A Birthday, Divine Mercy, and a New Saint!

God gives the best gifts!

I can't believe the amazing Graces that He has poured out lately!

I knew that my birthday this year was going to fall on Divine Mercy Sunday. I was so happy about that. 

I am so grateful to my dear Papa, St John Paul II, for the incredible gift of this feast!! Well, I am supremely grateful to Jesus, of course, but to Papa for canonizing St Faustina, and declaring the feast. 

I love the way that it falls during the Octave of Easter and the beauty and connectedness to my Lord.

So yesterday was my 55th birthday, and the feast of Divine Mercy, and it is also the feast day of another amazing Saint who was also canonized by JPII!!

St Gianna Molla is a beautiful saint, who lived her mission in the world in a truly heroic way. She was a doctor, wife and mother, who was pregnant when she found out that she had cancer, and chose to give birth to her daughter at the risk of losing her own life. Her daughter was born on April 21, 1962, and Gianna died on April 28th. That is her feast day.

I have always felt sad that my name doesn't really have a solid connection to a saint. I know that St Genevieve can be a patron for Jennifer, but I always thought it would be nice to have a stronger connection. I didn't understand the choosing of a saint for Confirmation, so that didn't work our so well either. So having St Gianna now just feels like the best gift!

So, TOB, Adoration, Prayer and healing, Words from my Father, Divine Mercy, Unbound, 

I am sure that something is coming. Jesus is preparing me. I know that He must be packing my bag for some kind of journey, because this kind of Grace isn't something that you get and keep wrapped up somewhere. Every day and in every way, He has given me what I need for whatever He asks of me. I pray for the wisdom to be able to reconize His voice and the courage and persverance to carry out the mission, whatever it is. 

It's Show Season Again!!

What a wonderful opening to the 2019 Horse Show season for Lilly.

The winter weather has finally let go and it was actually warm out! The ponies were all clean and trimmed and mostly behaving.

Lilly has a new pony, Cici, that she is riding this year, and they are really looking good! Cici, has been hanging out in the field with her girlfriends for the last couple of years, so she has gotten pretty attached to them, which makes show day a rather anxious time.

She did really well today though and I was very proud of Lilly for managing a rather difficult horse this morning.
They did very well in their under saddle classes, and they jumped beautifully!
They both like that the best. Cici is a very willing jumper and Lilly is really lucky in that respect. Not all the other horses feel that way...
It was a great day at the barn, and I am so excited for the summer ahead!

Your Story is The Story

Today's Gospel is one of my favorites, because Jesus is telling the Jewish leaders about the testimony that is given about Him, not just in the days leading up to His ministry, but in all of History!
 He speaks of John the Baptist, and then reaches back into the Scriptures, all the way to Genesis and Exodus, and shows them the testimony that even Moses declares about Him. In the end, the whole story will be about Our Lord Jesus Christ.

What I find fascinating is that each one of us is not just a part of the story, but we are main characters in our own story, and Jesus is the author. He doesn't just write the story, he gets into it with us. So when we are going about our daily tasks and duties, when we spend time with people, whether we have momentous experiences, or live a quiet life at home, the story is important.
It elevates something about the human experience.
 It is an epic that illuminates something that no other story can illuminate. We have a specific number of chapters and He has the plot in His Heart.
It is so beautiful and comforting to look at the way that He writes and to know how He wants it to end.
We live a drama, and every story is different. Some are filled with tragedy and heartbreak. Some are tales of hard work and struggle, and some are serene and quiet. All are love stories.

When I look at the story of my life so far, I can see the chapters where I was so ignorant of the way that my actions would impact the later parts.
I can see the chapters where I did things that the reader would know were going to lead to trouble. I was that stupid girl that made those bad decisions, and had to be rescued.
I can read the parts of the story where I was afraid of the way it would end, so very afraid. Those were the chapters where I learned to trust.
There are the parts where I had to step out without a clue as to what the author was doing, and then the realization that He really had me all along.
There were plot twists, in which I would think that I understood where it was all going, only to find that I had been TOTALLY wrong! And mostly those were times that I was surprised, and grateful!

The way my story intertwines with the stories of others, the people that God has put into my life, is the most fascinating aspect of the whole thing. He is writing the world and he loves His craft.
He puts down each word with care, and he tenderly layers all the things that He wants us to learn into the plot.

I think of all those that lived at the time of Moses. They all had their own stories and everyone of them was so important. Some of them were about the Hebrews, but many of the were about the Egyptians. There were those that lived in the world that we never even hear about in the Bible or elsewhere. Living difficult little lives, scrabbling to grow or raise enough food, staying warm, dealing with poor health, losing children to disease. These lives were also epic stories. Stories that we won't read until the end of time, unless someone stumbles onto the place where they lived and digs it up and studies it. Every single one is the greatest story ever told, to the one that it is about, and it is tied into the Greatest Story of all time in it's own way. We will have eternity to learn from this amazing library that is God's masterpiece.

I want to understand the plot better, but it is not mine to know.
The characters in these stories are able to choose how the plot will progress, but not to know what happens. We are given the gift of relationship with the author, and we are able to become somehow co-authors, but are not given the burden of how it will all come out.
I am excited to get to the end of the story. I have hope that the remaining chapters are filled with great adventure and that the final chapter is a happy one.

I don't want to put it down.

Our Mother Needs Us

There is a lot of talk lately, about the number of people leaving the church because of the scandal that has resulted from the victimization of children and others, by priests, and the covering up of these criminals by many bishops. Many bishops.
Those crimes cut me to the core. When I think about the monstrous evil that has been perpetrated pretty much in every corner of the world, and throughout the centuries, it is hard to even imagine.
Dwelling on it makes me ill, and I am inclined to shut out the horrific thoughts. However, it isn't fair to shut them out. It isn't fair to the victims, and it isn't fair to the Church.
Our Lord went to the cross with the sins of these monsters on His shoulders, and we need to offer up our own sacrifices with His. Our pain can be united to the suffering of Christ to in some way mitigate the effects that come from this wickedness.

Of course we are furious. We feel blindsided and powerless, and it seems like there is no place to take these emotions. They are legitimate and need to be expressed.

What I think is being misunderstood however, is the proper placement of our anger and frustration.
People see the Church as an organization or an institution, and while it has many of those qualities, it is actually more than any of them. The Church is something that is outside and beyond anything that has ever existed in this world, and it can't be defined in worldy terms. The best possible comparison, in our terms, would be a family. A huge family with Christ as the Head and the whole Church, Triumphant, Suffering and Militant, as His bride. We are members of the Church as there are members in a family. Different people have different places in the family, different responsibilities.
In every family, some more than others, there are those that struggle, those that fail, and some that are just plain bad apples.

Sometimes the people who have been entrusted with the most, fall in the most dispicable ways. For the people that they fail there is tragedy. They are hurt, they are abandoned, they become unable to trust. And that is a horrible fact.
The Church has some of those awful people in it. It has it's share of bad apples, and those bad apples hurt people. When they are the people that we look to as Fathers, it is even worse. The children are left with pain and distrust and lifelong scars.
But when a father and husband fails his family. When there is abuse or neglect, that is the time for the family to come together. When dad is a jerk and hurts your family, betrays your mother, or leaves, you come to the defense of your mother, and you are there for your brothers and sisters. You stay close and you heal together. That is what families do.
These men have cheated on the church, and have wounded her. They have not upheld their vows, or they have committed outright crimes. And sometimes the people who were supposed to be there to hold them to account have failed as well. They have chosen power and prestige over the good of the family. They have tried to keep the crimes out of sight so that the neighbors won't find out, so that they won't be embarrassed, so that they can hang on to their positions, or in the hopes that the whole thing will just blow over.
This is murderously wrong. These men are not behaving like fathers and they need to be held to account as much as the predators should be.

Our Mother needs us. She is the bride of Christ, and right now she is bruised and broken. She needs to be loved and comforted by her children. She needs us close to her.
We can't turn back the clock, but we can try to support those that have been hurt, and we can work to be sure that light is shed in every corner of the whole Church. It's time for all of us to attend to the suffering. Evil won't triumph, we have that on good authority, but it is for us to walk with the wounded.
This Bride will heal. She is destined for the Wedding feast of the Lamb and nothing will keep her from it. Her children will sit at the table and her Beloved will shower her with Graces.
Those who have stood by her in the bad times will celebrate with her at her triumph.
Hang on Children. Stick with her. He won't let us down.