Quick Post
Saturday, September 30th, 2006I’m off again for a few days to Northern PA. My aunt died yesterday and I’m heading up to be with my mom and Aunt Laurita’s family for the viewing and the funeral.
Pray for Aunt Laurita’s soul
Archive for September, 2006
Am I weird?
Friday, September 29th, 2006Last weekend my little guy was very sick. Friday morning he woke up with a fever and it lasted until about Saturday afternoon, off and on. He still didn’t act like himself until sometime Monday afternoon.
The weekend before that my daughter was terribly sick, although without the fever and throwing up the boy had (I think he has a sensitive stomach). She missed Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday from school.
Hubby stayed home from work one day with a cold.
So, now, I feel like I’m getting it, but you know what? I’m on immunosuppressants, so I should get things more easily, but I don’t. I’m usually the only who doesn’t get the colds and stuff. However, for the last two days, it’s felt like the thing was coming, but it never gets here enough to actually say, “Yes, I’m sick and going to bed.”
So, I end up feeling lousy but not enough that I can stop work or have anyone actually feel sympathy.
Am I weird to wish this would just develop into a full blown cold and get it over with? Or go away completely and let me have my energy back? At least if I got SICK sick I’d know it was coming to an end. This just hovering around the edges drives me crazy!
To Whom do we Tell our Dreams?
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
It takes a lot of courage to show
dreams to someone else.”
dreams to someone else.”
~ Erma Bombeck
Lately, I’ve been thinking about dreams. Not nighttime dreams of cooking pasta for Ray Romano while you’re on a raft in the ocean trying to find your car keys. Dreams that come from your heart and whisper in your ear when you’re alone or trying to get to sleep or sittng in a carpool lane wondering if there’s more to life than driving kids around and making dinner and doing laundry.
In one of the devotional readings this week focused on Sarah and her dream of having a child. The commentary said something to the effect that the dreams in our hearts are put there by God and He gives us the ability to succeed in those dreams, but we have to always remember that His time is not our time and sometimes, often, in fact, we have to wait for the opportunity we need to make the dream come true.
Sarah desperately wanted a child, and God had promised Abraham he’d be the father of a great nation. However, Sarah grew tired of waiting and she didn’t know what else to do, so she gave Hagar, her maid to Abraham to father a child for her. We know the story. Bitterness grew up between Hagar and Sarah, and as Sarah was the mistress of the household, Hagar got the gummy end of the stick often.
God was faithful, though, and even when it was humanly impossible, Sarah had her child and Issac was the child of the promise.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I went through the same thing most kids go through of not knowing what they want to be when they grow up. I never had anything that called to me and that I “desired” to be, and with counselors telling you “You can be anything you want,” well, it didn’t help.
But I loved writing, and eventually, I just KNEW that whatever else I did in life, I would write. I worked as a Kelly girl after college when I couldn’t get a public relations job. I wrote when there wasn’t any work to do. I wrote at home. I didn’t know a THING about writing novels, just that I wanted to.
Then I met my husband and we went to a concert at our church. Afterward, my best friend, the deaconess, asked me to take something back to the store for her and asked Steve to go with me. While we were there, some tabloid has something about romance novels. They cause cancer or something dumb.
I sheepishly told this lovely man with me that I wanted to write them.
He said: “Good for you.”
Is it any wonder I married him?
Most people laughed or scoffed or at best, said nothing about this writing dream. My own mother, who called herself “practical” as though saying “I’m Methodist,” worried that I was a “dreamer.” When I said something about wanting to write bookS (plural!!!) she repeated the plural with something akin to panic in her voice.
When Steve and I went on a date with one of his friends and a woman he was seeing, my writing Christian romance was mentioned, and she was a “scoffer.”
“What does that mean? Two people find God and fall in love?”
I wanted to slink under the table, but my darling, very own hero, said, “Yes.”
Dreams are a deep part of ourselves and fragile. Letting them out exposes them to dangers and the chance that someone won’t like them. They’re much like our own children that way. We don’t want to send them out into that cruel world where they might be bullied or hurt or made fun of. That hurts.
We have a choice. We can keep them with us, safe in our homes (hearts) and never expose them to the dangers and challenges of the world.
That’s not good for children. As parents it’s our responsibility to raise them to be strong, independent, self-reliant, moral people. One day we have to drop them off at school or put them on that school bus and hope for the best. Even if we homeschool, there will come a day when we have to let them go; maybe for their first sleepover at someone else’s house or for a playdate or something. We have to. It’s hard on us, but they can’t flourish if we hold them close to us every second.
Our dreams are the same way. We have to let them out and we have to let them risk being laughed at or ignored or scoffed at. If we don’t they can never be applauded or fulfilled. That scoffing or laughing can toughen up the dream and our determination to see it happen or it can cripple us, and make us forget those dreams ever existed. Who needs that pain, so I won’t dream anymore.
I watched a show once where a couple was struggling to get by. The man worked at a job he HATED and she worked at a job she didn’t like either, and because of their children, they had to work different schedules and never saw one another. What baffled me and hurt my heart is that this was not temporary. Neither of them seemed to expect life to ever change or get better. I couldn’t imagine living like that. I think they had stopped dreaming.
Years ago, when I was attending RCIA to join the Catholic Church, we attended Wednesday prayer services during Advent. During one of these, we were asked what our “New Years Resolutions” were – the beginning of Advent being the beginning of the Church year. I wrote “Get a book published” and “find a baby to adopt.” Those were my two big dreams and for about six years I thought about them every Advent and every prayer I lifted to my Heavenly Father ended with, “And let us find a baby to adopt.”
In June 21, 2002 a little boy came to live with us and stole my heart. In December 2002, Wings Press offered me a contract for Fabric of Faith. In Sept 2003, that little boy because legally ours (3 years ago yesterday!) and in Jan 2004, Fabric of Faith came out.
My dreams have been fulfilled and I really don’t know what else to wish for. If I hadn’t expressed those dreams out loud, it would still be 2006, but where and what would I be?
Tuesday Treasure
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
My Tuesday Treasure this week is a sick call kit my sister-in-law gave us. Neither Steve nor I were born and raised Catholic, so neither of us had seen one before, and he thought it was one of a set of Stations of the Cross from an old church. She’d found it in an antique store, so that idea wasn’t so far fetched. However, a Catholic friend of ours said no, it was a sick call kit. Old Catholic families would have these in their homes so when someone was sick and the priest visited, everything he needed for annointing and all would be here. As you can see from this picture:
there’s all kinds of things here, including a silver dish for the Blessed Sacrament and a bottle for holy water and a crucifix. On the sides of the little door, you can see places for small candles. I have no idea what it’s worth, but it’s a very special treasure.Adoption Day
Monday, September 25th, 2006
Three years ago today, a judge at the Delaware County (PA) Courthouse signed papers and announced that forever more this little boy would be known as Noah Anthony Brandt and would be entitled to all the rights and privileges of being our son just as though he were born to us!
Yea, Noah! We love you!
Booksigning at the library
Sunday, September 24th, 2006I had a great day yesterday at the Plaquemine Library. Although the woman who arranged the talk, Betsy, was disappointed in the turnout, I was very pleased.
I sold sixteen copies of Fabric of Faith (10 to one person – a friend) and one copy of Attack of the Queen. Betsy said the library wanted two copies of each book, but she didn’t have money from her boss and she would need an invoice, so I suggested that she order them directly from Wings. I wouldn’t make as much but I wouldn’t have to deal with the invoice stuff and my next royalty check will be bigger!
I’m posting pictures, taken by my friend from above, from the booksigning on the photo album pages! Go over and take a look!
The kids are back in school
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006Juliette woke up this morning at 4:15 am and came into my room, telling me that her ear hurt so much she couldn’t sleep. After the cold she’s had for the last six days (and felt tons better last night – she was chasing Noah around the kitchen!) I was concerned that she had an ear infection or something fairly serious, so I gave her some Tylenol and somd decongestant (figuring her ears might be congested) and told her and her father I was taking her to an ER. Something needed to be done.
After a little bit, after she’d gotten dressed in her school uniform and I was dressed, she said her ear felt, not perfect, but tons better, so she went to school
Of course, Noah went to school as always, and Steve went to work.
I’m still hovering on the edge of getting sick, but I’m okay so far.
We got our book THE LADY AND THE NECROMANCER sent out. You can read a blurb about it and an excerpt on another page on this site. I’d love to know how interested you would be in reading this book
What’s New at our House?
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006Well, despite Steven and Juliette being in bed sick (her on the tail end of the bad cold; him at the beginning), things are doing pretty well here.
Today we mail off our first collaborative effort at creating something that won’t require diaper changes. Steve and I wrote a book called “The Lady and the Necromancer,” and today we mail it to Wizards of the Coast. Keep good thoughts for us.
I’m getting my talk ready for the presentation at the Iberville Library in Prairieville, LA this weekend. I hope lots of people turn out to hear Lynn Emery talk about urban fiction and me talk about inspirational romance and electronic publishing.
I’m getting “famous”
Friday, September 15th, 2006Gang, checkj out CatholicMom.com‘s book club this month! Fabric of Faith is the featured selection in fiction this month!
Unchangable
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
I wrote earlier about feelings of spiritual dryness so I’ve been praying a rosary every day and trying to have some devotional time every morning. In that vein, when I was at Barnes and Noble yesterday (looking for a British cross stitch magazine) I found a Catholic Woman’s Devotional Bible. Since it’s not easy to find a Catholic Bible in most Christian bookstores, I had to get it. It was sitting on an endcap rack so it felt like a gift from God given how I’ve been feeling.
This morning, as I waited in the drop off line at Noah’s preschool, I read today’s devotion. The reading was Genesis 3:1-7 which is basically the serpent’s successful temptation of Eve with the forbidden fruit.
The devotion for today was by Kathy Troccoli, the contemporary Christian singer, and she took an interesting slant on this reading.
Usually I hear people talking about how the serpent deceived Eve or how Adam screwed up by not taking responsibility for what they did.
However, Kathy focused on verse one:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’
“Did God really say that?” “Yes, He did.”
“Really?”
“Are you sure?”
Satan does that with us, today, too. I know for myself that I have, in the past, told myself that while God said, “XYZ,” He didn’t REALLY mean EXACTLY “XYZ.” He meant “xyz” or “something like xyz.”
Our society has fallen into this error and those of us who try to follow God’s laws find it difficult to defend our positions against people who have embraced the whole “something like xyz” thing.
Take, for example, homosexuality.
God’s word clearly says that homosexual relations are wrong. Simple biology should be enough to tell us that we just weren’t designed that way.
However, many, MANY people want to change God’s “NO” into a “YES.” Same sex marriages, accepting homosexual partnerships as normal and in some cases, preferable to heterosexual, even allowing practicing homosexuals to stand behind the pulpit and “proclaim the word of God.”
And you know as well as I do that this isn’t the only place where society has taken it upon herself to change a NO to a YES or at least soften it to a MAYBE, IN CERTAIN CASES.
So, we end up with unisex bathrooms in schools so kids who are “ambivalent” about their gender won’t feel stigmatized, teachers who were Mr. So and So last year can be called Miss So and So this year, and young girls can get abortions without parental permission. It’s all around us, and those of us who are Conservative Christians and who understand that God is the same yesterday, today and for eternity are called intolerant, close-minded and oppressive.
It’s not easy to be a devout Catholic today, even in our churches. I see people walking out of a Respect Life Sunday Mass angry because the priest actually had the gall to say that abortion is a sin. We serve a God who laid out His laws for us in black and white and all around us people are standing in the gray areas telling us we’re wrong.
If you buy a fancy, expensive car, the one you’ve dreamed of and saved for for years, and the dealer tells you, “Change the oil every 3,000 miles and don’t put this kind in it” you’d listen because you want that car to run the way it was designed to and to last for years. You wouldn’t just toss the manual back at him and say, “I can make my own decisions on what is right for MY car. I don’t need your close-minded rules.”
God told us how to take care of our souls. It’s all there in the Bible and the teachings of our Church. Why do our souls deserve less respect than our cars?
God’s No is still No, but His Yes is, and always will be, YES!
