Author: fullofgracedj

We are former working moms blogging about faith, family, friends and food! In between writing about our hopes, prayers and adventures, we hope to bridge the gap between working moms and stay at home moms by providing recipes and resources everyone can use to make their family healthier.

Average Mom

My friend Tonya posted this on her Facebook page. I paid close attention because she doesn’t usually say this much. It’s pretty phenomenal, so I asked if I could share it here. 

My children all unanimously decided I was “an average mom”. We were all having a deep and insightful conversation over dinner last night, and at one point in the dialoguing, I was coined this term….”average”.
Now….let it be known that I’m extremely sensitive and take most direct and potentially opinionated comments towards me personally. However? I found myself laughing inside and out, that my children were all on the same page regarding this fact!

They, in true insightful form, had reason to back their theories! I listened and opened my mind as best I could. I was captivated at their strong and researched hypothesis….case in point…I am a “mom”, I am a “hairdresser” and “photographer” and I am, at times, a homemaker that doesn’t bake.

I am comfortable submitting to my children’s opinions and theories. I am comfortable seeking their opinions and their perspectives and I am VERY comfortable confiding in them and trusting them, because they are “beyond average” and have shown me though example and concrete evidence, that they are worthy.

After we all went to bed…I pondered this and realized? I’m glad that I am average in their eyes. In my humble opinion, that moniker makes me “approachable”, “attainable” and “real”, and, let’s be honest, it makes me human to them. All of a sudden, I felt a little “average” tinge of victory as a mom!

I want to enable them with all the artillery they need to achieve their dreams. I want to applaud and encourage their journeys. I want to see their successes and failures shape them into the best versions of themselves. I want to empower their unique gifts and qualities and help illuminate to the world all they have to offer. I want to take the brunt for them and elevate my 3 to the heights they are meant for. And the person best for this job? Is their “average” mom! Because? Sometimes? It takes a mediocre type of thinking to see the magic and beauty within others.

See?

We are all instrumental in the big picture…we all play a role and we all bring something unique and special to the table. Whether we are “average” or “above average” or “below average”….(whatever those guidelines mean???) We all have something to offer. Let’s honor “us” and support others, and let us begin to look beyond…for we all matter and we all have something to say; average or not! Thank you to my beautiful children for the insight I crave and need. NO better three I can think of, that have this ability to help me witness these truths within myself. I wish for you all great things, and in “great”, I MAY mean average;) Because you know what??? I may know a thing or two about what I’m talking about! ❤️

(Average mom)
T~

Spiritual Gifts

Every time someone hands me a personality test, they laugh. I’ve gotten used to this and I understand it.

My personality is not a light hidden under a bushel. It shines like a beacon in the night and speaks with a voice loud and clear.

Last week, I took a Spiritual Gifts test for a retreat team I’ve joined.

At least this time, the nice lady who gave us the test didn’t laugh at me until she gave me the results.

On a scale of 1 (Almost always true) to 4 (No desire towards it), and with five questions for each gift—this means the lowest score (and strongest affinity) would be a 5 and the highest score (and weakest affinity) would be a 20—I scored a 5 on Administration.

Also, a 6 on Faith and 7s on Discernment, Hospitality, Leadership, Service, Teaching and Wisdom.

I’M NOT A MARTHA. YOU’RE A MARTHA.

Ok, I’m a Martha.

And really, I don’t want to be a missionary, healer, evangelist or believer in miracles. I want to teach the catechism, say the prayers, honor the traditions and keep the calendar. I want to organize gatherings where missionaries and healers and miracle believers and evangelists come share their stories because we need that. All of us need that. We need to listen to those with the gifts.

And I need to build the agenda for that meeting, perfectly scheduled down to the last snack break.

I can see what needs to happen and how. I can make that vision come true. I can find and convince the right people to show up.

I may not move the mountain. But I know who can.

I used to think that the payoff for these gifts was a job well done, mostly because my OCD had yet to be diagnosed and treated.

Just like Martha, I had to learn: my gifts are all front-loading. Which means, if I’ve done it right, I get to be present for the very thing I built. I get to see the fruits. It only works if I let myself be done. I can’t try to control what I have wrought.

If I’m still trying to administer, lead, serve and teach unto the very last moment, I miss it.

But when I trust my gifts and my boundaries, then I see this little boy, waiting on God to call.

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I see 70 kids singing joyfully at the end of Mass. A 17 year old boy standing in tearful awe of a famous painting in the Louvre. My daughter and her friends dancing in the sunlight in their First Communion dresses. Teenagers giving up their first week of summer sleeping-in to work at church. A young woman we have loved and cherished finding the man God meant her to find and planning a life with him.

So now that’s what I do. I plan and lead and serve and administer and then I send it out into the world and watch what happens next.

I can’t share the test I took on the blog because someone paid for the rights to use it. But if you search “20 Spiritual gifts test” you’ll find some iteration of what I took.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Want Monster

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We’ve lived in our smaller house for a year now. It’s been an adjustment, but we’ve figured it out. Mostly. Just don’t open the hallway closet.

Still, as another birthday passes and the weather turns towards Spring, my heart starts to want. More square footage. A third bathroom. A self-cleaning dog run. I cruise the MLS and Pinterest. I dream.

At some point, the wanting steps out of my heart and becomes a monster in my chest.

The Want Monster.

It is naturally in my personality to obsess, and the Want Monster needs obsession to survive. At first, it seems harmless, like I’m considering. Let’s just see, the Monster says.

But then when Common Sense kicks in, or Shea puts his foot down, the Monster roars.

Why do we have to be patient? Why do we have to wait? Now, now, now!

And that’s when the Want Monster begins to steal my joy.

Shea and I have been mostly calculated and patient financially our entire marriage. We’re planners. Right now we are in year 3 of a 5 year plan and we are on track.

In the last month, the Want Monster has tried to tell me that this life is not enough.

I know it is a lie. But once the Monster is born, it takes a minute to beat him back.

Last week, I prayed for God to ease the wanting. I don’t want to want. I don’t want to have my head turned by things away from our life, which is good and solid and manageable.

I think a lot of us struggle with the Want Monster, whether in our homes, our marriages, our jobs, our families. Someone will always have it better, or have something we think we want.

I also think it is an act of grace to be happy with what you have built, with what you have been given. God calls us to live our best lives according to His time and guided by His plan.  But best lives doesn’t relate to accumulation of things and the Want Monster is not the voice of God.

Knowing is half the battle. Prayer is the other half. This Lent, I am coming in armed for hunting monsters.

St. Joan of Arc, pray for us. 

We Will Rise

This post first appeared last year. When I reread it this morning, I realized that it means something different to me today than it did last year. And since it’s still January, I reflected: In the last year, did I rise?

The story of the eagle who thought he was a chicken is a reminder to all of us that we are gifted by God with our dreams and our freedom, and no human law can strip us of those gifts. 

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On Sunday at Mass, our visiting priest from Tanzania told this story:

A farmer was given an egg. He didn’t know what kind of an egg it was so he put it with his chickens and waited to see what might happen.

The egg hatched. It was an eagle. But the eagle didn’t know he was an eagle, so he grew up as a chicken.

One day a wild eagle landed nearby and said “Friend, what are you doing among the chickens?” And the eagle said “I AM a chicken.” The wild eagle shook his head. “No, my friend. You are not a chicken. You are an eagle. You can fly. You can hunt. The world is yours.” But the eagle said “I have always been here, in this coop, eating corn and termites. I know nothing about those other things. I am a chicken.”

The wild eagle flew away. But the next day he came back. “You know what life is like as a chicken, cooped and corn and termites. Come with me for one week and see what life is like as an eagle.”

The eagle agreed to one week, and the two eagles flew away. For a week, the eagle flew as high as the heavens and saw all the world below him: mountains, oceans, prairies, lakes. He hunted fiercely and visited nests built in the tops of the tallest trees and clinging to the steepest cliffs. He saw all the vagaries of life and death, beauty and pain, courage and fear.

But at the end of the week, he went back to the chickens.

The wild eagle flew after him. “What are you doing?” he asked. “You’ve lived the life of an eagle! Why would you go back to the chickens in their coop, eating corn and termites and never having the chance to fly???”

And the eagle said “I like the chickens. I belong with the chickens. I am a chicken.”

The world calls us to be chickens, content in our cages, heads down, eating what we are fed.

But we are not chickens.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made. We are beloved children of God.

We are eagles.

They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength,
    they will soar on eagles’ wings;
They will run and not grow weary,
    walk and not grow faint.
Isaiah 40:31

Gut Check

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This picture. It’s from the Women’s March in 2017, but the message resonates even after a year. Maybe more, after Charlottesville and Roy Moore and #metoo and all the other mind boggling crap that happened this year.

I didn’t vote for Trump, because I’m a pro-life Christian. But I’m white and I KNOW that with those lame ass pink hats and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Persistence, we made the women’s social justice movement Pinterest-able, and then acted like we invented the damn thing.

It’s not that #metoo isn’t important, because it is and, #metoo.

It’s not that women are not marginalized, not abused, not underrepresented, not all of it.

But there’s something off about the pampered and privileged white women of Hollywood taking a diamond-laden and perfectly coiffed stand against sexual abuse in the workplace while still clamoring to act in movies that objectify women, glorify violence and desecrate marriage.

It’s in this picture too, where white women stand with carelessly curled hair and memorialize their “social justice girls weekend” with selfies.

As if this is the first moment, the first rally, the first battle.

As if this outrage didn’t exist until we felt it.

That black woman with the bored look on her face and the searing truth on her poster? She is LITERALLY keeping it real. God bless her, because that’s the business. And she’s probably been doing the business, like her mother and her mother before her and back and back.*

She’s also been waiting on us to show up. She is our dose of humility. This is not about a girls weekend or stylized pink ear pictures on Instagram. It’s not supposed to be fun. There won’t be wine later, for the love of God.

Show up. Be humble. Change the world.

*Turns out, she has. Her name is Angela Peoples and she was the director of GetEQUAL before leaving to start her own consulting group called MsPeoples. Her friend Kevin took that picture. You can follow her on Twitter at @MsPeoples.