November 20, 2019 “I have to come up with a column. So far, I don’t have any ideas,” I said Sunday morning, with my final deadline getting closer by the minute. “Write about the weather,” my husband said. My response: “How do I connect that to my faith?” “I don’t know. You managed to connect the cat eating plastic to your faith. Why not weather?” I’ve made it no secret that I struggle to write this column. I keep telling the people closest to me that, “I’ve used all my best ideas.” Yet the Holy Spirit keeps giving me new topics or stories to share. Every week, I seem to think about a time I’ve seen God working in my life or some other faith-based concept or story I feel is worthy of sharing. Sometimes, those ideas develop barely on time for me to make deadline. While it still is a source of stress for me, the column has also become a blessing. It’s made me much more alert, on guardfor signs that God is working in my life. It’s made me aware of the places in my life I need to be more open to His graces. It’s made me reflective about the ways my experiences as I try to live out my faith – even sometimes how I struggle to do so – may be relatable to others. It’s caused me to adopt an almost Ignatian spirituality, trying to “find God in all things.” It’s been a prayerful experience. As I struggled to come up with my column this week and thought about how often it’s been a struggle, it occurred to me that this difficult part of my job has helped me in my faith journey and helped me further develop my relationship with the Lord. I’ve become more aware of how He’s working in my life. The struggle has been a blessing. There are times it’s almost impossible to see graces in our struggles, our losses, our pains and/or our times of suffering, and we are called to trust that God has a purpose for them. But there are also those times when we see the graces in our difficulties, and those times are such immense blessings. And, in my case, I also need to look for those blessings and those graces. Even if they come in the form of a cat eating plastic or the weather. |
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