Footprints on the Fridge

Absence Makes the Heart Grow

2010-08-12T06:34:22-07:00

Since my husband has been out of town for a while, I've noticed something. In his absence, I grow more crazy, madly, deeply in love with him. Sure, we're all familiar with that old notion of absence making the heart grow fonder. But I don't think fondness is the word I'm looking for here. It's much too sterile. I've spent a good portion of my coffee time trying to think of the word I would replace it with, but most just didn't seem to say it all, and the rest were meant for private conversation ; ). And then I realized that the thought is a complete sentence, a completely good sentence, without the adjective at the end. Absence makes the heart grow. Yes, yes, it does.

Honey, this is for you. And all the people who don't know yet how incredible you are.

You see, in your absence, I become acutely aware of all the things your presence affords me that I take for granted. A bath with the doors locked, football practices in 100 degree heat without a four year old and three year old throwing ballpark dirt in my hair, alternating shifts at the role of juice bartender, and someone who knows what to do when the car won't start.

It's hard to do everything on my own. Marriages are partnerships for a reason. But there is grace in the doing. My appreciation grows. I am not becoming more fond of you as I notice all the little ways you are usually here, quietly doing. I am becoming insanely, wildly grateful. For every meal you plan and cook. For every wrestling match that tires out little boy bodies. For every "yes" to my chorus of "Will yous?" My heart aches to tell you how much I love you for those things. Each and every one of them. But alas, Skype is no medium for such lists, so I tuck away the tingling gratitude and feel the tug. The heart grows.

But you know, after a few days of you away, more than all the stuff, what I am reminded of is the great and inestimable value of the presence of you. The presence that centers the swirling planets of this family. The presence that glues me to reality. The presence that settles my manic states into calm and clarifies the vision when my blinders fall off. I grasp to find somewhere to land myself in the evenings and realize how those moments with you in prayer are not just moments. They are soul signals. They are smoke detectors of my heart, where in your love and your leadership, we sniff out where the day has gone off track and work to put out the fires. And they are gold star moments. In them, we see together God's will for our family unfolding and we see the effort the other has made to bring us all there, and we gold star one another. Those moments are vital to my existence. And I think God gives us times to sacrifice them with great purpose and tender mercy. Because in articulating what we miss, we remember what we have. And I have you. And you take my hand daily, and lead me down the path to heaven. And on the path to heaven, the heart grows.

And then there is this. I am strong so often. I am capable so often. I have borne so much and survived. People who love me notice. They affirm this strength, and I am grateful for their encouragement. But most people do not see the sinking moments. The stretches where it all becomes too much and this weary soldier needs to rest. And most people do not get to witness the awesome reality of you--soft, gentle, and supple. You, open, ready for my sinking in. You, my soft place to land. Your forgiveness and your mercy. Your care and your concern. And your passionate, generous, life-giving love. But I do. Over and over again, I do. And seeing how much I need it in this short time away makes my heart ache. I feel the stretch. The growing. My heart grows with such ferocity, it pounds harder. Reaches up into my throat and makes a lump there. Spills out of my eyes in sweet tears. Fills up my fingers so they tremble. And rocks my body back and forth in response to its rhythm.

This is no fondness. This is deep. And rich. And fierce. This is love, life-giving, soul-building, utterly precious married love. With its focus sharpened and its need revealed and its gratitude pressed down and filled up to overflowing. This is grace and gift from a Father who knows my deepest need. And in missing you, I cling to Him. And the heart grows. All because of a brief absence.

And then...and then, she said...there is the return. All that love contained, built up, steadily pounding fresh, released. A partnership renewed, a decision remade, a future full of hope. It's going to be good. Oh so good. Are you ready, my love? Because I am. And I am waiting.

Looking Him in the Eye

2010-07-21T05:09:45-07:00

In this post, I wrote that after digging to deep to find the root cause of the lack of intimacy I was feeling in prayer life, I realized that I was harboring fear, anger, blame, doubt and a host of other stony emotions deep in my heart. And so I was coming into the presence of God the way a little child who has been wounded by an adult she trusts does: needy for attention, yet eyes cast down, afraid to meet His gaze, afraid to let Him love me, because I had experienced the deep pain love can cause, and I didn't think I could hurt any more.

This is the part where I must confess that much of the wisdom that guided me through this process came from the help of a compassionate, wise spiritual director. I can't encourage you enough to find competent spiritual direction. In a tender mercy so deep I cannot fathom, the Lord saw fit to put me under the direction of a wife and mother who, I found out after Bryce's death, also has a little saint in heaven who died peacefully in his sleep as an infant. I know. Go ahead. Tear up.

Anyway, her consistent focus for me was to get back to the heart of meditative prayer and to really seek to see how deeply I was loved by my God. I struggled. I went to comfortable places in prayer. The Liturgy of the Hours. The Psalms. It was prayer. It kept me in the daily discipline of sitting quietly. It was reflective. But it was sterile. It was like the dating over the phone. I was making contact with my Savior and Redeemer, but there was a healthy distance that kept me safe. He couldn't see my deepest wounds from where I sat. And I didn't have to feel the pain of having them ripped open in order for them to be healed.

The direction kept coming to go deeper, think more, respond more, communicate more with Christ, who loves me. I knew where I needed to go. It is in His Gospels that we see our Savior, that we hear Him speak to us, that the stories play themselves out for us to delve deeply into. I thought of love, and I thought of St. John, always speaking of God as love, them being one and the same. And so I tentatively began a journey of opening my Bible to the Gospel of St. John every morning and meeting my Savior there.

If you are struggling to reignite a passionate relationship with the Heavenly Father, go through the Son. I have often struggled to come up with an appropriate mental image of God the Father, struggled to know how to communicate with such a one so mighty, so ambiguous, so mystical. And yet, Jesus, God made man, the form of God we can see and hear and know, says over and over again in the Gospels that anyone who wants to know the Father, should go through Him whom the Father sent. I know it may sound silly, but it was a great relief to me to know that I wasn't short-changing my relationship with my Heavenly Father by focusing exclusively on the Son. There's this weird dynamic to my people-pleasing tendencies that makes me feel it necessary to not let any member of the Holy Trinity feel left out when I pray. I know. I'm laughing at myself as I type it. Why does it sound so reasonable when you think it, yet so totally irrational when you type it?

And so, free to seek the face on my Father in the life of His Son, I began to dig deep into the pages of the Gospel. And I began to search out this Savior. This Jesus. This God man. And I began to turn His words over in my mind and ask myself what He wanted to say to me today as He spoke again, timeless in His existence and in his proclamations. And as my mind tumbled the words over, the roughness smoothed, their sharp edges ceased to prick those tender spots I was so afraid would be hurt again. Yes, Jesus challenges us. Yes, He says things that are hard to hear and harder yet to live. Yes, He does things that demand a response that we may wonder if we're ready to give. But none of what He asks wounds us in the way human love wounds us. Nothing He offers is on the condition of accepting brokenness, weakness, sin, and even death. Jesus offers to wound us with a perfect love. A love so deep, so pure, and so true, that our heart bleeds, not for the hurt it has caused us, but for all that we've held back from Him.

In walking with Jesus through the Gospel of John, slowly, sometimes for days at a time, turning over the events and the sermons and the relationships of my God made to look like one of us, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, I came to a new place. And in that place, I began to understand the love again. And in that understanding, my heart began to pulse once again with the joy of being loved, with the certainty that I wanted to hold nothing back from He who loves perfectly, with the assurance that it was not pain that awaited me in accepting the fullness of God's love, but joy and mercy and healing.

Finally, I raised my head, looked my Savior in the eye, and melted in His gaze. For what I found there was nothing to be afraid of. What I found was love.

Backyard Water Park: A Photoessay

2010-07-19T17:45:47-07:00

Colleen Mitchell

Digging in to Dig Out

2010-07-19T05:14:56-07:00

After I posted a little bit about my struggle with dryness in prayer and learning to be lonely, a few people asked me what the remedy was to such dryness. The truth is, that is a tough question to answer in general terms, because it is entirely dependent on circumstances, temperament, and the action of a Sovereign Lord. That's a lot of variables to try to explain. But I have spent a lot of time thinking about my spiritual journey as I sought to learn to walk again after the devastating blows of the last year.

I think when you are experiencing what people call spiritual dryness, where suddenly prayer is unproductive, you see no forward progress in your spiritual life, and you feel distant from God, you have to dig deep to the root causes of what is happening spiritually. Periods of dryness in prayer are often quite normal and just the Holy Spirit disciplining our Spirits and asking us to persevere. But sometimes, when a period of dryness seems to grow longer, go deeper, and feel heavier than a simple test of perseverance, we sense that something is wrong. We feel suddenly awkward in a relationship with a Savior we've known and loved many times over. We fumble through prayer frustrated with the lack of intimacy because we are hungry and desperate and we need Him and He seems far away.

That is where I found myself as I journeyed through my grief process and the weeks wore to months and we added suffering to suffering in our lives. Suddenly the God I had known and loved deeply since my early teen years seemed a stranger to me, and prayer, the language of our romance, was awkward and stilted and frustrating.

The solution to that special brand of dryness alluded me for a long while until I dug deep enough to hit the nerve center of what was going on. I knew that grief had changed me in ways both expected and unexpected. I knew that it had changed my relationship with God. While my faith had brought grace upon grace, tender mercy upon tender mercy as I grieved, it had also been dealt a blow, a challenge that knocked the wind out of me and left me gasping for breath. And there were many times I felt I was a spiritual feather weight placed in the ring with the heavy weight champion of the world.

When I began to try to recover from the near depression that stalked me for much of the early summer, I began to try to trace this dryness, this lack of intimacy, back to its roots. I read the prayer journal that I began in the weeks after Bryce's death from its beginning to the present. I could see the progression, the slow changes in my conversation with my Savior, but I couldn't really pin point what had happened.

I said in this post that Eucharistic adoration was the short answer to the question of how I recovered. In June, as uncertainty swooped in and added another death-defying plunge to our life's roller coaster, Greg and I made a commitment that one or the other of us or all of us as a family would be in front of the Eucharist daily, either in Adoration or in attendance at Holy Mass. I confess, this was a new level of commitment to me. Getting to holy hour on a regular basis was a habitual spiritual failure on my part. I know well it is because the very dominant Martha in me is scared to death to have to play Mary for a whole hour, sitting and listening. And yet I also know well, it is the better part.

And so I began a regular routine of sitting silently in the presence of my God. Outwardly silent, anyway. It is a struggle for me to quiet myself inwardly, and often takes me half of the hour just to settle in, but as I practice more, it comes more easily.

In that continual practice of stillness before the True Presence of my Living Savior, a flashlight shone into my soul. The deepest, quietest spaces that I had missed in all my searching were lit in His presence. And what I began to see in those corners of my heart were stones. Far back, way deep down, the heart that had once loved a Savior so joyfully, so zealously, was atrophied and cold. It was normal in all the visible places that others could see. It was normal enough that I could function spiritually on one level. But its symptoms were plaguing me, and I knew that if I left this condition undiagnosed much longer it was going to progress rapidly.

There in the safety of the presence of Christ the King, I was able to own the lack of trust I had developed, the anger and the blame I had placed on His shoulders, and the unwillingness I had developed to let Him go certain places in my heart. I found the places where I was digging in my heals and saying "no" to questions He had not yet asked. I found my fear. These were not the early, obvious wounds of grief, which had already been recognized and treated with healing balms. These were deeper, hidden wounds that even I had not really been able to articulate.

But it was in digging very deep and feeling out the cold stony places in the darkened recesses of my soul that I was able to come face to face with God again. And realize that His gaze frightened me.

That was the beginning. And it happened in His Eucharistic presence, where stillness and grace and tangible Divinity became the expert medical team that found what I had been unable to find on my own.

Savoring Summer with the Snoring Scholar

2010-07-01T05:15:00-07:00

I'm lucky enough to be guest posting over at Sarah Reinhard's place today, and we've whipped up some quick summer fun for you that includes ice cream, flip flops, and give away! Don't miss out. Go! Read! Grab the button. And come play with us this summer!

The Fast of Loneliness and the Feast of Friendship

2010-06-30T07:19:10-07:00

In the past few weeks, our lives have slowed from the busy pace of late spring with its baseball and work schedules and the final push of the school routine. Things are slower around here. And I am working my way back to normal on so many levels after a rough stretch. And we are praying for new direction in our lives, praying to understand God's will for us, praying to know the way.

That combination of happenings has led me to really focus on getting my prayer life back in order. To focus on rebuilding intimacy with God. I have spent so much time hurting in the last nine months, clinging to God for my very breath at times, weeping all my bitterness out onto His wounded feet, it's hard to imagine how I could have lost a sense of intimacy with Him. But lose I did. My Scripture reading, my meditation, all just dry. Prayer has been like eating Saltine crackers lately. I want to fall in love with Jesus all over again. I want to be young and fresh and zealous all over again. I want to trust and hope and sing His praise with unabashed joy once again. In light of where I've been, this may look a little different than when I first fell in love with Him, but it's possible. It's what He wants for me. It's how He loves me, fully, zealously, joyfully. And it's how He wants me to love Him in return.

It is no new discovery that silence is a necessary component for building a fruitful prayer life. Catholic saints and more recently, Catholic bloggers, have written eloquently on the subject. And I agreed wholeheartedly with their assessments. I just didn't exactly get what the Lord was trying to tell me right away. I'm like that sometimes, a little dense with the Lord.

But as I've put my focus on building an intimate prayer life, I've come to see that silence is not just about creating quiet pockets for prayer throughout my day. Silence is not only about guarding my time from the screen noise that can overtake me at times. Silence is not only about limiting online conversation. Silence in an intentional, purposeful fast. Silence is letting yourself be lonely.

My husband had to spend some time out of town in the last few weeks. His being gone fills me with a sense of his absence, with a sense that someone is missing. And that sense makes me lonely. He wasn't as available to me as he usually is when he's away and so that sense of his absence was all the more acute.

My natural reaction to feeling "alone" is to look for other voices to fill that sense of absence, of loneliness--to call friends or sisters or nieces--to chat away the time so that I barely notice he's gone. To chat up. To barely notice. He's gone. Oh. So not good. This time around I finally got a glimpse of what God was trying to say. My husband is my beloved. I'm supposed to notice he's gone. I'm supposed to feel lonely without him.

And so I felt the Lord calling me to fast while my husband was away. To intentionally put the phone back down and not dial. To desire conversation, and to feel the hunger, but not to feed it. To desire affirmation, to thirst for recognition, and to stay thirsty for a while. To feel the human longing for intimacy and to fill it, not with humanity, but with Him. To silence not the noise others make, but the noise I make. In my own head. In my own heart. To fast from even good, fruitful conversations with holy, like-minded friends. To fast from their encouragement.

Why? Because in our loneliness, we see our neediness. We begin to see just how clingy we are. Like little babies who are feverish and miserable cling tightly to you, begging you with clutching fingers and whimpering voices to assure them that they are okay. I whimper. I cling. Someone tell me I'm okay.

I don't like to see my neediness. It's shockingly embarrassing to realize how much I look to others to validate, affirm. When my confidence is waning, when sloth is lurking, when fatigue makes joyful service feel impossible, I look for a quick fix, a word of love, a little laugh, an "atta-girl". None of these things are bad in and of themselves. But what I realized is that they are like feeding myself a steady diet of cup cakes. I feel full right after, but the fullness doesn't last long. And the bottom out makes me feel worse than before and I need more cupcakes to feel full the next time around.

But in the fasting, I felt the hunger. And I waited. And I felt the humility of how much hunger there was. And I waited. I got so hungry, I cried. And I waited. And sometimes night fell and the darkness felt very dark and very lonely. And I waited. And I called out to Him to fill me. And I laid my scared, tired, feverish little girl self in His lap. And I drank living water and I consumed living Bread. And in time, I fell in love again.

I fell in love with the husband I missed so much, and I desired his company more than I have in a long time. And I fell in love with my God again. The God that feeds my hunger and isn't critical of my neediness. The God that created me to need. To hunger. To thirst. In the depths of my soul. The God who knows how badly I need to be loved. And who wants to rush in and fill me.

And all I have to do is let myself be empty. Be lonely. Be hungry. And He will come to fill me with the kind of friendship that makes me strong and healthy, full and satisfied. So that friendship cupcakes taste ever sweeter because I am not expecting them to feed a hunger they were never meant to feed.

I am still learning. I still reach for conversation when it might be better to wait. I still tend to think of screen time and chat time first when I feel myself begin to tire, begin to get hungry throughout the day. And I don't always wait when I should. But I am working. And I am learning to be lonely. And to see the reality of neediness. And to fill it with love worth waiting for.

The Feast of Saints Peter and Paul

2010-06-29T08:46:32-07:00

Today the Church honors, Sts. Peter and Paul, her two greatest fishers of men. Our dinner plans are posted over at Catholic Cuisine. Blessed feasting to you all!

Simple Woman's Daybook

2010-06-28T07:41:30-07:00

Outside my window...The sun is shining and I'm sure we're in for another steaming hot Louisiana summer day, punctuated by quick thunderstorms. That seems to be the norm lately. The flowers are starting to feel the effects. My petunias are withering sadly in their window boxes.

I am thinking...about lots of quotes from Mother Teresa, especially this one:

"Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your eyes, kindness in your face, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greetings.

We are all but His instruments who do our little bit and pass by.

I believe that the way in which an act of kindness is done is as important as the action itself.

I am thankful for...Eucharistic adoration, spiritual direction and spiritual sisters who love me and laugh with me. My faith and prayer life is finally starting to recover from my bout with May. I have these things to thank.

From the learning rooms...I'm hoping to add some summer science fun to the routine this week. I found this list earlier in the summer and was excited about it, but have failed miserably on the follow through. Perhaps this week will be the week.

From the kitchen...sliced cucumbers and fresh fruit. Friends and neighbors are handing off cucumbers from their gardens faster than we can slice them. And fruit, oh how I'm loving summer fruit. Today, though, I think there'll be red beans and rice. It's a kid favorite around here, a Monday tradition, and it's been a while.

I am wearing...jammies still. We had a visitor who stayed late last night and we are all going slowly this morning.

I am creating...a new look for this blog, with a little help. Can't wait to show it off.

I am going...very few places right now. Life has ground to a noticeable halt around here for a couple of weeks. We are learning to live with the quiet and the slow. I am relishing it. The boys, not so much. But July kicks back into high busy gear, so I am going to savor this week and not try to fill its slow-paced days with activity.

I am reading...The Joy of Living, a collection of thoughts from Mother Teresa organized by days. I think you're meant to sip this one slowly over time, but I am so soul thirsty for Mother Teresa's brand of simple faith and strong love, that I'm gulping it up, reading whole month's worth of quotes in a sitting, dog-earing pages and going back to reread. Oh, sweet little lady, mother to the poor, light to the world, thank you.

I am hoping...that God's direction for our lives will be made abundantly clear and that we will find grace and peace in walking it, whatever it is.

I am hearing...a four year old waking up and asking the first question of the day, "Mom, do we have marshmallows?"

Around the house...how the heck do we still have so much stuff? I feel like I declutter and purge constantly and yet there's still stuff everywhere. Blech. I want to start over.

One of my favorite things...my mom and my sisters. They were together this weekend and I wasn't able to join them. That made me a little sad. But vacation is just a few weeks away and there will be a whole week to soak them up. I can't wait.

A few plans for the rest of the week: maybe a library trip, a science experiment or two, walks to the Adoration chapel with Daddy, a visit from Granny and Pops, and hopefully some weekend fun with friends. And lots of quiet.

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

Vacation views that await.

Simply Footprints Daybook

2010-06-20T22:49:00-07:00

FOR TODAY

Outside my window...it's late and dark and quiet and the ground is still wet from a good soaking we had late this afternoon.
I am thinking...Actually, I'm trying not to think too much these days. Such big questions loom for us in the days ahead and trust and perseverance seem to be only roles in finding the answer. So I am trying to turn my thinker often and my prayer on.

I am thankful for...my husband. After eight days away and Father's Day Eve return, I realize just how I better off I am in his company. He makes me better in so many ways.

From the learning rooms...I had planned to go full force until the end of June, but we are summarily stalled. So I spent last week considering the balance between simplicity and richness I want in my homeschool while I cleared and decluttered our learning spaces. And I realized that book lists and a few good art supplies are really all I need for the richness I desire. I pulled the core subject books for everyone and they all fit one basket. I made a basket full of main lesson and notebooks. We have plenty enough. Of everything we need to have. A weekly library trip and fresh watercolors will round out my shopping for next year.

From the kitchen...there is a summer menu rotation underway. Last week, I committed myself to shopping smart and healthy. I shopped the perimeter of the store and grabbed the very few items I needed in the aisles at the very end. There were fresh blackberries and blueberries and nuts for snacking this week, and even with Daddy away, I fed the kids cooked, healthy food every day. I think we all feel so much better. I am obsessed with having summer fruit on the table at each meal. Can't seem to get enough of watermelon and berries and nectarines. This weekend on a quick run, I spotted fresh pineapples, and now I can't wait until it's time to restock the fruit.

I am wearing...navy and white sleeveless top, wide legged khaki chinos, and a haircut I gave myself the other day. I don't mean to brag, but it's cute. Really cute.

I am creating...a purposeful environment in my home. I have been compelled to conquer one room at a time, rearranging furniture, reconfiguring wall hangings, and moving things around with a point to clearly understand the place and the purpose of each item in the room. I love my bedroom after its makeover and seek its cheerful quiet often throughout the day. I'm hoping that soon each room will feel this way and that it will bring the same peace and cheerfulness to my family as it does to me.

I am going...on vacation in July. With my siblings and their families and my mom and her husband. And I can't wait. I am ready to lounge and laugh.
I am reading...Little Talks With God by St. Catherine of Siena. I need some reading inspiration. I've been in a funk for a while now.

I am hoping...that God will begin to clarify His will for us and that we will be able to give a wholehearted "yes" to whatever he asks.

I am hearing...quiet. Finally. My kids were up until midnight. Hence this post. But now, silence. Ahhhh.

Around the house...I feel like I am getting my footing again. When we eased into summer mode I assigned the three older boys one task that remains theirs all the time (maybe I'll switch it seasonally) and one area of the house to keep straightened. Quinn handles trash duty and the front living area. Gabriel handles the dishwasher and the boys' bedroom. Brendan handles laundry switching and the den. It's so easy to keep them focused and to keep things moving with this in place. It leaves me to train Evan to straighten the bathrooms (which will become his area when he is ready), to keep my bedroom tidy, and to handle the cooking and kitchen wipe down as well as folding and putting away laundry. That is a fairly reasonable distribution of daily work. If we add in one bigger weekly chore each day, like dusting or mopping or changing bed linens, things stay pretty well on course.

One of my favorite things...when a child who has struggled mightily to learn to read snuggles up beside and slowly, painstakingly sounds out every word to the first chapter of a Magic Tree House book. And the bashful smile that tugs the corners of his mouth when he realizes that he has done it.

A few plans for the rest of the week: Spiritual direction, one dentist appointment, and a 12th birthday celebrate. And that's enough for me. Baseball season has ended, and while we all had a blast, free evenings are so, so lovely.

Visit Peggy for more June daybooks.

Mudpie Masterpiece

2010-06-19T07:31:41-07:00

Gabriel, our resident artist, takes mudpie creations to a whole new level. This child's creative vision near gets boring.