This past weekend was another hard one, toward the end. DH and the Boy went on a campout so the Girl and I were home alone. We had a pretty good time just hanging out. I ate too much junk and will see the result this afternoon at Weight Watchers.

I became worrying about money again. It’s the end of the month and things, again, were stretched a little thin. With DH camping, it was extra hard for me because I couldn’t talk to him about it and hear him tell me it was going to be okay.

Sunday came and my boys came home. By the time DH came home I had decided to not talk to him about the money because I didn’t want him to get upset over my worry and he has enough on his mind and tends to mull over stuff longer than he needs to. However, the money issue did come out and he did tell me everything would be okay, but I wasn’t okay with that.

I worry about not contributing to the family financially, and even if I did knuckle down and get these books finished, it would be awhile until we saw any money (if we actually did). This line of thinking led to all kinds of unhealthy, spiritually, thoughts.

A couple of years ago, I heard a priest at a retreat talk about sin and what are the greatest sins we can commit. He said it wasn’t murder or adultery or even abortion.

Despair is the greatest sin because it means a complete rejection of God’s love for us. We begin to believe that we’re worthless to God and that He doesn’t care for us. When this priest spoke about this, I nearly left the room, it hurt so much and felt so close to home. I was deeply in tears.

Yesterday, I went to mass early as I usually do when the Girl and her father sing in the choir. Mass starts at 6 pm, but the choir is usually there at 4:45 pm to practice. DH wasn’t feeling good so he wasn’t going to sing, so he decided to come along later. He was coughing violently unpredictably so he didn’t want to be there any longer than he needed to be.

I had my journal with me, and my Catholic Women’s Bible. After getting the Boy settled with a pen and some paper, I started journaling about things. I wrote about how discouraged I was and how I felt like I didn’t have a purpose. I felt like I was in a hole that just keeps getting deeper and deeper. All of this came from my discouragement from our financial situation.
Then I picked up my Bible and read the mass readings. One of them was on Christ’s wilderness journey and there was a devotion written exactly for that reading. It was eerie how it practically had my name written on it.

The devotion was about how we sometimes have to go through a wilderness just like Jesus had to.

“At times, the Spirit will also leas us into the wilderness to endure a time of trial. It may be a wilderness of loneliness, illness, misunderstanding, poverty, failure, or doubt.”

“If you find yourself in the wilderness, perhaps you should be encouraged. God may be preparing you for a time of greater fruitfulness and joy.”

“Your enemy wants to convince you that God has abandoned you and that you are good for nothing.”

“There will be an end to your wilderness.”

Of course there was more in the devotion, but it was like someone knew what I wrote in my journal and was responding.

Wait! Someone did know and He was responding.

You ever have a 2×4 moment? That’s what I call it when God has been trying to get your attention for so long and eventually He just has to take a 2×4 to your head!!

If that devotion didn’t wake me up, the priest’s homily did. Our associate pastor is Indian and sometimes his accent is hard to understand. Also, he has the habit of telling jokes at the beginning of his homily, always jokes that seriously don’t make sense. I don’t know if they don’t translate into English or if I can’t understand his train of thought or accent or what it is, but even my husband and daughter have said, “Yeah, I didn’t get it either.”

Anyway, yesterday, his story wasn’t a joke, and I GOT IT! He talked about how we have to empty ourselves of ourselves in order to let the Holy Spirit in. He said that Jesus went through the wilderness experience because he emptied himself so that he could do what the Father intended. Even through all that, he said NO to Satan.

We can’t get what God wants us to get when we’re full of everything else. Like the world.

I heard a guy on the Christian radio station talk about what it means to be “in the world, but not of the world.” (Do you think God’s been hitting me on the head for a while?????) He said that boats are made for water. A boat sits in the water and that’s what it’s supposed to do. However, if water get INTO the boat, that’s not a good thing and can cause immense damage. Sometimes that damage can’t be undone.

We need to be IN the world, but we can’t let the world get INTO us!

Well, Father Joseph said that when we are worried about stuff in the world, or when we can’t let the Holy Spirit in, that’s MATERIALISM!!

My stomach clenched (2×4 to the head time). I was worried about money and worried about how would we ever get out of this hole. That’s Materialism!!!!!

After communion, I fell on my face (figuratively, of course, we sit in the front row right by the Eucharistic ministers. Falling on my face would seriously disrupt the flow of communicants!) before the Lord and repented of my materialism. I don’t know how NOT to worry about money, short of having DH deal with everything and not tel me anything, but that’s not really practical. So, that’s what I prayed about. How do I not let the money worries get to me?

I’m beginning a course of keeping my Bible and rosary close at hand at all times and remembering that Jesus is my lifeline and there will be an end to his wilderness time, and it will be a time of fruitfulness and JOY!

I’ve been WAY busy trying to get this NaNoWriMo book written. Almost finished, and then December will be focused on getting Christmas gifts made/organized!

Speaking of Christmas, I saw this today.

I wonder how long it will be before going to church will be outlawed because you might offend an atheist as you drive by!!

I saw this article mentioned on the Drudge Report this morning.

It really shouldn’t suprise anyone that a Bishop of the Church of England has made this sweeping, shocking announcement. In 1930, the Church of England decided at the Lambeth Conference of that year that birth control was acceptable in hardship cases. How many people do you know today who would ONLY accept birth control in hardship cases? How many people do you know who think abortion is ONLY acceptable in hardship cases? How many think that abortion is pretty much okay across the board?

Of my readers, or at least the ones I THINK read this, you probably don’t know that many who agree with the last statement, but look how different the world is than it was in 1930.

Back then, every church taught that contraception was wrong. Now, many, many denominations not only accept birth control across the board but have an official pro-choice stance.

I see this Bishop’s statement as frightening because history seems to indicate a slippery slope society isn’t afraid to set its sled on and go right down.

I see this society eventually getting to a point where we don’t feed our grandparents because they’re old. I don’t want to be there.

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!

This quote came from Blogging with Christian Women Online. I have been meaning to join in with this Get Inspired “meme” thing, but I continue to get distracted. Today as I went through my blogroll, I read Blest with  Sons and she wrote about this quote. So I decided to try my hand at this.

I have always been the kind of person who is comfortable just talking to anyone. Not striking up a conversation, mind you, but once we start talking, I could talk all night and often talk more about myself or whatever than anyone ever wants to hear. My husband used to gently take my hand or put his hand on my shoulder as his subtle way of telling me that I was blabbing too much and maybe it was time for someone else to talk!

One mistake I have made in the past is that I mistake pleasant conversation for friendship. I learned, when my husband was in graduate school, that for real friendship to develop is for BOTH people to share. There was a woman I knew at the church we attended with whom I thought I had something in common. This church is in the middle of a major Midwestern University and most of the people we knew were college students. This woman, however, while she might have been in graduate school (see? I don’t even know), was married and as I was, too, I felt that gave us common ground.

So, I would seek her out at church gatherings and we would talk. That is, I would talk. Several times I know I confided problems or fears or concerns or whatever, thinking I was with a friend. It wasn’t until this had happened three or four times that I realizes that she never shared anything with me. She was sympathetic to whatever I spoke about and offered advice and a listening ear, but never did she tell me anything about herself or her situations.

One night I talked to my husband about this, and he told me that he believes that he and I are the kind of people who don’t have many close friends. We have acquaintances, and many times, friendly acquaintances, but only a few FRIENDS.

I find this is true even now. I have a close, dear friend who I have known since before I met my husband and we are like sisters and we know more everything about each other, even though we haven’t lived in the same state in about 20 years!

I have found one good friend here, another writer, but it’s not the same thing. I long for a close, dear friend like the one I mentioned above, someone closer I could go shopping with or to the movies or just have coffee. However, I’ve learned that I can survive without that. I have my own interests and my writing to keep me busy.

I started blogging because I was hoping to find some close friends in the blogging community. I’ve read dozens of blogs that reference other bloggers and how close they are even though they’ve never met. Never happened to me. I guess that even in this community, I’m destined to be a “friendly acquaintance.”

So, the conclusion is that while I think Lewis was right in his quote above, I think many more acquaintances are born of something in common and the friendships, while born in the same situation, are rare.

What do you think?