Then, a week ago last Saturday, I was driving home from my mom’s house at 8:45 at night after dropping the kids off for a special spend-the-night with her and a visiting aunt. Her house is within the same connected network of subdivisions that we’re in, and so I was winding through neighborhood streets. Shortly after I turned onto the main drive of our own subdivision, I saw a motorcycle zoom past me, headed the opposite direction. I had just come around a corner, and when I looked at his trajectory and considered how the street curved, my heart sunk. He’s not going to make it, I thought. I hit the brakes and looked in my rear-view mirror. The darkness erupted in a spray of sparks, and I heard a terrible crash.

I turned the car around as I dialed 911. I parked by the accident site and jumped out to check on the rider. I could never have been prepared for the horror of what I would see. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that it was like something you’d see in a war zone. One officer commented that it was one of the worst scenes he’d come across in 20 years. I had trouble breathing, and immediately started going into a state of shock.

After I got off the phone, there was a surreal silence. I was standing next to this horrendous scene, with no authorities having yet arrived. It was just me and this deceased young man, with a couple of other stunned witnesses across the street. For a brief moment, I was pulled out of my shock and given a specific, very clear message: I was supposed to be there, on behalf of this kid’s mother. I was her envoy, there to look after him, to pray for him, and to send him off on to his journey in the next life. A feeling of calm, as thick and palpable as a fog, enshrouded the scene, and I was given the words to say a short prayer for him and his family — specifically, for his mother.

Police sirens broke the silence, and within minutes the street was filled with police, paramedics, neighbors, all walking around in the glare of headlights and flashing red and blue lights. I fell back into my state of shock, and was told by officers to go home.

At my house, I sat with my husband on our back porch and told him everything that happened. As I spoke, I felt a connection with the victim’s mother. “I feel like I know her,” I said. It was an irrational thought: The drive on which the accident happened was one of the main arteries into a large network of neighborhoods that contains hundreds of houses. I don’t know that many people around here. Also, the victim could have been here to visit friends for a Saturday night get-together; he may not have lived anywhere nearby. And yet I felt this sense of connection so strongly that I ran out the front door and stood in the middle of the road and looked down the street toward the house of my neighbor friend who has a teenage son. Her house was dark, and so I went inside.

The next morning after Mass, I got the call. We did know him. It was Cameron, the gregarious 21-year-old son of my neighbor a couple of doors down. When I was standing in the road the night before, I was turned the wrong direction; if I had turned around, I would have seen his mother’s house bustling with grief-stricken visitors, and I would have known.

As more details came out in the following days, it seemed that everyone on our street was involved in this tragedy in some way. Cameron had stopped by one neighbor’s house just minutes before the accident. Another neighbor was the first person he’d shown his brand new motorcycle to. Another neighbor had gone with him when he bought it. I was the first person to find him. Another neighbor was just arriving back from a night out when I came home from the scene, and cried with me as I told her what happened. Other neighbors had been outside because of all the sirens, and were with his mother when the police arrived to deliver the news. Still others were good friends of his.

All last week, I spent most of my time with the people on my street. I wasn’t online at all, and directed all of my energy to interacting with the people whose lives play out just yards away from mine. We stopped and hugged one another on the way to the mailbox, stood and cried on the sidewalks, sometimes right in the middle of the street. When we gathered to walk to the candlelight vigil at the accident site, the first person to greet me was one of the women whose property my son and his friend had damaged. The last time I had seen her I was standing on her doorstep, humiliated and chagrined, thinking that we’d probably never speak again. She walked up to me with tears in her eyes and asked if I was okay, we embraced, we cried, and we walked to the candlelight vigil together.

The night of the funeral a bunch of us gathered outside, sitting on the curb and talking until past 1 AM. We toasted to Cameron, we prayed, we laughed those raw and intense laughs that don’t quite cover over the grief, we cried, and we asked ourselves why we never got to know each other before now. The next day another person approached my house with the biggest bouquet of flowers I have ever seen. I could tell it was a neighbor since there was no car in front of my house, but couldn’t see the person’s face because of the size of this tremendous gift. I opened the door to see Cameron’s mother, accompanied by his sister and step-father. In an act of graciousness almost too shocking to comprehend, she had come by to give me this gift as a token of thanks.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day before the accident, my husband and I stumbled across an idea for creating some more space in our house that took a lot of pressure off of our overcrowding situation. I had been so fixated on my plans that I had never paused to consider whether it was God’s plan for us to move on from this place. That time may come one day, but this week it was as clear to me as few things have ever been clear to me in my life, that that time is not now. I knew that God sends us to just the right time period in human history, that he sends us our families, but I don’t think that it clicked until this past week that he sends us our neighbors too.

As I talked with Cameron’s family, his mother and I in tears as we spoke, I noticed that his sister was sitting in the same place in my living room that she sat almost four years ago to the day, that afternoon when I first met her and my other little friends. And I had the same feeling that moment last week that I had those years before: this is exactly where I need to be.

Also, if you would like to read the obituary of the young man killed in the accident I mentioned earlier this week, you can find that here. Please pray for his soul, for all who were on the scene and are having difficulty moving past what they saw, and especially for his family and friends, who are understandably devastated.

— 1 —

Let me just warn you that I am writing this on very little sleep. Last night was one of the worst nights I have had in my parenting history — and that is saying something, considering that my first child woke up every few hours around the clock until he was almost two years old. The 11-month-old baby woke up around midnight, and alternated crying, fussing, and loud babbling until 5:00 AM. As she is still in our room, this meant that neither my husband nor I slept at all last night.

Anyone who tells me to savor these moments because they go by so fast will have their IP address summarily banned and a virus downloaded to their computer that causes it to catch on fire.

— 2 —

The baby’s sleep has been drifting from “very good” to “not great” over the past few weeks, and I am extremely ready to get this under control. I believe in gentle parenting: My babies need to be gentle on me, and let me sleep. And so I wouldn’t mind a little intermittent Kim West-style “crying it out” to send the message that no, seriously, we sleep at night in this family. But the problem is that I don’t have the kind of house where I can do that. Just imagine this…

…in the crib with the baby. I wouldn’t be able to let her cry for ten seconds without imagining that she’s crying not because she’s frustrated about falling asleep, but because she is being STUNG OVER AND OVER AGAIN BY A VENOMOUS ARACHNID THAT IS ATTACKING HER IN HER CRIB!!!!!!

— 3 —

Let me bring some balance into this post by telling you about Megan Tietz’s new book, Spirit-Led Parenting. For those of you who aren’t already familiar with her, Megan blogs at Sorta Crunchy and has been joining us in Quick Takes for years. She and co-author Laura Oyer wrote the book with this mission:

In Spirit-Led Parenting, two mothers share their stories. They tell of a journey that began in fear-soaked, tear-stained days marked by an overwhelming fear of failure that eventually found redemption in discovering the freedom to ignore the wisdom of man and follow the direction of the Spirit. This gentle path looks toward the example of God the Father, seeks after Christ’s unequivocal call to servanthood, and leans upon the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in determining and meeting the individual needs of each unique child.

I had a chance to glance at an early copy of the book, and it’s delightful. Though my own parenting style differs slightly from that of Megan and Laura (read: I recently mused to a friend that my parenting book would be called Mommy Is Going to Die if You Don’t Stop Being Bad and Go to Sleep: A Guide to Draconian Parenting Methods), I appreciated how honest they were about their journeys, as well as their passion for helping moms and babies find peace during that intense first year.

— 4 —

One big issue we’re having is that the baby really needs her own space. But with seven people in a three-bedroom house, there is not a lot of space to be had. And so I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from the local Ikea, which has all sorts of model living spaces set up for people who live in tiny spaces. Check out this video to see what I mean:

Whenever I go to our local store, I am always fascinated by their little “Living in 550 Square Feet” model home things they have set up. All my efficiency-loving German genes come alive, and I stand in awe as I look up and down the wall and behold an area where not a single square inch is wasted. I am convinced that if I could just get hooked up with a ten thousand dollar Ikea gift card, I could transform my house into a model of efficiently used space.

— 5 —

From my homeowner’s association:

When I saw the peppy clipart of that zany little snake, I did not expect it to be a warning about rattlesnakes sighted within the neighborhood. That image goes with an announcement like, Lost pet snake – answers to ‘Snookums’. That is not the appropriate artwork for a communique that says, in so many words, “Hey, there are venomous creatures lurking in the neighborhood! Unlike the scorpions that fill your houses, these things can actually kill you! Have fun when you go for your next jog — hope you don’t die!” (I’m paraphrasing, but that is how I interpreted it.)

The best part was what came next, which I unfortunately could not capture in the screenshot: An admonishment that read “DO NOT PANIC!!!” (copied in the exact style it was written). OF COURSE!!! WHY WOULD I PANIC WHEN YOU ARE TELLING ME NOT TO, USING A BOLDED FONT AND THREE EXCLAMATION POINTS?!?!?!?! SOUNDS LIKE A LAID BACK SITUATION TO ME!!!

— 6 —

I recently downloaded a great album called The Covers, in which Christian artists cover classic popular songs. To get an idea of the effort that went into putting these songs together, check out Audrey Assad’s post about the song she chose to cover, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. This is one of my favorite albums I’ve bought in a long time.

(Which I discovered thanks to Marc Barnes, who, as far as I can tell, is becoming one of the most popular bloggers in the solar system.)

— 7 —

Don’t forget to take some time to read others’ Quick Takes posts on the list below. There’s always some great stuff there! It’s always a bright spot in my weekend to grab a cup of coffee and see what everyone else has to say.

I’m off to not sleep while not thinking about the scorpions and rattlesnakes that surround my house. Have a great weekend!

————————-

ON THE CALENDAR

• Saturday, May 12 I’m excited to be speaking at a moms brunch at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in College Station, TX. For tickets or more  information, call 979-693-6994.
• Friday, August 31 I’m honored to be giving a keynote presentation at the Catholic New Media Conference in Dallas, TX (along with my friends Elizabeth Scalia, Brandon Vogt, and a bunch of other great folks). Come join us!

GOOD STUFF TO CHECK OUT

• A family has been called to adopt a special little girl named Harper who has both HIV and Hepatitis C. Here’s an opportunity to help them raise the funds to make this happen, as well as having the chance to win great prizes. (You can see a picture of sweet Harper at the link as well.)
• Fr. Joseph Homick (whose blog is one of my favorites) has a special call to pray for people who have lost faith, specifically that they will come to know God in the last moments before their deaths. Check out this post for details, and to find out how to contact him to send him names of folks who need these kinds of prayers.
• The Benedictine Daughters of the Divine Will is a brand new order with a neat mission, which you can read about here. They need some funds to build a monastery. If you feel moved to help them with that, you can donate here.

FROM MY BLOG AT THE REGISTER

•  10 things I learned in our first full year of homeschooling
• Men’s real vocations are not their careers
• Why do we call it a “culture of death”?
• Thomas Merton’s prophetic warning about social media

Work as if everything depended on you, pray as if everything depended on God.

Love that! What it seemed to be saying was, “Work hard, pray hard.” This really resonated with the way I like to do things.

Then I got some emails from readers saying: That is probably not the correct version of the quote. Evidently, what St. Ignatius actually said was more along the lines of:

Work as if everything depended on God, pray as if everything depended on you.

I haven’t been able to find a source for the quote either way, so I’m not positive that this second one is correct. But quite a few knowledgeable people have emailed me to say that it is accurate, and it’s given me a lot to ponder. There’s a surprising amount of wisdom contained in this second quote. Consider:

Pray as if everything depended on you

Imagine that the leaders of the ten most populous countries were going to gather for a meeting about how they could usher in an era of peace and harmony, and they were going to invite one speaker to come and give them advice: You. Through some crazy circumstance, you were the sole person picked to address this group, and the FATE OF ALL HUMANITY hung in the balance of what you said. Can you imagine how hard you’d pray? I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if I would do anything but pray.

The thing that works about this advice is that high-pressure moments bring our weaknesses into relief. In daily life, it’s easy to try to control everything, to think and act like we have to need of God, because we are gods. But then when we are put in positions where we’re actually in charge of high-stakes situations, our mentality shifts. We see with startling clarity just how feeble we really are, and how unworthy we are of being in control of much of anything. At least in my experience, rarely are my prayers more passionate and sincere than when I end up in control of an important situation, and I feel like everything depends on me.

Work as if everything depended on God

When I first heard this version of the quote, I interpreted it to mean, “Be lazy.” It tells you a fair amount about my personality type that I thought, Sweet. If that’s true, then I can sit around and do nothing and trust that God will handle everything. I’m not wasting time on Twitter, I’m just following St. Ignatius’ advice and working as if everything depends on God (i.e., not at all)!

But I think that maybe, just maybe, I misunderstood what that advice is getting at. The quote, if correct, doesn’t say, “Don’t bother doing any work, because it all depends on God anyway.” Rather, the spirit of it is that we shouldn’t work in a frantic, controlling way. We should work diligently but peacefully, and not be afraid to rest when it’s time to rest.

Over at the Country Monks blog, Fr. Mark Stengel summed it up well when he wrote:

If I pray as if everything depends on me, I would have to pray with a greater sense of urgency and need, recognizing my own inadequacy. I would have to pray for the wisdom and strength that I will need. I would need to seek forgiveness and humility, so that my past sins and my present flaws might not be stumbling blocks for those I am trying to serve.

If I work as if everything depends on God, then I will go forward with greater confidence and energy, since the work to be done is in more capable hands than my own. If the outcome is in God’s hands, then I will perhaps be able to persevere in the face of opposition and apparent poor results. If it all depends on God, then I will not hesitate to “step out of the boat,” out of my own comfort zone, as I try to serve. And if God is in charge, then He will not allow my mistakes to ruin His work, but will make all things work together unto good.

Anyway, again, I’m not positive that the second version is even right. But even if it’s not, I think it contains a lot of rich food for thought. Which version makes most sense to you? Does anyone know for sure which one is correct?

— 1 —

I know what you’re thinking: Jen, I have not seen enough of you on my computer screen lately. You were in LOTR, you blessed us with that video of yourself chasing around a scorpion in utter futility, and yet I find myself yearning for more. Could we get you to run your mouth a little more in front of a camera?

You’re in luck. Just for you, I went on Fox and Friends on Fox News last week, to talk about the 9th Circuit’s ruling that political ads can air on public television:

— 2 —

Have kids? Want to ruin your life? Get one of these. My children like to collect those pill bug things, and after too many times of having my bowls and glasses commandeered as bug habitats, I went on Amazon and bought one of these “watches” that acts as a mini bug house. Because I secretly hate myself, I only bought one.

Like could not even begin to describe my children’s feelings for this thing. Love isn’t all that close either. Nay, it is as if, upon beholding the green toy contained within the Amazon box, each of them instantly realized that his or her entire life up until this point had been a sad, sad joke, and now, by way of this bug watch, a life of joy and wonder could finally begin. But there was only one, to be shared among my four oldest kids.

I instantly ordered a couple more with two-day shipping, and thus began the longest 172,800 seconds of our lives as we waited for the next box to arrive. Even now that they’re here, the problems have not ended. If there is any question of one child using another child’s bug watch, our house instantly turns into a scene out of a WWF cage match.

Heed my warning, fellow parents: Think LONG and HARD before introducing your children to the world of bug watch ownership.

— 3 —

Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess, a.k.a. the blogger I really cannot link to, had a book signing here in Austin last night. I went, because I feel a familial sense of duty to follow the careers of crazy sixth-generation Texan bloggers who write memoirs. Hundreds of adoring fans packed the entire second floor of Book People, so this was my view:

In addition to a reading, she was celebrating the fact that she just found out that her book, which was released only days before, was #1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. I should have told her about my eerily accurate prediction from back in January, perhaps jumping up and down and shouting, “Who called it?!” People would have been all like, “Wow, you guessed that someone with over 200,000 Twitter followers would be able to sell a lot of copies of her book. You’re a veritable soothsayer!”

— 4 —

During the Q&A after the reading, a fan asked Jenny Lawson about how she handles blog trolls. Her answer was genius. She said that she used to have some people who would regularly leave extremely hateful, personally insulting comments. After trying unsuccessfully to ban their IP addresses, she started going into her control panel and editing their comments to delete what they actually said, and write something like this instead:

I just wanted to tell you how much I admire you, not only as a writer but as a person. I am your biggest fan, and aspire to be like you in every way.

Inevitably these people would see her changes, and leave a second, more vitriolic comment letting everyone know that they never said anything of the sort. And she would edit that too, so that it ended up saying:

I was worried that I might not have expressed my full appreciation in that first comment, so I wanted to come back to reiterate how amazing I think you are. I’m just in awe of your awesomeness.

Every one of them eventually went away.

— 5 —

Speaking of blogging, the past few months I’ve gotten way behind on my blog reading. Who are your current favorite reads? Any new voices you recommend I check out?

— 6 —

It came to my attention after I published my last 7 Quick Takes that a few clarifications are needed:

• My son was not stung in the face twice; it only happened once. It all went down while I was writing my quick takes post that Thursday. Per the scorpion-sighting routine around here, as soon as the event occurred I jumped into action and updated my blog. Then I resumed writing quick takes, but found that I had yet more to say about the matter (mainly, “AAAAAAH! %&$^*#! AAAAAAAH!”), so when that quick takes post was published the next day it gave the incorrect impression that there were two stings.
• We’re not moving. I know I said, “We’re moving,” but we’re not moving. In fact, you can safely ignore anything I say in scorpion posts as it pertains to future actions I plan to take to remedy this situation. I occasionally vent my anxiety about being surrounded by venomous arachnids by threatening everything from moving to hiring a live-in exterminator to arson, but I always find these plans to be too logistically difficult to implement.

— 7 —

Only a few weeks until summer! This means that I have three months off from feeling guilty about not homeschooling enough. I can’t wait!

————————-

Speaking of which, here’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about:

You’ll notice in the interview that I once again plugged The Perfect Health Diet. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the book that made it all click for me. I’ve read approximately three billion books on the subject of nutrition, and I found this one to be the best. It’s written by two Ph.D. scientists who went on a personal quest to overcome some illnesses they were struggling with and achieve optimum health. A bit about their backgrounds:

Paul Jaminet, Ph.D. Paul was an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, became a software entrepreneur during the Internet boom, and now provides strategic advice to entrepreneurial companies while pursuing research in economics (see pauljaminet.com for more information). Paul’s experience overcoming a chronic illness has been key to our views of aging and disease. [...]

Shou-Ching Shih Jaminet, Ph.D. Shou-Ching is a molecular biologist and cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Director of BIDMC’s Multi-Gene Transcriptional Profiling Core. [...]

What I love about the book is that it’s written more like a doctoral thesis than a glitzy diet book. Rather than trying to strong-arm you to adopt their opinions through emotional stories or scare tactics, they simply talk about the research they did and explain why they found some arguments more compelling than others.

Anyway, I’ve also become a big fan of the authors’ blog, so imagine my delight when I saw this post on Good Friday. Even more cool was the ensuing discussion, where Paul Jaminet offered an excellent defense of the idea that not only are faith and science not incompatible, but that faith leads to better science. Definitely worth a read.

If you’re interested in hearing more about that topic, you absolutely must go get a copy of Br. Guy Consolmagno’s talk, Why Does the Pope Have an Astronomer?, in which he goes into detail about this idea that adherents to the monotheistic religions do the best science. He also has an interesting (and funny) talk you can watch on Youtube called The Religious Life of Techies.

Enjoy!

Also: Thanks to Chelsea Zimmerman for finding the link for me! By the way, if you’re not currently reading her blog, Reflections of a Paralytic, you really should. She’s one of the most insightful, interesting young writers out there today.