – or the poorly banked road that would send my skidding vehicle into oncoming traffic.

Choices of a Lifetime

It’s one of the great ironies of the human condition, that the amount of time spent pondering a decision is seldom proportionate to its long-term significance. The special dress you spent weeks finding, altering, and accessorizing is but a page in some dusty scrapbook. One impulsive passionate interlude, on the other hand, can have life-long repercussions.

My car accident might have been prevented had I made any number of small decisions a bit differently: not going in to work that day, or deciding to stop at my friend’s house. I would have been spared a great deal of suffering (at least the physical variety). But I didn’t – and to this day I carry the scars of those choices on my body: tracks along my legs and abdomen, spinal arthritis, disk rupture, and pinched sciatica. And yet, God sometimes allows His children to suffer terribly … in order to draw them as close as possible to Himself.

I was hospitalized for more than a month. During that time, my romantic entanglement was abruptly severed (he found out my injuries were serious enough that I might not be able to have children). Fortunately, I had the steady support of another friend, who assured me that any man who deserved me would find the scars beautiful, “Because those scars are a part of your story, part of what makes you … you.”

I took great comfort in those words, and in the realization that – for all that I had suffered – it had been a small price to pay. God had my undivided attention for the first time in my life. Clearly, He had spared my life for a reason, and I wanted to know what that reason was. I didn’t know what His plan for my life would be, but it had to be an improvement on what I had done with it so far.

Wounded … or Scarred?

A year after the accident, the pin that had been set in my left femur worked its way loose, and began to dig into my hip joint. Since the pin no longer served a useful purpose, I was scheduled for surgery to have it removed. Unfortunately, I had to wait a week for an opening. A week of lying in bed and trying not to move.

Two days before the surgery, I was visited by one of the church elders and his wife, who came to pray for me. They believed that God wanted to heal me not through the hands of a surgeon, but through prayer. Not seeing a graceful way out of it, I grudgingly let them put their hands on my leg and pray – and was amazed when, a few seconds later, I was able to get up and jump around the room. (The pin was removed anyway.)

I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t. That night I gave God a good talking to. Why had He seen fit to heal my leg in this unconventional fashion, when I was going to have the problem fixed in a few days anyway? Why would He bother with such a trifle when He had not healed my sister’s cancer or my Aunt Rosemary’s ALS? Why would He use “faith healing” to fix my leg, when all over the world people were dying from injury and disease far worse than mine, without any medical assistance?

There was no immediate celestial response, no zap of lightning for my ingratitude. Through the years, I’ve come to recognize that this is the way God often operates. The mystery is part of His charm. He can handle our questions, though the answers are sometimes years in the telling. He has the answers, of course – and He knows when we will best be able to receive them.

It wasn’t until years later, when I first heard of the Incarnation Principle (that God initiates contact with the human race through the sensible world) that I began to understand what had happened to me. God had not shifted that pin merely to spare me a few more days of physical pain. Rather, He wanted to remind me that I could trust Him to tend to me – on His terms, and not on mine – as a loving father cares for his children.

Have You No Scars?

Whether our wounds are physical, emotional, or spiritual, the principle remains the same: God uses the painful consequences of our actions to draw us into deeper relationship with Himself. As we endure the pain and the scars begin to form, those marks can become a source of bitterness … or thankfulness.

If in our pain we choose to pull away from God (either because we think He’s abandoned us, or because we are trying to punish ourselves), our scars become a constant reminder of our own failings and weaknesses. However, if we let ourselves draw close to God – in prayer and through the sacraments – He tends to our wounds and teaches us important lessons that we could not learn any other way.

When this happens, He does not remove the scars entirely; the pain may stay with us for a lifetime. However, these marks no longer accuse us, no longer have any power to determine our future course. They have been transformed into reminders of God’s providence and mercy. And with these scars, we are turned a little more perfectly into the image of the One who was wounded for our sins, and the sins of the whole world.

Got a phone call today from school. “I think you need to pick Sarah up. Her eyes are puffy, she’s coughing, and says her neck hurts.” Turns out 16 kids in Sarah’s class are out with the flu.

Sixteen out of 24. You do the math. By the time Sarah got home, her fever was up to 102. It was normal this morning. It’s amazing how life can change on a dime, you know?

So the 1:00 meeting I had with the doctor to talk about Sarah’s test results from the educational specialist is now on speaker phone.

The 4:15 Religious Education class has been modified and laid out in the classroom so my teachers aids can carry on.

The new doctor appointment is now at 5:15.

The 7:00 Boosters meeting has been pushed back one week … since three of five of us have sick children at home.

Then, just when I stopped beating my head against the steering wheel of my car from the last-minute carpooling/errand running, I fired up the computer and read this post from Extraordinary Mom Sherry Antonetti:

So read a story to a child not because it will improve their test scores but because you think they’ll like the book. Brush their hair and put in the ribbons if they love them, even if they don’t match. Allow an older one to take a break from studying even if there’s more time, and break out the Rock Band. The pseudo accomplishments of play that aren’t taken seriously have serious benefits that no ribbons, trophies or public “Like this” thumbs up can match. Play for fun. Write for fun. Create a hearth out of your home and do all the things you do, because you would do them even without the A’s, without the accolades.

Life is not just about showing up, but about being present. Not about being noticed, but noticing others.

Be sure to read the whole thing … You’ll be glad you did!