Labor of Love

"Work without love is slavery," said Blessed Mother Teresa.

That's a deep thought, one I've personally pondered for quite some time.  I aspire to work only with love, to break the chains that bind me, but it's so easy to get caught up in the motions, the annoyances, the things I can't control, the drama and nonsense of business politics.  Quite often, I am enslaved.

It's pathetic, really.

So I was really happy when I found this prayer in my Magnificat the other day, and I kind of wish I had had it years ago.  It's completely perfect, and I figured that it would be good to share on Labor Day for all you who labor.  Let's all ask God for the grace to labor with love.

Litany to Sanctify Work

     R. Lord, protect me.
From the temptation to be listless and lazy: R.
From the temptation to complain: R.
From the temptation to be critical to my boss: R.
From the temptation to cheat or to be dishonest with others: R.
From the temptation to gossip: R.
From the temptation to lateness: R.
From the temptation to waste time: R.
From the temptation to be judgmental of my co-workers: R.
From the temptation to procrastinate: R.
From the temptation to be jealous or envious of others: R.
From the temptation to indolence and lethargy: R.
From the temptation to be hyper-critical: R.
From the temptation to engage in idle-conversation: R.
From the temptation to be quick to take offense: R.
From the temptation to shift my work onto others: R.
From the temptation to impatience: R.
From the temptation to cut corners or to be sloppy: R.
From the temptation to give in to weariness: R.

     R. Lord, please grant it.
For the grace to be a peacemaker: R.
For the grace to witness to you by word and example: R.
For the grace to be energetic and committed: R.
For the grace to take initiative: R.
For the grace to be compassionate and forgiving: R.
For the grace to offer up all tedium and drudgery: R.
For the grace to be attentive to those in need: R.
For the grace to be generous in sharing: R.
For the grace to be prudent in dealing with others: R.
For the grace to be kind: R.
For the grace to be understanding: R.
For the grace to fulfill my responsibilities well: R.
For the grace to be patient and persevering: R.
For the grace to put myself in others' shoes: R.
For the grace to be dedicated and undistracted: R.
For the grace to be honest and forthright: R.
For the grace to be hardworking: R.
For the grace to be free of stress: R.
For the grace of insight to solve problems: R.
For the grace of industriousness: R.
For the grace to resolve conflicts and difficulties: R.
For the grace to put up with hardships: R.
For the grace to esteem the dignity of my co-workers: R.
For the grace to be thankful for the chance to work: R.
For the grace to spread the Good News of the Gospel: R.

"Come to Me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)

When Little Lights Become Fires: i.e. adulthood

No longer a little light, there is now a fire inside, a flame burning hot and bright.

To some who have known me a long time, it seems frightening in its sudden ignition.  But the truest, bluest friends understand "It's about time."

We all come out bloody and screaming into this world, but our unique life experiences stretch us into our unique selves.  For some, the changes come early on.  Then there's me and all the other late bloomers.

Life throws its punches and I always just adapted and went with it, hiding my little light under its protective bushel.  The punches piled up and up on top of my bushel until one day the devil told me lies of such astronomical proportions (through someone I loved dearly) that I couldn't pretend to be who they wanted me to be anymore.  I needed to be me, really me.  In my darkest moment and deepest pain, I shoved the bushel off and let my light shine, really shine.

The growing pains from that leap into adulthood hurt more than I could comprehend, but the fire burning in me reminded me that no matter what, I was right, and I was being my truest self--take it or leave it.

I struggle at times to keep the flames in check.  Life keeps throwing punches, and I keep adapting when necessary, and fighting when adapting is not necessary.  Most days I'm okay, but some days my husband has to go downstairs to dig my stuffed cow out of the hot pink tub of memorabilia that was apparently stashed in storage too soon.  Because sometimes, I just need a hug from a fluffy, inanimate object that can't talk, yet still knows my deepest darkest secrets and has seen my fattest, wettest tears.

There's a fire in all of us, or a "monster" if you prefer.  The fear is that we will either be consumed by the flames or the flames will be stamped out.  The key, I believe, is to offer our fires, our monsters, to God, to give them to Him and let Him use them to accomplish His Will.  That offering, I believe, which is admittedly easier said than done, is how we will have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10)

Summer Lovin

Can it just be summer all the time?

Seriously.  I know that I've written several posts about how important the seasons are and how they indicate change and yada, yada, but seriously.  SUNSHINE.  Sunshine is all I need.

Clouds make me claustrophobic--especially when they create that horrible overcast whitish-gray shroud over us.  It's like they're blocking us out, the whole state of Ohio, from the rest of the world, from the rest of the universe.  It's depressing.  And I tell myself over and over that the sun is still shining above the clouds.  But I'm still at the point where every day the sky is overcast, I am tempted to get on a plane and fly somewhere just so I can transcend the misery.

Don't get me wrong, not all clouds are awful.  Some clouds have character, like angry storm clouds or white fluffy ones just out for a leisurely afternoon stroll. . .in the sunshine, or the kind that look like the wallpaper in Toy Story.

Mostly, I just love sunshine and summer. This is me:

Put me in summer and I'll be a. . .happy person!

A Glimpse of Spring

“…you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning.  Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. . .Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.  But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.  When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. . ."*

Every year it’s the same story—the earth dies, and rises again to new life in the spring.  The soul follows the same pattern. 

To be honest, it gets old after a while.  Year after year, you’re cruising along and everything is great and then the holidays come around and they should be enjoyable but they’re just stressful and then they’re over and you think you can breathe a sigh of relief and start fresh with the new year, but the new year is full of its own challenges and changes and bitterly cold days and snowy mornings and snowy evenings and salt-covered shoes that lead to salt-covered floors and sickness here and there and then here again because your stress is so high that your immunity is shot to hell and you know spring is just around the corner, and finally it’s the first of March, and still you drive to work through four inches of snow and ice and wonder why you are risking your life for coffee, because that’s what you do for a living, you make coffee.

Then one fine day, the weathermen say it’s going to start warming up tomorrow, and your wedding present has arrived from Denmark—a coffee maker, the finest in the world, proven to produce a nearly perfect cup of coffee every time.  Suddenly you see yourself ten, twenty, thirty years from now brewing coffee with this same coffee maker and sitting across from the man who loves you even when you go off in a hangry rage at Wal-mart because the brooms aren’t where you think they should be and you didn’t eat enough for breakfast.

As you sit in the parking lot of Home Depot nomming on your filets o’fish and he watches you with skeptical eyes, willing your body to accept this food so that you don’t go into a hangry rage inside Home Depot too, you realize that it’s not as warm out as the weathermen said it would be, and you aren’t surprised because it never snowed when they said it would and always snowed when they said it wouldn’t, but you know that when the snow does melt, you’ll be better.  Because every year, it’s true.  It’s never perfect, but it’s always better in the spring (and the summer, and the fall).

Just when the weary soul can’t take much more of the constant reaching and hoping for a glimpse of spring, it comes.

It comes on a ray of sunshine from the east, down the street and to my right it shines its light on the cold pavement, causes the dumpy leftover piles of snow to bleed into the street and pool puddles of mud on the sidewalks.  The trees are bare but still, and from one nearby comes the soft chirping song of a bird.  It isn’t snowing.  The sky isn’t a depressing canvas of gray.  The muddied grass mirrors the weathered and worn soul, but it is green enough that one truth pervades--

spring is coming.

“In those days though, the spring always came finally, but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”*

*A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Snow Glow

It's as if my life has been made up of a whole bunch of different compartments of sh. . .stuff I have to deal with.  Like time was moving me neatly from one compartment to the next, and I dealt with each one the best I could then moved on.

Then I flew across the country, to the side I'd never been to.  The grass was definitely much greener there, the trees taller, the mountains higher (obviously, since we don't exactly have any here), the people nicer, the coffee better, the food tastier, life slower. 

Out of my comfort zone I stretched and reached and dreamed for things I never dared consider from my bubble.  The world was bigger, brighter.  The light shone differently so that things that were once in shadows were now in the light.

Sunday morning sunshine in Portland.

The best thing I brought home was not, in fact, the t-shirt with the pine tree on the front (although that is pretty fantastic) but a new perspective and a renewed mind.  I am so thankful for the opportunity and the experiences I had!

Especially considering the fact that shortly after I arrived home, all of the compartments of stuff I had to deal with decided to collide.

I suppose it's just another side-effect of Adulthood, that the to-do lists only become longer and more detailed, that for every item you check off, three take its place.  Or perhaps it's simply the fact that practically everything in my life has been in the process of changing since this past April when I moved out of my parents house and my dear work friends told me they were moving away, followed by my engagement in May, followed by the decision in June that I would keep my position at work but switch companies, followed by all of the changes and absurdities that go along with keeping your same job but switching companies, management, and teammates in July, followed by painful goodbyes in August, followed by a month of mourning and adjusting in September, followed by my first ever business trip in October, and now here we are, knee-deep in marriage prep and snow, just in time for the holidays.

It's been a busy year, busier than I realized.  And I don't see it slowing down in the near future.  But at least I have a slightly better grasp on my sanity than I did even a week ago.  I'm learning to roll with the punches, to not over-think things too much, to leave work at work, to enjoy the little things about these crazy days of my entrance into Adulthood.

It's so the little things.  Like my car battery dying on my day off instead of on a morning when I had to be at work at 5:45 in the morning.  Like the sun sneaking its light through the crack in my curtains to form a perfectly golden exclamation point on my wall.  Like the ridiculous beauty of this early onset of winter in the Ohio Valley.  

Yes, I think I am just going to surrender everything and let this glorious sunlight melt the cold bitterness in my soul.  

Spiritual Bouquets

A few years ago, I first discovered the website Pray More Novenas.  It was mid-September, and I saw something on Facebook advertising a group of people gathering together spiritually to pray the novena to St. Therese.  The link said that it would e-mail the prayers to those participating so no one would forget to pray.  Convenient, I thought, so I clicked and signed up.

"I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens," St. Therese promised.

I always wanted to believe that she meant that literally.  Every year I pray the famous novena to St. Therese (my patron saint and homegirl) and hope to have a bouquet of roses appear in my room, rather than the usual pack of stinkbugs.  I very rarely actually receive any physical roses in answer to my prayers, but I do receive spiritual bouquets of roses--consolations, graces, assurances that my prayers have been heard and are being answered.

I love especially praying the same novena prayers to the same saint as so many other people.  Pray More Novenas has grown quite a bit in the last few years, and they pray at least one novena a month with over 100,000 people participating.  That's kind of crazy awesome.  I have since met the couple behind the ministry, and they are also awesome.  It's truly comforting to be part of such a huge prayer group.  And it's easy to remember to pray when the prayers are sent to my e-mail (which I, like I'm sure many of you, can receive on my phone).

Coming up on October 19th, we are beginning a novena to St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes and desperate situations. As soon as I heard that this was the next novena, I knew exactly which hopeless cause I would be praying for (don't we all have a "hopeless" cause close to our hearts!) and I was so excited, feeling that the novena itself was an answer to my prayer.

Then I remembered that October 19th is the day that St. Therese's parents, Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin, were beatified 6 years ago, in the year of their 150th wedding anniversary.  This fact has a ridiculous amount of significance for me and my personal intention, so I know that we're already off to a good start!  (If you want to join in this awesome novena, click here!)

Since we're talking about prayer and novenas, and since October is the month of the rosary, I feel the need to share the mother of all novenas that I discovered a few years ago:  it's the 54 day rosary novena.  With 27 days of petition and 27 days of thanksgiving, and each day including a recitation of the rosary along with several special prayers, it is difficult to get through.  I confess that in the handful of times that I have prayed it, I didn't always pray it diligently/prayerfully/perfectly, but the intention was there and I know God heard me.

How do I know God heard me?

I finished praying a 54 day rosary novena for my future husband (which I began on a random day when I felt inspired to) and finished it (conveniently) the day before the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (October 7).  A month later, the man who is now my fiance asked me out on our first date.

The novena takes dedication, but it totally works.  Again, not always in the kind of way where water is turned to wine right before my very eyes, but in such a way that I know God is answering my prayers.  And, every time I have prayed it, I have found myself growing closer to Our Lady, more understanding of myself and my weaknesses, and watching with awe how God works everything out in His own way.

I found the novena here and hand-copied the prayers into a journal my mom gave me (made out of an old copy of my childhood favorite, St. Therese and the Roses by Helen Walker Homan).  But if you aren't as much of a nerd as I am, or if you don't have that kind of time (I did this shortly after I graduated college, when I didn't have a life), you can buy a book with the updated prayers here, at the St. Jude Shop. (Did you catch that reference?  The shop where you can buy the rosary novena booklet is named after the other novena we're talking about here.  If you weren't sure about joining the novena, this is your sign, so sign up here.)

So you get the idea--I like novenas.  And I like sharing novenas, and praying novenas with other people.  But something to keep in mind:  prayer can't be forced.  It shouldn't be a dull recitation of prayers written thousands of years ago.  As St. Therese herself put it:

"For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned towards heaven; it is a cry of recognition and love, embracing both trial and joy."

It's just that simple.

So however you choose to pray, I pray that you are showered with spiritual graces and roses from the heavens!  And if you read this, I would really appreciate it if you'd say a prayer (in whatever form you prefer) for a special intention of mine!  THANKS!

A Yellow Ledbetter Kind of Day

The morning started out foggy, hazy, depressing.  It was hard to keep the eyes open.

Then the clouds shrank to polka dots in a brilliant blue sky.  It was hard to keep working.

The sun began to shine, reflecting off the changing leaves and casting its golden glow over the browning but still green grass.

I kept working, but it seemed nothing was getting accomplished.

I escaped from the madness of my day during lunch and took a seat in my car.  Rolling down the windows, I turned on "Yellow Ledbetter" by Pearl Jam and turned up the volume.  I heard the song live just a week ago, so my connection to it feels deeper somehow.

As the sun warmed my cheeks and the breeze cooled them off, I let the riffs from Mike McCready's guitar and the indecipherable ramblings of Eddie Vedder's soulful voice wash over me:

I said, "I don't, I don't know whether I was the boxer or the bag."

I honestly don't know these days, whether I'm the boxer or the bag.  The harder I fight, the more it feels like life is beating up on me.  I guess that's just part of the process known as "living," and particularly that phase called, "being an adult."

Anyway, I know this music, and I know the beauty of the day.  It's a powerful thing to experience music with the people that make it come alive, and it's a powerful thing to experience beauty with the One who gave you life.  I've gotten to do both of those things this week, so that's something.

But sometimes I have nothing left to give but frustrated tears.  I know deep down, in my heart and soul, that there is more to life than the failures of today.  And I think I just need to pray and listen to this song with the windows down a few more times to let that truth sink in.