Spooky Town

Some people who know me probably think I have a strong sense of self. They know that I’m an introvert or that I like to write or that I like to meditate or that I listen to obscure music. This is probably even more the case with people who have seen my spiritual side and know how important prayer is to me and how much believing in God affects my life.

But I actually don’t have a strong sense of self at all, and it has always been that way. I spent years feeling like a shell of a person, and I still sense an uncomfortable lack of substance to myself a lot of the time. I can remember one of the things that scared me the most as an adolescent was feeling like I wasn’t a real person. I had emotions but no sense of identity. I was so scared of my nothingness that I started a notebook to record everything about myself I could think of that made me a real person. I ended up with a bizarre list…

15. I like rainy days
16. I like lotion that smells like roses
17. I like music on CDs more than live music
18. Cream is my favorite color
19. I write poetry
20. Sundays depress me
21. I sketch faces

…and it went on for a few pages. Every time I realized that I had a like, a dislike or an interest, I wrote it down in the notebook, and if I were feeling especially empty or numb I would look over the entire list to prove my existence to myself. Years later, in an eating disorders group, I would find out it’s common for women with eating disorders to feel hollow or invisible.

My relationship with God has gotten strong enough that I no longer have the fear that I’m not a real person. I know that I’m a unique creation, I know that I have gifts, I know that I have many shortcomings and I know that there is a purpose to my life that I am living out each day. But despite knowing all of this and despite knowing how creative I can be, to me my identity still seems diluted and weak.

I covet personalities and characteristics the way other people covet expensive cars and large diamond rings. Last night was a perfect example. I went to eat dinner at my sister-in-law’s house because she wanted my daughters to see her Spooky Town collection. My sister-in-law (whom I shall name Maxine. Will this name work, Maxine? If not, I advise you to leave a comment suggesting a new alias) had a table covered with Spooky Town houses, skeletons, pumpkins, tombstones and even pebbles for landscaping. It was one of the best Halloween decorations I’ve ever seen, and my daughters were enchanted by it.

The decorations triggered a longing in me. I wanted Spooky Town to be mine, but more than that, I wanted to be the person who decided to collect the pieces instead of being the person who walked past the display in the craft store. I wanted to be the one with the good idea. It wasn’t the thing that mattered, but the desire for it. In spite of how needy I am, it’s hard for me to want things.

So I look at other people and see the things they do that make them real. Then I want to be the person who majors in geography, gets French manicures, uses a crockpot, enrolls my children in art class, paints bird houses, makes pesto, donates to charities online, buys my jewelry from consignment stores or uses monogrammed stationery. I don’t care about any of it; I just want to care.

I threw a friendly challenge out to God this morning and asked him if he wanted to say something about this in my morning Bible reading. I’m going through the New Testament again in order, so I wasn’t going to flip through pages randomly. There would either be a message for me in 2 Corinthians 5 or there wouldn’t. I had to smile when I read today’s passage, especially verses 16-17

Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

So often I try to recognize myself according to the flesh. I look at my possessions, my education, my schedule, my hobbies, my habits and try to convince myself that I matter as much as the people around me. But these are the “old things.” I am a new creature.

Today I can choose to recognize myself according to the spirit. My decision to become Catholic, my belief in God, my thoughts about Mary, my prayers, my spiritual journal and the miracles I’ve witnessed were all given directly to me as part of my spiritual life. I don’t ever worry that I’m pretending to believe in God or that I only believe in God because I saw someone else do it first. When I speak to God I don’t worry that there’s no meaning behind my words. When I am with God in silence, I don’t worry about whether I’m a person who matters; instead, I am ready to lose myself.

Spooky Town is still calling to me. Christmas decorations will call to me. Someone’s coffee mug or Mary Janes or book club will call to me. I will always feel that huge hole inside of me, that need to fill it up by buying the things the Joneses buy and doing the things the Joneses do. Thankfully, the hole inside of my soul is bigger, and my need for God grows larger each day.

Different Angles

I was in the grocery store last night and had to ask if my feelings were real. In the morning I had met a meek and pleasant man with Lou Gehrig’s disease who wants to start volunteering frequently for the charity I work for. I was saddened to know that he is terminally ill, and I admired him so much for wanting to use the time he has left to help others. That night, I saw him at a closed AA meeting and found out that he had recognized me as a member of the program when he had spoken with me at my job earlier in the day.

So now I have nice new friend, I am going to be seeing him a lot at work, we have a bond since we are both in AA and he has a progressive, fatal disease. As I left the meeting and felt more sadness come upon me, it was so strong that it felt like an assault.

I stopped by my church and prayed for him at Adoration. I prayed in front of the statues of Jesus and Mary in the sanctuary and asked them to please take care of him. I lit a candle for him and said more prayers. And in the grocery store, as I kept thinking of his tragedy while I was trying to shop, I wanted to cry out in pain.

Since I know so much about my chronic self-centeredness and my histrionics, I felt I had to examine myself. Was I making someone else’s sad story about myself? Was I using his situation to act dramatic? Was the attack of pain I was feeling real?

The answer was simple and silent. Yes, it was real. Earlier that day I had talked about people behind their backs. I had told a lie. I had been harsh with my 7 year old and out of anger had tried to hurt her with my words. For a lot of the day, I had been expressing my worst character defects. But the pain I felt for my new friend was real. My compassion was pure, without ulterior motives. I hurt for him.

I walked to my car in a strong wind, seeing lightning flash around me in the night sky. I felt anchored in the now, and I felt whole. In one day I had seen some of the worst I bring to God and to the world and also experienced the best I bring to God and to the world. Selfishness interspersed with concern outside of myself, meanness interspersed with love for my neighbor, ego interspersed with reliance on God. The wind seemed to come at me from multiple angles just as my emotions hit me at different angles. “This is who you are,” I thought, “This is who you really are.”

For where your treasure is...

Matthew 6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.


Over the past several years, I have cringed when I read this Bible verse. I have always come away from it condemning myself for loving money more than God and feeling guilty.

Today I was having a very hectic morning full of kid-induced drama (infected mosquito bites, lost book bags, lost saddle oxfords, lost ballet shoes, undone homework, etc.), and I started to run so late that my own pre-work routine fell apart. I was angry, and after an hour of muttering and stomping, I knew that my day was getting worse and worse.

I finished up gathering my things in the silent house (only silent because I was running so late that the rest of the family was gone), and I quieted myself inside and out. I decided that I was powerless over all of the trouble I had already had but that I could choose not to let it ruin my entire day. Then Matthew 6:21 came softly into my head. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This time, I didn’t judge myself harshly with it. It came into my mind and showed me a positive truth about myself.

Do I want more money? Yes. Do I get jealous of people’s appearances and material possessions? Yes. But I was surprised this morning when I saw that my treasure is really my peace of mind and my reliance on God. That is what I seek, value and safeguard above all else. And that is where my heart is and where I direct my energy. When I pray today for God’s will to be done concerning my family’s finances, his will is truly what I want, no matter what that looks like.

God’s will is my treasure, my relationship with him is my treasure and there my heart is also. I am amazed to be typing this after how strongly I felt for years that God had abandoned me. I think that’s what Jesus wants for all of us…for us to be amazed by him.

Casual Happiness

One of my coworkers has a laugh that makes me happy. It’s throaty and really, really loud. And she reserves it for the times that something is truly hilarious or remarkable, so when I hear it, I know something good is going on.

I heard her laugh a moment ago in the office around the corner as she gave a computer training to someone. “HA HA HA HA HA!” At first I smiled to myself, thinking about how much her laugh boosts my spirits, but then my face fell. Something tugged at me; something was wrong. I got quiet for a moment, and then I realized what was going on.

Earlier this afternoon I had taken a phone call from someone who was desperate. If you’ve ever been desperate (as opposed to “sad” or even “devastated”), you know that you can detect that feeling in the voice of another person. No matter how hard they try to sound smooth and composed, you can hear that they are barely holding themselves together. You can hear that they have almost exhausted all of their resources and that they have hardly any remaining hope. I spoke two times today to this desperate person, and although I don’t know her, I prayed for her each time after we got off the phone.

When I heard my coworker laugh, I thought about the caller with the seemingly insurmountable problems, and I remembered how bad it feels to hear laughter and gaiety when your world is crumbling. It slices through you. The contrast between other people’s casual happiness and your misery is unbearable. It’s a lonely feeling. At that moment you realize that you have nothing in common with people living normal lives, even people who think they’re unhappy. You have nothing in common with people who can complain about doing annoying tasks like picking up dry cleaning or going to the vet, people who have so little going on that they can spend several minutes thinking about the rudeness of a drugstore clerk or how much they couldn’t stand a kid that was in 5th grade with them. You feel so disconnected from the world you see going on around you that it might as well be on a movie screen.

I am radiant with gratitude right now. I am concerned for the lady I spoke with on the phone, and I almost feeling like jumping up and down because my life is better than that today, and I know it. I am living a normal life today. I can pay the bills I have today. My children are healthy today. I’m healthy today. If a cashier glares at me, I won’t be so depressed that I don’t care. I’ll be annoyed for a second. If I get an ecstatic call from a friend telling me she’s pregnant, I won’t go lie on my bed and cry. I’ll be able to tell her I’m happy and mean it. I’m in a place today where I can be bothered by things that are bothersome, where I can rejoice over events that are good and where I put off doing tasks that are unpleasant. There are appropriate reactions for everything I’m dealing with right now. There is no apathy, there is no terror, there is no mournfulness. I smile at someone else’s belly laugh; I don’t wince.

God has delivered me to normalcy. I feel like soaking up every bit of ordinary life that I can today.

The Money Prayers

I prayed a few weeks ago to give God control of my family’s finances and to let him help me make wiser decisions about spending money. I remembered a time when I tracked every dollar that we spent and had the good feeling of knowing I was being financially responsible, and a few weeks ago I believed that God could help me to be that way again.

The bad financial news I received last week hit me hard and triggered a lot of fear about the future. As I mentioned in my post this weekend, I prayed, but I did not try to figure out how to feel better. I surrendered to my fear and took it to God over and over again. By the time the weekend was over, I was not feeling as frightened as I had been on Friday night.

This morning I woke up feeling very scared about money, though, and when I opened up to my Al-Anon sponsor about it on the phone, it nearly turned into a full-blown panic attack. She was asking me questions about how I was going to deal with the problem long term, and I knew I couldn’t handle the discussion…at least not while I was at my job. I told her that all I feel like I can really do right now is try to have the courage to look at my expenses every day, cut unnecessary spending in a way that doesn’t feel severe (like stop eating out at restaurants but hold off on getting rid of cable) and pray for God to help me make good decisions. My sponsor said that it sounds like I’m going to strive for better financial health one day at a time (I could hug her for putting it that way).

So here are my ideas for ways to walk with God for financial success in the short term.

1. Pray each day to be a good steward of the gifts God has given me and for God’s will to be done for our family financially.

2. Pray to St. Germaine Cousin (beautiful saint who lived a life of impoverishment and abuse) and ask for her intercession so that God may guide my spending and work his will for my family’s financial future.

3. Pray each day for the courage to look at our expenses (and then go look at them).

4. Congratulate myself and thank God for each small success or behavior change.

And now, instead of just writing all of this in my blog, I’m off to practice it. If you walk with God in your financial life, please leave a comment and share what works for you.

If There Is Any Way

I got a phone call last night from someone who was in agony. His spouse's depression, isolation and sideways rage are almost more than he can handle. He feels unqualified to monitor her depression and is scared for her sake, while he himself is having to deal with the loss of the happy marriage they had just months ago. I listened to him for an hour, told him to look at all of his options, invited him to an Al-Anon meeting and let him know I was praying for him and wished both of them the best. My response was inadequate given the gravity of the situation, but I knew there was nothing more I could do at that moment.

I took a shower before bed and cried through it. I was in a daze watching television. I woke up this morning, and my stomach felt clutched by the sadness of what they're going through. One of the reasons I hurt so much for them is that they do not have faith in God, and I don't think they have any form of spirituality at all. I don't know how God is going to help them when the idea of God is something that they reject. And I don't know how people without faith make it through the hard parts of living since that is the only reason I feel like I've made it this far.

I've prayed for this couple many times over the past year, and I don't know how many times I've prayed for them in the last 18 hours. Many, many times. They don't seem like wasted prayers, but they seem futile. I feel like I'm reaching deep into a bathroom cabinet and am only pulling out expired medicine. I pray, but Jesus knows that I don't really have any hope.

Last week at a work retreat I did a guided meditation where we tried to discover what we think God sees when he looks at us. In my meditation I saw God looking at me and seeing how much love I have for other people and how much I ache and grieve for them. When I got the image of God reading my heart and seeing the concern I have for people who are hurting, not only did I feel loved by him, but I felt like I was seeing the real me. I feel so selfish, bad and mean most of the time that I cried tears of joy thinking that God might treasure the kind of love that I bring to the world.

And now I have this October day where I am called to give this couple to Jesus. It almost seems like an insult to them to try to help them by praying for them when they don't believe in him. But besides being on standby with empathy and a willingness to listen, there is nothing else I can do. So I pray to Jesus, Mary, St. Monica (patron saint of troubled marriages), and I think I'll be talking to St. Dymphna and their guardian angels, too. I am not quietly comforted by this; my inner refrain is still "This is so messed up."

Dear Jesus, today please take special care of people who are in pain but don't know you. If there is any way that you can help, please do it. Amen.

Bottom of the Boat

A friend of mine calls it the "gerbil wheel." I have compared it to a fish wildly flopping on the floor of a boat. Another person I knows refers to the phenomenon as "attack thoughts."

What we're all describing is when we feel assaulted by fear, and thinking about the problem causes other negative emotions (e.g., self-loathing, guilt, shame, new fear) to start coming at us at lightning speed from other angles. It doesn't seem fair. We think about the problem in our life because we want relief, we want to be sure that it's as bad as we think it is, and several minutes later we have had so many new horrible thoughts that we feel worse. If you ever see me with my head bowed and my fingers in my hair clutching the top of my head, you can assume that I'm overwhelmed by fear.

For years I tried positive thinking to overcome both my painful emotions and hard situations themselves. I would do my best to ignore my fear and think about God's love for me instead. For several years in a row I had incredible results with this approach. I remember talking to my husband in our kitchen and sounding jubilant. "I get it now. I mean I really, really get it." I believed that I knew the spiritual laws of the universe and that I'd rounded a corner and would not have to suffer again.

I don't believe in jinxes, but oddly, after I said that, I seemingly started to fail at positive thinking for several years. God did many incredible things for me during this period, but two grave problems got increasingly worse, and I believed they had the power to destroy my family and ruin my life. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, I took the approach I usually do: "I will work harder." I prayed more. I read every spiritual book I could to make sure that I was not overlooking the tool that would turn my life around. I obsessed about my prayers, trying to make sure that I was using the verbs and phrases that would allow me to access God's compassion and gain his help. I always thought that I was very close to the solution but that God was waiting on me to do something right, and that I had just not figured it out yet. I asked God to guide me. Silence. I spent a lot of time in my pose (head bowed, hands in hair).

At the end of these years where life got harder and harder, I ended up on my front porch. I went out there every night to cry. Not only had I collapsed emotionally from the stress of my husband's illness, his inability to work and the financial stress associated with that, but lately I was unable to sleep, I was hyperventilating during the day, I was having esophageal and throat spasms that I thought signaled cancer, my extremities would spontaneously twitch and tremble and I was losing weight rapidly although I had stopped dieting. I knew I had broken down emotionally, and now my body was breaking down. I never knew how I would get through each day during that period, and by nightfall, once I had struggled through the day and completed it, I cried on the porch.

"You've given me a $hitty life, God," I said one night with tears streaming down my face, "and I hate you for it." That was the first uncalculated prayer I had said in a long time. I wasn't trying to utter the words that would compel God to help me. I was convinced that he was content to see me suffer, so I felt free to be completely truthful. The physical problems I was having felt like God had slapped me in the face. He had seen how hard I had tried to overcome the hard parts of my life, he had heard me begging him to make things better and now he was allowing me to have such a severe physical reaction to stress that simple things like microwaving oatmeal and making 10 minute grocery store trips seemed mountainous. I didn't know how much longer I could survive, especially since he had decided not to help me. So I hated him.

And the help came pouring in. It came in the form of kind, compassionate people sprinkled throughout my life and in a series of events that gave me more and more hope. I was helped by a loving, concerned physician. I returned to AA. I returned to the Catholic church. I wandered into a Catholic bookstore and found two books that changed my life. I told God that I was letting go and meant it. He was not silent anymore. He gave me continual affirmations that I was on the right path and that I was being carried by him. The multiple holes in my faith were filled by the pure love of family, old friends and new friends who linked me to God. Life was too much, it was too painful to bear, but I was not alone anymore. The reality of my life became the love that was present all around me.

Last night some recent financial happenings triggered the gerbil wheel, the flopping fish, the attack thoughts. Our financial future seemed bleak, and as I turned it over in my head, it went from looking worrisome to looking extremely bad. I started hating myself for certain decisions I've made, and I felt shame that told me that I'll always be such a bad person that I'll be beyond God's help. As I type this, I'm still flopping frantically on the boat, wanting to grab hold of the spiritual idea that will deliver me from my fear.

Enough with the struggling. Enough with straining toward grace and trying to get away from fear. Today I submit to fear. As soon as I feel myself panicking and trying to push the feeling away, I will relax back into the fear and let myself live in it in the moment that it surfaces. I will not be alone. The times I have felt God the most powerfully have been the slow minutes that I have entered into my pain and realized, "O God, even here, you are with me."

I welcome your prayers and will post an update later on my submission to fear. Please leave a comment and tell me about anything you're grappling with right now.

Soul Gripping

I work at a charity in a poor urban community. I'd whittled my to-do list down so much yesterday that I decided to work on a mail campaign alongside our volunteers. I like being around our volunteers because most of them are elderly, and they help me to daydream about the person I want to become. I want to believe that even if I were wealthy I would think about people who don't have enough, or that even if I were a widow, I would want to spend some of my time helping others. The volunteers help me to imagine being a financially secure and loving person, and it's hard for me to imagine myself as anything better.

Yesterday morning I was working with one of my favorite volunteers named Betsy, who's smart-alecky and has a story about everyone in the city. Elaine was also with us. I had never actually spoken with her before; she has a soft voice and looked polished but was casually dressed. I was having a pleasant time stuffing envelopes with Betsy and Elaine and listening to them talk about "nickel Cokes" and dating during World War II.

Within an hour, I was trying to keep the two of them from seeing that I was crying. I found out through their conversation that Elaine had had a son with Down's syndrome, and he had been a sweet, happy adult who had proudly volunteered at our charity. Elaine talked about how much he enjoyed his volunteer work and then smiled a little and quietly said, "I prayed and prayed that I would outlive him, and God answered my prayers."

I cannot comprehend loving one of my children so much that I wanted to go through her death so that I could always make sure she was taken care of. But at the same time, I do understand it, and that's why I started to cry. I didn't cry because I pitied Elaine; she didn't seem unhappy. I cried because the love that emanated from her made something resonate in me, and it hurt.

In the spiritual place I have been brought to, love, pain and death exist together. Loving deeply makes me so vulnerable that pain is unavoidable, and death is the only way through the pain. The death of dreams, the death of insistence, the death of self. And somehow the death of Jesus on the cross completes everything. I could barely type the last sentence because I have absolutely no understanding of it. It's something that I believe, but it's not something I can speak about. I've had only the faintest glimpses of what Jesus has really given me, and they've been fleeting. There have been a few moments where I was aware of my life and it's circumstances, but I became more aware of the love of God.

So I cried at the mail table at work yesterday. The part of me that has seen glimpses of God does not emerge very often. But it will burst forth in certain situations, such as after talking to someone and realizing that God wants my prayers for them, or listening to someone and realizing that she knows the same God that I have known. Then that part of me that is buried deeply, that exists in the innermost layer, becomes for a moment my entire existence. If I'm alone I can cry and gasp and thank God for showing himself to me again. If I'm around other people, I blink back tears and try to act like I don't feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Betsy and Elaine were looking at their stamps and envelopes the entire time they talked; I don't think they noticed.

Do you have people in your life or have you met anyone whose words grip your soul? Have you ever felt like you couldn't talk about God as he really is in your life and then met someone that you thought would understand? I would love to read your comments.

Pet Peeves

Jesus wants a relationship with me, right? The relationship frustrates me. It doesn’t feel like the way a relationship with a living, perfect being should feel. Sometimes after our interactions I find myself angered, bitter, frightened or in pain.

Is there anything about God that frustrates you? I decided to come up with a list of what bothers me and share it with you.

God’s timetable
Help has always come. I’ll repeat that statement. Help has always come. But there have been a lot of times that help seemed like it didn’t come in time. Those periods of my life have been very hard. After the last time in my life where it seemed God was never going to come to my rescue, I ended up with weight loss and arrhythmia from the stress. He saved the day, but I truly felt like I almost didn’t make it. I don’t understand why sometimes his help is instantaneous and at other times it’s on the other side of drawn-out agony.

God’s silence
Just recently I prayed about whether or not I should apply for a different position at my organization, and God seemed to drive home the idea that he wanted me to keep working in my current capacity. Every day I became more and more convinced that I was in a niche that allowed me to do fulfilling work while developing new skills, and I finally had such an overwhelming feeling that God had answered me that I never started on the paperwork to apply for the other job.

There have been other times, though, that I have asked God questions and heard nothing. During one hard situation, I went years without knowing what God wanted me to do. Although I could sense him in my life helping me in other areas, with that one problem it seemed like I never got any guidance from him.

God’s idea of best
I don’t see much of a point in believing in God and trying to have a connection with him if he’s not the ultimate source of love and he doesn’t always do what’s best for us. The problem that I have, though, is that what God thinks is best has sometimes been immensely painful for me. I have never attempted suicide or wanted to commit suicide, but I can think of three times that life seemed so unbearable I wanted to die. There were two times I wanted to be struck dead in a traffic accident (with the other driver coming away unharmed, of course), and there was one time that I fantasized about returning to severe dieting and having a heart attack. To want death is to find life so hard that you give up hope, but somehow while this was going on, I was receiving what was best for me. It’s something I can’t understand.

God’s kindness to my enemies
This is the most embarrassing one to list. I love the idea of God forgiving me for everything I do and loving me in spite of it, but when I see people living well who seem mean or oppressive, it horrifies me. I become outraged that I love God and try to be loving to other people, but God allows people who are hostile or nasty to have more comfortable lives than I do. Some people say that everyone gets their own dose of heartbreak and sadness in life. I don’t believe that. I believe that some people who are not as loving as I am have much easier lives. I get angry with God because I don’t think they deserve it, and I think he should have blessed the "good guys" more. I know how flawed my thinking is here, hence my embarrassment.

So there you have it. You have seen my list of problems I have with God, and I probably could have come up with more. I don’t think any of those feelings should be in my head, but on the other hand, maybe the fact that I have some complaints about the way God works means I have a real relationship with him. What I got out of reading the Nicole Gausseron diary series (my favorite three books ever) was that Jesus wants a relationship with us more than anything else. I hope her diary was right.

What frustrates you about the way God works in your life? Do you talk to him about it? Have you always had the same issues or have things changed over time? I’d love to hear from you.

Spiritual Envy

I have an emptiness that tugs at me, even when I’m not worried about money or a family member or if one of my daughters is getting her feelings hurt at school. It’s spiritually based, and yet the feeling isn’t spiritual at all. The uncomfortable emptiness is envy. I’m very familiar with envy and frequently find myself envying random people for their larger houses or toned upper arms or lives as stay-at-home mothers. Frequently when I’m in this state of my mind I can catch myself, realize that jealousy has no payoff and think about something else.

But the spiritual envy is hard to shake off. It’s easy for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having 1000 more square feet of house, but it’s almost impossible for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having a stronger spiritual center. Of course I’d be more content and more useful if my relationship with God were stronger. Of course I’d help more people find faith if I had more faith. It makes sense for me to have what I want spiritually…but I don’t have it.

I want to be like my friend Kristen, who is the most positive person I’ve ever known. She thinks about love, talks about love and wears clothes and jewelry that remind her of love. If I had seen her huge pink faux gemstone ring in a store I would have flinched, but on her it’s just part of the entire “love package” she sends out to the world each day. I want to be like Alexis who loves her church, has her deepest friendships through her church and doesn’t talk about Christianity unless you bring it up. But then she speaks about it quietly and steadily, and you know that it’s the foundation of her peaceful, mother-of-three-boys existence. I want to be like Courtney, who is a born again Christian and always talks about Christ and always brings up her beliefs. I want to be like Mary, who is either muttering or smiling and cracking jokes – until you start to talk about God. Then she becomes sober and intense and tells you the hard truths: that for her there is no life without dependence on God, that her beliefs about herself and her place in life create her future and that she struggles every day to find gratitude and claim it as her reality.

The people I have just written about have real faith that directs their lives. As I go about my life, God is the most important thing in it, and yet I feel like I’m just pretending to have a relationship with him. That is where my spiritual envy comes from. I look at the spirituality of others, and it seems authentic. I look at mine, and it seems forced.

At the same time, I have had spiritual experiences so amazing that when I put them into words, they read like fantasy. But they were real, and each one was so overwhelming it seemed to suffocate me at the time. When I’m feeling jealous of other people and the way their love for God is expressed, it helps to remember that he has chosen me to witness some spectacular works. It helps, but the emptiness doesn’t go away.

I have started this blog for a very simple reason: I want to talk about God. My hope is that this blog will become service work just as my prayers for others are service work. My hope is that becoming even more engrossed in my spiritual life will take away the feeling that my relationship with him is not enough, and the feeling that if I really loved him and lived for him that my life would look like something else. My hope is that I attract readers and that he reveals ways for me to express my faith in ways I had never thought of.

For everyone reading this, thank you for coming, and I pray that you will come back often, with all of us stronger in our faith.

Living in the Present...Maybe

I don’t think anyone would say that staying in the present is a bad thing as far as our emotional health goes. Jesus said to, twelve step groups say to, self-help authors say to. But when dark thoughts come, is it always helpful to try to stay in the present? For me the answer is no. There are situations where trying to stay in the present is very useful to me. If I’m feeling regretful about the past, if I’m angry with people for things I think they’re going to do in the future or if I’m feeling bitter because I long for more material things and don’t think I’ll end up getting them, then realizing that I’m dealing only with this single moment can quickly ease a lot of that discomfort.

There are other times, though, when I’m emotionally troubled and trying to stay in the present seems to aggravate the situation. I am filled with panic or dread about something that could happen in the future, and I try to make myself understand that I can only experience today. For example, I can be at peace because the medical claim isn’t being denied today… I can be at peace because my daughter has not been diagnosed with a disease today… I can be at peace because I can pay my bills today...It’s true and it makes sense, but the fear may be so awful that it keeps popping back into my mind. I’ll frantically keep trying to correct my thoughts. I’ll try to use will power to keep my mind focused on the present so that I will feel okay, but it doesn’t work.

And that’s where the problem lies. If I’m extremely worried about something of a grave nature, I am not okay. In that situation, I am a person filled with fear, and it’s not okay for me to feel like that. Bringing myself back to the present helps when I know better than to feed the thoughts I’m having, but what if I don’t know better? What if I knew I would die tomorrow? Could I be okay with it by focusing on this moment, feeling the keys clicking underneath my fingers, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and smelling roasted potatoes in the kitchen? I don’t think so. I think I would be filled with worry about the emotional and financial impact on my children, and I don’t think I could chase the feeling off by recognizing that it had not occurred yet.

I’m an intelligent person. If I can think my way out of distress, I probably will. If I can’t think my way out of it, it doesn’t mean that I need to try harder. It means that I’m having a harsh encounter with my makeup, my humanness. The only thing that can help me is to realize that I cannot help myself, no matter how much I want to be able to. Trying to play mind games with myself to escape from fear delays my taking the problems that overwhelm me to God. God empowers me to deal with things that bother me, but the things that terrify me are his domain, not mine. I am not supposed to handle those matters myself any more than my seven year old is supposed to sew stitches in her forehead.

What about asking for God’s help to live in the present? Wouldn’t that be following the advice given in books and taking the problem to God? Yes, but what may be more important is that I am trying to beat the system and think of the angle that will make things okay. God is not going to make me earn his help through my own cleverness. He’s going to help me through my fear because I ask him and he loves me. I can ask God for anything I want, but if I put pressure on myself to appeal to him in the right way, then I’m trying to solve the problem myself. In AA we sometimes talk of the most powerful prayer that we ever prayed, the one we prayed before we ended up in our first meetings, the one that changed our lives. Although the settings and circumstances were different for us all when we prayed that prayer, we’re in complete agreement on what the words were. “Help me.”

The Cross of Clouds

For a while now, I have been a spiritual person. Not a good person, maybe, but a spiritual one. By "spiritual person" I mean that when I wake up I know that a God that I have interacted with before still exists, and throughout the entire day, that is my truth. I may say a lot of prayers and try to resist gossiping. I may act hateful to my husband. I may cry off and on all day because it's rainy outside and I call lots of people on the phone trying to reach out to someone and get a voicemail every time. But no matter what, when I go to sleep, I still know that God is real and that we have a connection. It's like how I know I'm a mother of two daughters even when I'm away from them for 8 hours at work. Believing in God is the part of my identity that reaches down into all of my layers. It's there all of the time, sometimes helping me in hard situations, and sometimes, when I'm showing the most vicious parts of my personality, seeming to be barely more than irony.

Part of my life as a spiritual person is just keeping my eyes open and noticing when God has a message for me. I think that the most common way God speaks to my heart is sending me people to pray for. Sometimes they are family members, sometimes they are friends, sometimes I read about them online and sometimes they are strangers I see. When I feel a pang of concern for someone, I believe that God is asking me to pray for their needs.

Every now and then, though, God speaks to me in special ways. I read an essay where a Catholic educator called those instances "postcards" from God. I'll be writing much more about remarkable interactions in future blog entries. But for now, I will explain the one that happened this summer, the one that gave me the name for my blog.

I was vacationing in Hot Springs, and I was troubled. I sensed anger in my husband, a rising anger that he was obviously trying to stifle. I didn't know what caused it or how I would deal with it, but I was grateful that we were both trying to smile and laugh so that our daughters would have a fun trip. One afternoon we were leaving the beautiful wooded setting of the science museum, and when we came out from underneath the trees, I saw right before me in the sky a perfect cross in the clouds hanging below the formless ones.

The cross looked like two simple beams of wood, and there was a small horizontal cloud beneath it, to provide the "ground" and complete the picture. When I saw it, I knew God had put it there for me. I showed my husband and children and did not think about photographing it until we were already driving off, which breaks my heart. Throughout the rest of the vacation, I thought about the cross and wondered why God had given that gift to me. What did he want to tell me? That he loved me? That he was smiling on our family? That things had been hard but would be all right now?

Back at home, I wrote in my prayer journal and sketched the cross as I remembered it. Two days after our return, I faced separating from my husband and embarked on one of the most painful weeks of my life. In prayer one night I reached a point where I was willing to give up anything God asked me to - my house, my security, my family life, anything. I will be writing much more about that night in future entries. As the horrible days passed and I emerged from my crisis intact and feeling powered by God, I thought about the cross in the clouds. I realized why God had given me that: I was going to need to be strong. He knew that the only way I could survive the days ahead was to get all of my strength from him, and he gave me a cross of clouds to remind me that he's not just an idea in my head. He is as real as the earth underneath me, the sky above me and the air that fills my lungs. He gave me a cross of clouds to say, "I'm always here. Don't forget that."