Merry Christmas!

How blessed we are to be believers in Christ! Today, as we celebrate His Incarnation, I reflect on what that means in my life. It's very interesting to think about all He did for us. He didn't have to do any of it. He's God, after all. Yet He humbled himself to be born in a stable. It makes me consider the concept of humility. Do I really know my place in the world? Do I dwell in meekness or am I arrogant at times? I have no reason to be arrogant. I'm insignificant, nothing really, yet I have a feeling the good I do makes a difference in the world. At least, that is my hope. The good I do is only because God has given me everything I need to do good. It's all by the grace of God, not really by anything I do.

It's been a marathon day of playing for masses, getting stuck in the snow while driving, making dinner for my family, opening presents...so much fun but, oh so tiring, truth be told! Little Liam and I have a special bond. Whenever we have a crowd at my house, he asks if he and I can go into my room, shut the door and be quiet for awhile. I always say yes. These are precious times spent together, just the two of us. And, I hope, one day, he will look back and remember how very much his Nana loved him. We must always try to let people know they are welcomed in our lives, loved and important to us. It's the only way I know for people to understand what we already know: God loves us so much, He even became a man so He could die for our sins. Amazing, when one thinks about it!

A blessed Christmastide to you!

peace always

Have you ever been so busy that you crawl home at night, exhausted, wondering how you will ever be able to get up tomorrow and do it all again? It happens every Christmas, Holy Week and Easter season for us church musicians. We work and work to make sure we choose the correct music, the most beautiful music, the most meaningful (we REALLY want the congregation to sing and to be spiritually uplifted by our offerings!)...we rehearse and rehearse our choirs ('til they're blue in the face!!!) and practice hours by ourselves (or we SHOULD; we've been doing it for years and years and sometimes we get complacent). I'm at that point right now, yet, at the core of my being, is great peace and joy. I love doing all these things--and much more, given this is only a part time job. All is well with my world, even though I'm bone-tired! The tiredness is of little matter when I consider the gifts I have been given. I know without doubt that God loves me. I believe I know my purpose in this life. I have marvelous friends and family who love me, no matter what, no strings attached, no expectations of perfection, willing to forgive any and all trespasses. (The people who once caused me angst have left. I am grateful they have and for the lessons I learned having encountered them for a while.) I believe I am doing the best I can to respond to God's call for my life (but NOT without lots of direction from Him!). I am very blessed!

I'm taking a week off after Christmas to rest, to pray, to contemplate something that seems very important in my life. I keep teasing you with this. I don't mean to do so but I'm not ready to divulge what is happening with me just yet. One thing I can tell you is it is very beautiful and it will ultimately involve a radical change in my life. I am praying I will be ready when the time comes.

So, we enter into the final week of Advent and of all our Christmas preparations. The one preparation we must not forget is in our spiritual life. Are we going to be ready to celebrate Our Lord's birth once more with selflessness and hospitality and a sense of giving? I'm praying for all of us--you and me--that we will always be open to Jesus' presence in our lives.

May you have a blessed and peaceful Fourth Week of Advent!

love revisited

I woke up this morning, thinking of my last post. It was pretty negative! So, I resolved to re-work it to be more hopeful. In my defense, I was very weary when I wrote what I did and I've discovered that, when I am tired, my thoughts become more negative. I should have waited until I was rested. I hope you find what I re-wrote more compelling in a positive way!

love

For the past 5 years, I have been searching for my "next" husband. I'd gotten divorced and obtained an annulment after almost 30 years of marriage and I wanted to move on. I thought the way to move on was to remarry. Believe me when I say I looked everywhere for "the" man. I tried every singles website (I joke that I flunked eharmony...all I ever received from the site were men who lived in distant places), I asked friends to introduce me to their single men friends, I prayed for him to walk in the door, a la a knight in shining armor, I looked over every single man at Mass, I casually checked out men's ring fingers when I was out and about. I had lots of first dates, even several deep relationships that were destined to go nowhere and I would have realized it at the very beginning if I hadn't been enamored with the idea that the man of the moment might be "the one". Instead, I hung in sometimes, figuring we'd work it out together. I was rejected by several men, although some have remained friends of mine and the others didn't really understand who I was and so rejected their idea of who I was, which was a false rendering of me. (It still hurt even when I knew that they weren't really rejecting the real me but their skewed idea of me.) I learned that the men my age whom I'd met came with a ton of hurt from previous relationships and seemed to be reluctant to do anything but carry it around with them, infecting new relationships. Finally, I gave up my search and found something much, much, much better. One day, I will share the details with you. For now, it's still a beautiful work in progress.

In my endeavors to find a man, I don't think I was that different from my clients. My clients seem to look for love in all the wrong places, too. While they don't seem to value marriage the way I do, they do tend to attach themselves to men who are not healthy and who treat them with great disrespect. I try to challenge their thinking, hoping they'll see that they are worth far more than they think and they certainly don't deserve abuse. None of us deserves to be abused at the hands of another person. Blessedly for myself, I have a very healthy self-esteem and don't tolerate abuse for long. (Amazingly, men whom I'd never met in person thought it was okay to scream at me via email, text messaging and phone. Their arrogance and anger, which had a history way before they met me, together, were quite a force that I never came to understand but refused to be a part of for long.) I wish I could help my clients understand better that they are't to blame for abuse and they don't have to be victimized by it EVER.

What I've surmised is it all comes down to our human nature's quest to find love so we will be able to love and be loved. It hearkens to our innate longing for God and to be in relationship with other human beings...in essence, to follow the two greatest commandments: to love God above all others and to love one another. In the end, I believe the old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all for it seems to me that our actions of love are much more important than being loved. Loving helps us to grow closer to God. It helps us to live fully. It teaches us to take our own selfishness out of the picture. And, the lessons learned in every situation become a part of the fabric of our being and help us to be more like the way Our Lord calls us to be. And, that is a very beautiful thing!

paying a debt/obedience

Yesterday, I went to court to pay a debt. I had been cited for speeding a couple weeks ago and it was time to pay the piper. The policeman had been kind. He clocked me at 46 in a 30 mile zone but lowered it to 44 so I'd pay less of a fine. I could have mailed in the $131 but he'd advised that I make an appointment with a hearing officer to get it expunged from my record, since I had a very good driving record. When I read on the citation that I could plead not guilty or guilty with explanation, I thought I'd plead guilty with explanation. Clearly, I had been speeding so pleading not guilty couldn't be an option. (When the policeman asked me how fast I thought I was going, I said I didn't know, that I was keeping up with the traffic, he responded, "You were catching up with the traffic!" I thought that was a great retort.) It wouldn't be right to plead not guilty.

As I sat in the hallway outside the courtrooms and the hearing officers' rooms, I didn't think I fit in with the people who were waiting for their court appearances, yet I did. I'd broken the law, same as they probably had. I thought, well, my offense wasn't serious. Well, it was...the evening I was speeding, I was on my way home after a long day of work and having dinner with a friend afterward. I was tired, distracted. It was dark. What if a child on a bike had been on the street and I didn't have time to react and I hit him? What if a car was stopped for a turn and I hit it, due to my speeding? I could have caused an accident, or worse, a death. And, I was disobeying the law, the law that was there for everyone's safety. As I sat there in discomfort, I was glad I was there. I needed to learn. I needed this lesson in humility.

The hearing officer was compassionate. I told him I was there to pay my debt to society. He laughed. He explained my options. In order for the ticket to be expunged, I would have to plead not guilty, not get a ticket for a year and pay $185. The $185 was a set price to do this. My other option was to plead guilty with explanation and he could take the price down to $91 (without me even asking to have it lowered; I didn't consider that might be an option) but it would stay on my driving record. I had no choice. I paid the $91, thanking God for the $40 saving but also realizing that I could have donated that $91 to a good cause. (My speeding was definitely NOT a good cause!) I decided it would be unethical to plead innocent so that I'd have a clean driving record. This offense had to hurt a bit so that I WOULD learn something from it. (I'd asked my insurance agent if a ticket would raise my premiums and he said it wouldn't, thank heavens.) And, the biggest thing was I wouldn't lie. From now on, I just had to obey the law...as I should have been, all along.

The ticket has been showing me things. First of all, the day after I got it, I started consciously going the speed limit, using my cruise control, even on side streets, and discovered that 30 MPH was verrry slow. I wondered how long it had been since I'd actually gone 30 MPH. Then, I took this whole thing as a lesson for my life. Why do I always rush around like a crazy person? What is the point of that? Shouldn't I be stopping, now and again, to savor life's journey, instead of running from one thing to another, never stopping, always in a hurry? As the days went by, I became more relaxed, less stressed. I set my home clocks 5 minutes ahead, I left earlier, I kept to the speed limit. When I'd arrive at my destination, my new joke was I would have been there 2 minutes earlier but I was following the speed limit. And, literally, that was probably not a joke. What point WAS there to speed when it saved a couple minutes, it was unsafe to others and, in the long run, it probably shortened my lifespan because of the stress I'd put myself under?

These days, I'm obeying the law. I'm trying very hard not to speed. It's tough sometimes when I find myself in the blind spot of a big semi and the truck is going the speed limit. I have to decide whether or not to speed ahead or lag behind, where there are 10 cars right behind me, pushing me to go faster and faster. It's safer in the slower right lane, although it is not always possible to stay there, given how our freeways are laid out here. Left hand exits are not uncommon.

This is not unlike our call to obey God's laws. To do God's will, we must follow His laws. What I've been contemplating from this experience is that disobeying God's laws could very well spell death--spiritual death. I want to live in God's realm at all times. That is what I strive to do. If it means moving over to the slow lane and taking more time to love others and myself, that is what I will do. Who knew that a speeding ticket could teach such marvelous things to a (now) reformed speed demon? God is good!

grandchildren

Whenever I hear that the mother of one of our clients is coercing her daughter to abort her grandchild, I become incredulous. I doubt I will ever understand it. Even when I hear her reasons, I still cannot believe it because what I know to be true is my grandchildren are among God's best gifts (if not THE best gift) to me. They are pure joy--heaven sent, to be sure! Spending time with them causes everything else to fade into the background. It's all about being silly, laughing together, a little bit of spoiling, learning new things together, viewing the world through innocent children's eyes, being fully present in the moment with two precious angel babies. We do lots of things together but it's never really about the things we do. It's about spending time together, enjoying one another, loving one another. The other night, I went over to play with them for a bit before tucking them into bed and my grandson told me he wanted me to be there if he woke up in the night and in the morning. I had to explain that I wouldn't be able to do that but we would plan an overnight together very soon. The next night, my daughter-in-law invited me over for dinner. It warmed my heart to be able to spend so much time with all of them. These times are such treasures!

Before Liam was born, I told my daughter-in-law that I thought I would have to see him at least once a week so I could develop a relationship with him. Without batting an eye, she said, "Of course." I was so thrilled by her response. (Since then, she's told me that I could visit any time I wanted and I could tell she meant it.) I'd been hearing about in-laws not having access to grandchildren and I'd been praying that wouldn't happen to me. I spent the first six weeks of his life with him every day because his mother was recovering from having an emergency c-section and she asked me to help her. I took the 6 AM to noon shift and her mother came in the afternoon until my son got home from work. It was a wondrous time! When Ellie was born 15 months later, we had the same routine. It was such a privilege to be there with them during that time. And, every week since Liam was 6 weeks old, except when they go to their cabin for a week in the summer, we have had a "Nana play date" one morning a week (usually Mondays unless I have to play for a funeral). My, how I look forward to those days!

I have a million funny stories. One day, when Liam was 2, he was helping his mom clean the goldfish bowl. His job was to pour the fish into the clean tank. He missed the bowl and the fish landed, splat, on the counter. He scooped it up and put it in his mouth! He must have decided it wasn't a good thing to eat because he spat it out and his mom picked it up and put it in the water. The poor fish survived...We were all surprised it didn't die of a heart attack!

This morning, we spent the morning at the mall where we saw Santa Claus. (Liam thought he was going to get to pick up the things he'd asked Santa to get him right after he was done sitting on his lap. It's going to be a long Advent for the poor kid!) When we were walking along, I told Liam he was my love bug. He told me he was NOT my love bug. I replied, are you kidding me? You've been my love bug since the day you were born 3 and a half years ago. How can you say that? You'll ALWAYS be my love bug. Then, he laughed. I think he enjoyed getting Nana's goat like that. This was the first time he'd teased me. I love watching his sense of humor emerge. And, Ellie must have 1000 words in her vocabulary. She says everything these days! She's a lot like I am in that she is a student of people. She studies them closely and always seems to know how they are feeling. "Liam sad" she'll say when he's unhappy about something. She's been like this from a very young age. They are both so unique...and very dear to their Nana's heart.

Truly, it is a mystery to me how grandmothers can think it's a good thing to force their daughters to abort their grandchildren...From a purely grandmother perspective, I know they are depriving themselves of something very beautiful and irreplaceable.