My poor roommate.

I played a song for my dorm-mate, and we've both had it stuck in our heads the last couple days. Sorry Kara...but its sooo good!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3HwFtdVTfM
Crazy Girl-Eli Young Band.

So, 10 reasons I love this song:
1) Of course, its a sappy-sweet love song that my womanly heart can't get enough of! **sigh**
2) I've never listened to Eli Young Band before, but I really like the singer's voice.
3) The video's funny. Totally goes with the play on words.
4) Part of #3. It's a play on words... "Crazy girl, don't ya know that I love you?....I love you like crazy, girl..." I love puns. :)
5) "Before you ever came along, I was living life all wrong. The smartest thing I ever did was make you all mine." I like songs that value women; those songs that say how precious a woman really is to the heart of a man. :)
6) It's original. The play on words really puts a playful tone to the lyrics, even though its sound is more like that of your typical lovey-dovey country song.
7) "We're gonna have a fight or two...I wouldn't dream of goin' nowhere." This song speaks of fidelity, an attractive (necessary) quality in a romantic relationship.
8) My absolute favorite line: "Silly woman, come here, let me hold you." If I were ever upset and in tears, I would simultaneously laugh, feel better, and my heart would melt a little (Ok, a lot) if someone said this to me.
9) I had a conversation with someone about this song. He didn't like the line I listed above because it seemed like calling a woman "silly" was disrespectful. Though I understand his meaning, it just makes me like the playful tone of the song all the more. And it showed me how awesome the guy really is. :)
10) When I sing the refrain to myself, I imagine God singing it to me...and this already awesome song is made like, 102848303 times better. :)

PS-I'm so glad to be home for the summer. I can hardly believe its here...what do I do with this? Lead me, Lord.
May our Lord lead you to good music and another blessed summer! Grace to you, and peace.

Drat.

Well, its 3:24 a.m. at the moment...I have had some whopper-esque ideas for blog posts since Easter. About the third Sorrowful mystery. That one's a doozy. Or about having my heart romantically pursued by God. I'm feeling swooned as I think about it...but all I can focus on is this stupid zit. In the most obscure place on my face...right next to my lip. Normally, I save weird acne placement for super-stressed, very hormonal times. But after this fabulous dead day before finals, I am definitely not stressed. Blegh. Acne. Can I get a Amen?
Obviously, I could be doing more normal things at this hour instead of obsessing over my face...like sleeping, (which might restore my hormone balance a bit). But, like the silly human I am, I choose to (attempt to) debate with God instead. You see, He and I are going around and around again on this thing called beauty. The world will tell me, in VERY uncertain terms, the same thing John Eldredge says in his book Captivating: "The essence of a woman is Beauty...Beauty is what the world longs to experience from a woman..."

Well, crap, God. Thanks a lot. By definition, I am a failure at life because of this stupid zit.
Buuuuttttt, God nudges me to keep reading.
"'Beauty captivates the senses in order to obtain permission to pass straight through to the soul...'"
Ok, soo...?
Keep reading.
"'The soul's inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it.'"
Ok, God, but you're forgetting the part about the zit on my face. I'm not-
Keep reading.
**sigh**
"A woman in her glory, a woman of beauty, is a woman who is not striving to become beautiful or worthy or enough. She knows in her quiet center where God dwells that He finds her beautiful, has deemed her worthy, and in Him, she is enough." 
Ahhh, yes, well....

And so it goes. God sees the acne-covered, overweight, greasy-haired, smelly-footed people we sometimes are, and He loves every bit of us. He sees the prideful, pathetic, broken, infuriating people we sometimes are, and He loves every bit of us. The beautiful messes He created are the tools He's using to build His kingdom. They (we) are the mirrors with which other people see Him, and all His beauty and glory. Now isn't that something? I'm feeling prettier already.
Do you believe you're beautiful? Or are you focused on your odd acne placement? If you can't get away from your mirror, maybe take a long look at the mirror inside God's heart. He'll show you how beautiful, how captivating you really are.
Grace to you, and peace.

Lent thus far

Hmmm...so I kinda cringed when I looked back on this Lent. Though I would say that I did grow spiritually, it was in ways that I didn't expect (isn't that about par for the course?) And I did not hold myself to my Lenten fasts and lofty goals for personal prayer like I had hoped. I definitely realize the cost that came with my laziness. However, I am trying to look at it in a new light: I am trying to not focus on keeping God's Law on the outside like the Pharisees, but what is really more important-keeping God's Law and Love in my heart, and trying to accept and embrace it more. Here's a short conversation He and I had this afternoon...

Me: I realize I didn't keep to any of my resolutions for Lent this year.

God: I know that, dear. You still have much to learn about devotion, and discipline. So many more graces will be yours when this happens. But I have still managed to work in you during this season haven't I?

Me: Yes, Lord. I learned at least a little bit more about offering wheat and sacrifice. But it's so humbling, Lord. And very very hard. I know that I am weak. But I always wish I could suffer joyfully, like the Saints. Will You grant me the grace to do so?

God: Of course, My dear. But think about what you are asking of Me. By asking for the grace to suffer joyfully,  you also ask for such an opportunity to suffer, so that I may pour that grace upon you. Don't lose heart when this opportunity arrives. The first step to suffering joyfully is to realize that I Am the One allowing it. I also Am the One who sees you through it.

**Insert Lightbulb flash above April's head in the chapel**
Me: Yes, Lord. Whenever You grant my requests, I always curse my luck...when no such thing exists. Help me to always recognize Your Hand and Your Will in all things.

Amen to that!
Grace to you, friends and peace!

To know His will, or to do simply it?

This is gonna be fun. Stick with me...I promise its not just "bathroom" humor. **snicker, snicker**

Imagine you get out of bed in the middle of the night to find the bathroom. Though you cannot see clearly the familiar hallways or the doorways that lead to other bedrooms in your own house, you MUST make it to the bathroom. Ignoring the urge is not an option. In this situation,
Happy ending=you, in the bathroom, with an empty bladder and a peaceful feeling.

Ok, laugh a little at this absurd allegory. But, after you're done chuckling, go back to the moment when you wake up because nature calls. You might be slightly disoriented because you cannot see an inch in front of you in the dark, so what do you do?
1. I imagine you might have a floor plan of your house on your night stand to clearly show you the path to the bathroom. (You are about 1 in 89390238580230498304 if you do.) 

2. Or, you could grab your phone (which more probably IS on your night stand) and call your parents, who have better knowledge of the house than you do, and ask them to direct you to the bathroom from your bedroom. This course of action would allow you to make it to your destination with fewer embarrassing bumps into the walls and also, fewer entries into the wrong doorways than if you simply charged ahead without assistance.

3. The first two options are a bit superfluous. This is YOUR house. You know it, and you know that the tools that will enable you to get to the bathroom are available: stairs, doorways, your feet, your experience of your house. And the tightening feeling in your bladder is enough to motivate you to seek the bathroom, and to follow through until you reach your destination.

So why should you be embarrassed by bumping into the walls? Everyone else in your house is asleep. And why should it matter if you enter the wrong doorways? Just because you accidentally venture into your sister's room doesn't mean you can't retreat and re-orient so you head the right direction. And who will judge you for HOW you got to the bathroom, so long as you make it there successfully?

I understand that this story is awkwardly long and seems to go on a tangent. But put yourself in this story and make a couple of changes:
1. Floor plan of the house=exact plan for your life.
2. Phone=Prayer
3. Parents=God
4. Bumps, scrapes, wrong entries=attempts at following God's will
5.YOUR house=this world...God's world.
6. "Gotta go" feeling=call to holiness
7. Bathroom=Heaven

Make these switches and ask yourself the questions again. What's your journey with God shaping up like? Do you HAVE to know His will? Or do you simply have to do it, and trust that He will lead you to your final destination, regardless of how many mistakes your make or what kind of route you take to get there?

"We must never come to believe that we have all the answers. Though the answers are all available to us, no one is ever in full possession of them. God will continue to humble us, to remind us that we're children, by allowing us to fall and to find ourselves without the right answer at the right moment. He'll even permit this when we are, ostensibly, working for His good cause." ~Scott Hahn

Enjoy this ridiculous metaphor...hope it brings you some insight. Grace to you, and peace!

Excellent Emotional Chastity blog!

Carmen Marcoux (author of 2 fantastic books about purity and relationships, Arms of Love and Surrender) put this blog up today that I just love! It's about Emotional Chastity, which might seem like a completely foreign concept...but its so fundamentally important to romance that it needs to be understood by those of us discerning our vocations. She found a blog post by another woman that explained emotional chastity really well...enjoy!

http://www.courtshipnow.com/blog/

Trust: It's hard and it hurts.

So during Mass and more specifically, the excellent homily this evening, God asked me: “What do you want?” The word that came to my mind was: “Trust.” And then Jesus scoffed at me a little, and rightly so. He and I have had several talks about trust. This weekend, I came up with two feeble reasons for why I struggle to trust God.

1) Trust is hard…especially trusting in God. I always, always always ALWAYS think my plans are pretty fullproof. So why do I need to trust God? I got this. But obviously after re-reading my blog posts, this reason is a pride thing…and my plans suck compared to His. AND…didn’t Christ have it hard when He had to carry that heavy wooden cross up the hill?

2) Trust hurts…especially when its damaged. I’ve been betrayed before, and I can think of few other things that hurt more than feeling betrayed. But when I stammer about my overwhelming suffering, Jesus noted that these sufferings come as the result of human failings, not His. In addition, he pointed out the hurt He suffered physically during His passion. And if I’m still not convinced, He reminds me of the hurt that I can relate to at least a little better: the hurt He suffered in His heart. His friends and followers spit on Him and cursed Him on the way up to Calvary; by then His bestest best friends had long since deserted Him. I thought my experience with betrayal was awful, but I cannot imagine the magnitude of the painful ache in His heart.

Anyways, as I contemplated this hardness and hurting of Trust, Christ seemed to say to me: Why don’t you trust Me? I will never let you down. You have never been hurt by my failings, because I have never failed you, and I never will. You will never need to trust in broken humans who fail you, so you won’t hurt. First argument fails. Secondly, trusting Me in everything you do may seem hard, but why should it be? If you have faith in Me and I promise to protect you (which I obviously have), who can stand against you? (Romans 8:31) If you have My purpose behind you, you can do anything. (Philippians 4:13) So the things you must do may be hard, but trust won’t be hard either. Second argument fails.

So in conclusion, the Master of the universe makes for a very convincing logician. I’ll have to process this some more. But I do want to trust. And that’s a start.

"Loving Father, grant me the grace to trust You, in all things."

May you humbly, completely trust your God, the One who will always love you.

Grace to you, and peace!

Accepting the Cross

FIrst of all, theres a reason for this ridiculously long blog post. I could have cut out the first 2 paragraphs and skipped to the good stuff, but I haven't really talked about this, like ever. So in addition to some pretty cool theological realizations, I'm doing some unloading thats been long in coming...say 12 years or so.
July 28, 1998-I was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I was 7 years old. Though it was at the very least, an interesting experience spending several days in the hospital and taking classes on how to eat and manage my blood sugar, I accepted this new turn of events into my life easily. Call me a psych major, but I think young minds accomodate tumultuous news with much less emotional backlash than adults, because they haven't really become their own person, with their own unique feelings and routines of life. (For that matter, they also aren't used to being stubborn and asserting their will against God's yet. See Romans 11...part 2 of this post will come later on.) I theorize that this is why diabetes was not super traumatizing to me...but then again, maybe it more latently affected me than I used to believe.
Growing up, I'd get angry when a high blood sugar would put the kaibosh on dessert after supper, or when a low blood sugar meant I couldn't start in the basketball game in fifth grade, but as I hit high school and started "taking care" of myself, I thought less and less about my disease. It sounds totally oxymoronic (and it was), but I almost never gave a second thought to my health. Unbeknownst to most people, diabetes is a daily series of many, many choices; virtually everything I choose with regard to food, exercise and my schedule has consequences that affect me within hours. I tried to make these choices as best as I could with as little effort as possible; this often meant I'd sacrifice a day of good blood sugar concentration for one poor food choice. I didn't think about the choices I made when I made them...it was only after I suffered the consequences that I realized my poor decision making. For example, instead of potentially embarrassing myself and leaving class to take my insulin because I forgot it in my locker, I'd just sit through class and feel awful the rest of the day. I still do that: I've been doing it since I started college and have the least amount of control over my diabetes that I've ever had. Crisis managment style is not a good way to approach diabetes. But despite my bad test results these last two years (the nurses at my doctor's office promptly scold me every 3 months) I didn't really think about what my long-term state of health meant...until just recently.
Like I said, diabetes has been a real roadblock this last year...when I think about it. And I generally only think about it when my blood sugar is 300+ and I feel awful...and I generally only know what my blood sugar is when I test it because I don't feel right (definitely a BAD habit...I should be taking it 4 times daily to track it to make more informed decisions about eating and exercise and such...). A couple weeks ago, I was really upset because I noticed (Finally!) that I had been having the same blood sugar problems at the same time of day consistently. It didn't matter that I adjusted my insulin dosage a little; I still didn't make a good enough choice each day to combat that problem. Note: When I'm upset, I generally rail at God a bit, and then ask Him to help me.  But for the first time in 12 years, I actually prayed about my diabetes. Not to toot my own horn, but I've always known to ask God for help when I don't know how to handle a problem. But I kid you not, it NEVER really occurred to me to ask God what His purpose was for my diabetes. That's some serious oversight on my part, friend. Ouch.
So, this recent conversation with God about diabetes has been floating around in my subconscious-He didn't give me an answer I understood at the time. This weekend, a couple of friends and I were talking about how connected and holistic each part of a person is: physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual. And the idea of suffering spiritual attack through physical sickness came up...and bam. There it was.
It has always seemed to me that my health was never something to pray about. The two spheres of my life, my physical health and spiritual faith had no contact as far as I knew. Why pray about it? Its something God has given me, move on...Ah, but wait! I have recognized that it is God who has given me diabetes...but before I move on, I must explore what it means for me to have this disease.
Gosh darn it, how easily and effectively has Satan hidden this from me! One of his biggest and best weapons against humanity is to scare us away from suffering. No way should we accept that heavy, horrible cross, he tells us. It can do no good for us! Suffering is nothing but a petty annoyance that God chooses to bother us with, even if we are aware that He loves us. What a lie..and I've bought it hook, line and sinker. How easily he has hidden my cross from me: by not letting me see my diabetes in a spiritual context and as part of the bigger picture of God's plan. Though not fully understanding my health this way hasn't exactly torn my spiritual life apart, I now see that it has held me back. I've always shied away from meditating on Christ's passion and really truly contemplating the meaning of suffering. Before now I could never have said why, I just felt that it was an area of spirituality I'd eventually get to when I was more mature. However, now I see an opportunity to offer more of myself to God, through my low blood sugars, through my tiredness when its high, through the headaches of quick blood sugar recovery, through the annoying pains of finger pricks and insulin shots. This new state of mind turns my frustrations and sometimes despair into excitement and joy: I have been blessed indeed with a chance to unite my (meager) sufferings to Christ's on the cross, to grow closer to Him and take others with me. The only thing that has held me back is recognizing the chance to accept my diabetes, to take up my cross and follow Him. WHOA.

"Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong." ~2 Corinthians 12:10

"Whoever wishes to come after Me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me." ~Matthew 16:24

I really hope that made sense, because it just kind of tumbled out. 12 years of not thinking and little practice really screws up your eloquence...and there's more to come, after I refine the rest of my ideas.
Grace to you, and peace!