Be a Living Rosary!

Drawing by Anna Ponchak

I believe God calls us to the vocation that is going to best help us encounter him and help us grow in holiness. The more we encounter him and grow in holiness, the more joy we will have. For me, that vocation is Motherhood. 

My children have definitely helped me in my quest for holiness and have helped me grow closer to Christ. Through my first two, the Lord started teaching me about resting in him and receiving his grace. The next two helped teach me perseverance. Number six, our boy taught me that God is faithful to his promises. Through my fifth child however, I feel like I have grown the most. You see, she was miserable from day one and continued to be that way until she turned four. She cried all the time, even when I would hold her. She also would not go to anyone else but me and she constantly wanted to be held and nursed so I never got a break. 

One day I was sitting in the rocking chair, that she dictated I sit in, and nursed her while also reading a book a friend gave me. The book was Interior Freedom, by Fr. Jacques Philippe. I read stories about people that had been prisoners in concentration camps but still had joy and peace because they had found an interior freedom that came from knowing Christ. I cried as I read this book because like them, I also felt like a prisoner, just to a lesser degree. Before my fifth daughter was born, I kind of had it all together, or at least I thought I did. Everything was somewhat under control. I was usually able to complete my "to-do-list" every day. After Sarah showed up however, my world seemed to fall apart. That book helped me to see that there was a lot of work that the Holy Spirit still needed to do in my heart. I realized he was calling me to a higher level of surrender.

I began to realize that my main goal everyday was to complete my mental "to-do-list". I even had prayer on that list. If anything stood in the way of me getting my list completed, I would lose my peace and my joy and my family suffered. After two years of struggling to row upstream and crying out to the Lord, "WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?!", he finally showed me my problem. He impressed on me that my main goal every day needed to be to encounter him and help my children encounter him. I then realized, that even though I was making it a priority to pray everyday, I wasn't necessarily taking the time to encounter him. By just trying to complete my "to-do-list" everyday, I had become like a hamster on a hamster wheel and life lost it's joy and felt like drudgery.

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis said, "The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all those who encounter Christ."

When our main goal is to encounter Christ, well, we can do that no matter what is going on in our lives. We can encounter Jesus in the joys of life. We can encounter him in the sorrows and the cross. We can encounter him on the mountaintop or the valley. We can find him in the mundane and the thrilling. Most everything we experience, Jesus experienced. He was and is a person. These are also the things we meditate on when we pray a Rosary. 

For my Protestant friends who may think the Rosary is all about Mary, it really is not. Through the Rosary, we meditate on the Gospel, the life of Jesus. Yes, there are also Marian prayers. Through these we ask Mary for her intercession and to bring us into a deeper relationship with her son. There are also a few things we experience, especially those of us who are mother's, that Mary instead of Jesus experienced. She experienced the joy and sorrow of being a mother. It is okay to meditate on these things (Philippians 4:8). Jesus gave her as a gift to us (John 19:27) and we can find comfort in her story because it is our story too. Unlike Jesus who was also fully God, Mary was fully human and yet she was highly favored and full of grace (Luke 1:28). This should encourage us of how much we also are loved and the level that God desires to elevate us and how we, like Mary are also called to magnify him (Luke 1:46). This is also what we as Catholics meditate on when we pray a Rosary. Mainly though, through the Rosary we meditate on the life of Jesus. We meditate on his joys, his adventures, his sorrows, and his glory. It is all covered in the Rosary. The goal then is to join our lives to his. In this way, we become a living Rosary. 

A Life Worth Living

Well, I didn't come up with a blog post yesterday so I guess I wasn't faithful to my 7 in 7 challenge. Again, soon after the kids got to bed, I spent some time in prayer and was going to blog but couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. The gospel reading yesterday was from Matthew 6:24-34 where Jesus tells his disciples not to worry. So, I am not going to worry about it. Today is a new day. How often though can we get perfectionistic in our prayer life and our relationship with the Lord. I used to be very much that way. I felt it needed to be all or nothing. If I couldn't pray "perfectly" (whatever that would look like) I wouldn't pray.

Lent is starting this week. Many of us will try to make commitments and give up things in order to better our spiritual lives and hopefully grow closer to Jesus. The Lord is delighted by this desire. There is a good chance however that many of us will at some point fail in our commitments we made. At some point we may give into the temptation to eat a brownie even though we gave up sweets. This may cause us to get discouraged and down on ourselves but the important thing is we get back up. The Lord is so kind and merciful, and it pleases him to see his children making any kind of effort to draw close to him. We need to keep in mind that that is the reason we are doing these sacrifices in the first place, is to draw closer to him.

Yesterday we celebrated my youngest daughter's 4th birthday. With each of my kids, the Lord has taught me some valuable lessons. Through Sarah, I have learned more about his unconditional love for us. I have also had to grow in patience and I have received a deeper understanding of interior freedom. These are just to name a few of the things I have learned by being her mother. When she was a baby, it seemed all she did was cry. She was miserable from day one and there was nothing I could do to console her. She wanted to be held and nursed almost constantly but even those things did not make her happy. She was still miserable. There were whole days where all I did was sit in a rocking chair and nurse her. During that time a friend of mine lent me a book called, "Interior Freedom" by Jacques Philippe. This book was invaluable. I sobbed the whole time I read it. It had true stories of people even in concentration camps that discovered an interior freedom and joy in Christ even though physically they were not free.

One day I was praying about why she was so miserable all the time. I heard in my heart, "It's because she was made for heaven." That kind of freaked me out at first as I was thinking the worst. The truth however is that we are all ultimately made for heaven. None of us are ever going to be fully satisfied with life here on earth. Like St. Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until it rests in you". Only God can truly satisfy the longings in our hearts. We were made for him. Our lives are supposed to reflect and glorify him. When we fail to do that and when we fall short, we feel the aching in our hearts.The good news is that because of Jesus' death and resurrection, the breach in our relationship to God has been repaired and the Holy Spirit is now made available to all of us. We now have the potential to get as close to the Lord as we want. He is also preparing a place for us in heaven which will be beyond our wildest imaginations! Heaven is our true home and our final destination. Realizing that truth, let us take advantage of all the opportunities here on earth to grow closer to him.