grief

Persevering When Your Knees are Tired

Our small tribe has been touched again by the death of a very loved young person. And, once again, we arrive to a new day with more questions than answers.

I don’t know about you, but my mind would like to go to the easy place of throwing in the towel.

It might just be so much easier to hit the snooze button rather than wake up and join Jesus for tea/coffee. It would be momentarily more pleasant to let loose with a stream of expletives in the comfort of my car when the next terrible driver follows me too closely or cuts me off, feeding my anger rather than praying for the safety of all on the road. It would be more fun to go for a mimosa brunch, rather than sit between the squirmy toddler and stinky older person in Mass. It would be just a little bit too easy to drift away from the practices that I know tether me (which at times feels loosely) to Jesus.

When All You Feel is Stuck

My feelings are running deep these days.

Not sure about you, but it seems like every where I turn I hear some sort of mediocre and even bad news. Maybe you are in the same spot— a few too many hard moments and far too few joy filled hours.

So, thinking that I will feel better if I could distract myself, I turn to Face Book and see a long stream of other people’s good news. While I am glad to to see the joy and hopeful expectation on the young faces who are going to their first prom, the excitement of new drivers, the freshness of new babies and all of the college announcements, there is a lingering feeling of being left behind in some way.

Settled somewhere in the in between is a strange place to be.

Standing at the Foot of the Cross

A few years ago, I wrote about Mary’s experience of Good Friday in The Spirit of Mary. We often think of Mary as she was depicted in the beautiful sculpture, The Pieta, sitting on the ground cradling her Son’s beaten, bruised, and broken human body. But, pondering Scripture, I was particularly struck by John’s depiction of the most beautiful and awful scene of our Savior’s death. Mary was standing by the cross along with other women and John. (John 19:25). She stands with her people, gaining strength from Her Son. Her silent witness, her presence in the face of unspeakable horror, is an example to each of us in how to face whatever suffering we carry today.

If you need a few words to figure out how to face the day- look to Mary’s example in this excerpt:

Mary reveals how to face suffering with strength.

Exhaling Grief

Exhaling Grief

Pollen is just about everywhere I look these days and so is grief. It seems that no matter where I turn, everything is layered with a fine yellow coating. It is on every car, the sidewalks, in the lake water. As I look out over the water to a stand of trees, one of them seemed to exhale a cloud of pollen just the other day. The yellow plume hung in the air and seemed to settle slowly, ever so slowly, down to the earth.

Many around me, myself included, are exhaling grief. It bubbles up in the most unlikely of places. In so many conversations, grief and sadness hover at or just below the surface. It wasn’t until the trifecta of tragedy struck close to home that I began to pay attention to the voice of grief and recognize how many of us are walking with her.

When Life Delivers More Questions Than Answers

When Life Delivers More Questions Than Answers

I held it together pretty well until the recessional song.

Sitting in Mass, I did my darnedest to pray for the mothers who were grieving for their girls. One laid to rest after she suffered a horrible death at the hands of a man she thought was an Uber driver and another clinging to life in a burn unit. And Caroline, the child of one of our sisters in the Faith Moves Mountains Community, a 20-year-old whose life was cut short after an accident over the weekend.