Category: Faith

How to Pray

I’m reading The Art of Prayer for my class. Written in 1957, so I’m kind of 😴.


Then this. Now I’m awake because YES.


This is the prayer people like me HAVE TO LEARN. We want to decide, intervene, plan, control, dictate.

We cover it by saying we are hoping, inventing, inspiring, leading and guiding. But really, in our worst moments, at our most angry, threatened and afraid, we are asserting our ego at God and other people in a desperate scramble to get back to solid, predictable ground.


God made us this way, so he is not surprised when we come for Him with our blueprints and list of demands. He loves us still.

He waits for us to surrender to the only plan that matters: HIS plan. And when we do, when we can pray with open and obedient hearts that His will be done, then we can be free of our need to control.

Resurrect

How do we walk with the Lord on His journey, especially in this year of so much change and uncertainty. Surrender. Endure. Grieve. Resurrect.

Easter: Resurrect

We are all Mary Mag on Easter morning.

We have surrendered, and followed.

We have endured.

We have grieved.

We have been promised a resurrection, but we don’t fully understand what that means. And we’re not sure how the dead guy, the one who did all the miracles before, is going to be able to help himself.

We are all Mary Mag.

When she woke up on that third day, she knew the prophecies, and she knew what Jesus himself had said. But the world looked the same, and in that world, Jesus’ burial needed finishing. So she gathered her oils and one or two other women and off they went to do their work.

She witnesses the empty tomb in all four of the gospels. In John’s, she runs to get Peter, who comes back with her, sees the empty tomb and flees. Flees. Mary stands her ground, in tears. She thinks his body has been stolen—“They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have put him” (20:13). She still doesn’t understand that in this moment, everything is new.

Jesus is new—the Risen Christ, the promise fulfilled.

The world is new, saved.

Mary is new, so new that Jesus names her again: “Mary”.  And in that moment, she sees the Truth.

This is the promise of the journey, friends. There is a point to our suffering, there is a reason for our sorrow and it’s this: if we do the work, we will die to our old life and rise again in truth.

Let’s don’t go “back” to normal.

Walk your surrender.  

Endure your trial.

Grieve your reckoning.

And rise again in truth.

Happy Easter!

Grieve.

How do we walk with the Lord on His journey? Especially in this year of so much change and uncertainty. Surrender. Endure. Grieve. Resurrect.

Day #3: Grieve  

Listen. This step is the hardest one of all.

Grieving is worse than enduring. When we endure, it is happening, and we put one foot in front of the other and try to stay in our skin. When we grieve, it has already happened and we are left to count the things we have lost. This is the reckoning.

Past the initial stages, grief becomes more intangible, and we think we can push it away. And we can push it, but not away. Twenty years later, that grief will knock on the door and demand to be heard.

Men especially struggle with this because since forever, it has not been ok for men to cry or admit they are sad. Both of these looked like weakness, and God forbid a man appear weak.

Today, there’s more awareness in the world that when we are weak—when we sit inside our grief and heal from it—we are strong. But not enough. We are still learning that lesson in reaction, instead of proactively teaching it to our kids.

Which brings me to the Apostles.

We’re not wholly sure where they spent the second day. John tells us that once Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb on Sunday morning, she ran to tell Peter, and that he and “the other disciples” went to the tomb (20:3). It’s safe to assume they were together, as they had been for three years, but we don’t know for sure.

What we do know is what they were doing: nothing, because it was the Sabbath.

In the Church we say they were “waiting”, and we liken it to our waiting here on earth for what comes next.

But I think it’s no mistake that God made them sit in their grief. No escape. No excuses. Just sit in the grief and feel it.

We have to do this too. We have to. And not just for death. For the lost graduations, weddings, trips of a lifetime, jobs, homes, sports seasons, church community—everything we lost in the last year. All the traumas in our lives. We have to surrender, we have to endure and then we have to grieve what was lost. We have to reckon the cost.

I hear a lot of talk about resilience, most of it in a “suck it up”” kind of way. But true resilience is the result of walking ALL the steps. True resilience is the provenance of the fully healed.

And there is no healing without grief.

Endure

How do we walk with the Lord on His journey, especially in this year of so much change and uncertainty. Surrender. Endure. Grieve. Resurrect. That’s how.

Day #2: Endure

Two weeks ago, I read the part of Mary for a Stations of the Cross written from her perspective.

I didn’t like it. The poetry is beautiful and heart-wrenching. Each station ends with Mary accepting what is happening in silence: I watched, silently. I cried, silently. I walked, silently.

It confronted me powerfully, as a mother. It forced me to think through the reasons why Mary, Mother of God, whose strong, brave voice raised in obedience is what started this whole ball rolling, would be relegated to silence through the passion and death of her son.

I wanted her to rage—against Pilate, against Herod, against the priests of her own faith who were killing her son. I wanted the women of Jerusalem to rise up behind her, raise their hands and voices to heaven and call down the archangels to smite them all.

This is why women like me don’t get picked for these kinds of jobs.

Fine. But why, then. And what can we learn from it?

I knew this had to be.

This line is also in each station. An acknowledgment that even though Mary didn’t know or fully understand what was coming, she believed that something was coming. She believed it more strongly than the Apostles, more strongly than anyone. She had surrendered to his plan. God had promised his people a savior. Gabriel said that her baby was the Son of God and would assume the throne of David and His kingdom would never end.  She knew, as she followed her broken and bleeding son through the streets of Jerusalem, that this was not that. And though she grieved for her son in his pain and suffering, her faith never waivered.

She endured.

And that my friends, is what we should learn from her. Resilience founded in faith, that God is always with us and we can do hard things. She didn’t turn away. She stayed in her skin. She witnessed his pain and death, she lived her own agony as he suffered and still, she endured.

If she attacked the soldiers, if she crumbled into a broken shell in the corner, or someone tried to shield her, she would have missed it. And the thing is, it would have happened anyway. There was no way to avoid it. Only delay the terrible reckoning: this thing happened. She chose to be present because she believed in God’s plan.

It had to be endured.

The same is true for us. The sorrows in our lives cannot be ignored, unwitnessed, unacknowledged, shielded from us. They will happen anyway. And our attempts to deny or flee them doesn’t save us from the reckoning, only delays it. They must be endured. The only way out is through. Like Jesus, who endured it all for us, like Mary his Mother who endured it for him and, by the grace of God, we too are strong enough to endure. 

Surrender

How do we walk with the Lord on His journey? Especially in this year of so much change and uncertainty. Surrender. Endure. Grieve. Resurrect. That’s how.

Day #1: Surrender

Can I introduce my sister, Denell?

Just to clarify, because after watching her video, it’s possible you might think we are actual sisters. We’re not. But like attracts like and Denell exploded into my life on a retreat in 2016.

She is the owner/creator of Coffee As You Are, a Catholic online community. Just recently she quit her day job to dive into spiritual coaching full time–so recently that her website coffeeasyouare.com, is still being rebuilt. But you can find her on Facebook and Instagram (@coffeeasyouare).

We asked her to guest for us during Holy Week because, in her own words, she “LOVES Holy Week!” She’s a Catholic convert, and converts come into the church at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday–so Holy Week takes on another meaning for them. But I’ll let her tell you: