Quick Takes (10)

After being absent from the quick takes scene for a couple weeks, I figured it was high time to re-join Jen and crew for a few updates!

1. Yesterday was my birthday! As a kid, the only reason I liked having my birthday that close to Christmas was because I could ask for presents that I didn’t get two days earlier. It’s a little different now that I’m older and don’t want toys anymore. Haha. I ended up spending the majority of the day with a friend who didn’t even know it was my birthday. Hahaha apparently he forgot to check Facebook ;)

2. As I was opening my sister’s gift to me on Christmas, she says, “I don’t even know if this is something you’d want or like.” Well that’s a promising intro to a present…She got me The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. We’re both huge Harry Potter fans, but I actually hadn’t even looked into her new book. Anyone have any opinion on it? Is it worth the read?

3. Since I didn’t do a quick takes last week, I forgot to write about cookie day. Every year around Christmas, my family gets together and spends all day baking cookies. Literally all day. My mom started at 5 or 6 in the morning (I didn’t get there until about 7:30) and we mixed, rolled out, dropped, and baked cookies until 7 or 8 at night. I don’t even know how many we ended up making. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens. A few lucky friends got some in the mail and my fellow daily mass goers gobbled up quite a few as well :) Anyone else have any Christmas traditions?

4. Over the summer, I borrowed a couple seasons of ER from my grandma. I had watched some of the later seasons when they were still new and had seen most of them in rerun form, but I was running out of things to do so I started from season 1 and worked my way through them. Now I’m on 11 or 12. Gotta love old medical dramas.

5. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas filled with peace, joy, love, and good times with family!

6. In honor of the Holy Feast of the Innocents, I wanted to share this: "Today, dearest brethren, we celebrate the birthday of those children who were slaughtered, as the Gospel tells us, by that exceedingly cruel king, Herod. Let the earth, therefore, rejoice and the Church exult — she, the fruitful mother of so many heavenly champions and of such glorious virtues. Never, in fact, would that impious tyrant have been able to benefit these children by the sweetest kindness as much as he has done by his hatred. For as today's feast reveals, in the measure with which malice in all its fury was poured out upon the holy children, did heaven's blessing stream down upon them."

7. And I’ll leave you with this quote from John Paul II: “People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him. True joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory.”

Jody's birthday

As I'm sure none of you know, today is my birthday! Hahah now you know ;)

Anywaaaaaay, I started off the day by going to mass. I usually stay afterward to have coffee/tea and cookies with the other dailies, but I had to get home so I could catch a train into the city for a birthday lunch! So as I was getting ready to leave, the priest and another older gentleman decided to sing to me. Hahaha and it was hilarious. First of all, my poor priest LOVES to sing but he can't carry a tune. At all. So he just sort of made up his own melody. But it gets better. When they got to the part "happy birthday dear (insert birthday boy or girl's name here), the Father Richard just sort of mumbled through that part and the other man inserted the name Jody. It took everything I had not to start cracking up!

Hopefully all of your days have started off that joyfully!! :)

Spiritually Thirsty Thursday

I'm not exactly sure when the tradition started since I was only involved in our Newman Center for a year, but every Thursday night, there would be mass at 9 followed by fellowship and food. And as you've surely guessed, it was called spiritually thirsty Thursday. I figured it could be a fun thing to incorporate into my blog (minus the Mass...and the food....) Hahaha we'll see how it goes.

This quote seemed pretty fitting since Christmas is only 5 days away!!!

"I am the Mother of adoration and reparation. Beside every tabernacle of the earth there is always my motherly presence. It forms a new and loving tabernacle for the solitary presence of my Son Jesus; it builds a garden of love for his permanent residence among you; it forms a celestial harmony which surrounds Him with all the enchantment of paradise in the adoring choirs of angels, in the blessed prayer of the saints, in the painful aspiration of the many souls who are being purified in purgatory. In my Immaculate Heart all form a concert of perennial adoration, of unceasing prayer and of profound love for Jesus, really present in every tabernacle on earth.

Today my motherly heart is saddened and is deeply wounded because I see that, about the divine presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, there is so much emptiness, so much abandonment, so much neglect, so much silence.

O Church, pilgrim and suffering, of which I am the Mother, Church who are the family of all my children, ark of the new alliance, people of God, you must understand that the center of your life, the font of your grace, the source of your light, the beginning of your apostolic action is found only here in the tabernacle where Jesus is truly kept. And Jesus is present to teach you how to grow, to help you walk, to strengthen you in giving witness, to give you courage in evangelizing, to be a support for all your sufferings." 

Words of Our Lady, August 21 1987

I pray Jesus continues to bless us with all of these gifts, but also that we remember to ask for them and recognize that we need them. He wants to give us all of this and more. What are we willing to give to Him? 

Toys from the 90s :)

Making up for my lack of posts last week with three in a row this week. You're welcome. ;)

As I was wasting hours of my life perusing Facebook last night, I found this gem on a friend's wall. Obviously I went through and reminisced about all the toys I used to have. Between my sister and me, we had #s 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, and 50.

1. Those roller skates were not a great investment for us because we lived on a tar-and-chip road and the little plastic wheels couldn't handle all the gravel. Therefore, my sister and I did more walking tripping than skating.

2. Moon shoes were THE BEST! Until we got to big and broke the elastic with our jumps...whoops.

6. Did anyone ever win this game?

7. Somehow we didn't get tired of hearing the same song. Over and over and over and over again.

9. I'm pretty sure we spent hours recording "secret" messages on these little guys and then turning the dial so we sounded like robots or Alvin and his chipmunk brothers. I'm not sure what ended up happening to them. If I had to guess, I'd say my mom hid them from us.

12.  I used to have a Reptar-mobile that had coloring books and crayons and other crafty stuff inside.

13. I'm pretty sure we had every Disney version of these. Almost as much fun as watching the actual movie. Almost...

15. We both had gold ones that we used to race from the top of the hill on our street (or our neighbor's driveway).

18. We used to cheat at Bop-It by having one of us man the bop-it and pull-it, while the other one had the twist it. This was actually a horrible idea because we ended up blaming each other every time we lost!

21. The little boy I babysat last year had one of those echo mics. I hid it from him every chance I got...hahaha. Why are children's toys so annoying??

22. Tamagotchis were banned from my grade school because kids spent too much time taking care of their strange creatures and all the beeping drove the teachers crazy. Obviously I couldn't just let mine die, so I did the logical thing and made my mom take it to work with her and care for it.

24. The lazy man's form of catch.

26. Looooooved my LiteBrite.

27. My sister begged my mom for this art kit. I think she used it twice. Story of kids' gifts...

28. Who thought this was a good idea...?

30. PlayDoh that you were supposed to let dry out basically, but mom would never let us cover any of our stuff with it like the commercials suggested.

31. I have no recollection of this story but my mom swears it's true: One time, a friend came over to our house and wanted to play with my Sky Dancers. So we took them outside and everything was fine and dandy until she got one of them stuck on the roof. Apparently I acted like it was the end of the world and refused to let her play with any of the others. And of course we don't have a ladder at my house, so for all I know, that little fairy is still up there!

32. Yeah we definitely never built anything this cool. We were lucky if we could find enough pieces to make a snowflake.

35. Our aim was so bad that no one ever got "soaked." We chalked it up as a success if a couple dribbles hit our intended target.

39. Did anyone else have the 96 pack of crayons??

40. We.were.OBSESSED.with.pokemon. We had the Game*Boy games, the cheat books for the games, and the cards. We would bring them to school to trade with our friends. I'm pretty sure we knew the names of all the original 150. I even had Charizard at one point.

41. They do have a very distinctive smell. Why is that?

42. Hahaha I took this to a slumber party one time and we spent the whole night taking and decorating pictures of each other. The paper turned into stickers--what more could you ask for??

43. The cure for our roadtrip boredom.

45. I always assumed ours was broken because it never seemed to register as many skips as I believed I accomplished. Clearly faulty technology.

47. I spent hours moving my Polly Pockets from the first floor to the second floor.

50. Instead of getting an allowance, we used to get a Beanie Baby every week. Of course we thought they'd be worth millions one day. Now they just sit in a tote in our garage collecting dust...apparently we should have sold them as soon as we bought them. So much for our get-rich-quick scheme.

Hopefully you had as much fun as I did thinking about the toys we used to play with!

Un-limiting God

Does anyone else find themselves limiting God as much as I do? I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me what I hope to find or experience at a conference I’m going to the first week of January. As I was considering my answer, I thought “well, I don’t want to go into it with any expectations because I don’t want to be let down.” It’s a trap I fall into quite frequently. Instead of thinking about things before they happen, I go into them blindly, with no idea what to expect. In some cases that’s good. I mean, it doesn’t do any good to overanalyze a situation or worry unnecessarily about it. But it doesn’t hurt to do a little thinking beforehand either, especially if the thinking involves praying ;)

Now that I’ve lost you with all that rambling, I’ll explain how this has anything to do with limiting God. In my efforts to keep myself from being disappointed, I’ve taken God out of the equation. I’ve assumed that He doesn’t want to or worse, can’t, grant my desire. I’ve prematurely assumed He’s going to answer my prayer with a no, without even giving Him the chance to say yes. But the last time I checked, we have an all-powerful God who is able to take the idea he has of himself in his mind AND MAKE IT INTO A FLESH VERSION! Soooo I’m pretty sure He can help me have an incredible experience at this conference.

Now, let me give you a little context—this is how the website describes the conference:

“SEEK is a gathering of college students on a journey.  It’s a place where we can come together to take on some of life’s BIGGER questions and, like guides along the way, learn from one another where wisdom and experience lead.  Life is meant to be lived and in order to live it to the fullest, we need to heed the wisdom that calls us to ‘ask, seek and knock’ to discover who we are, where we’re going and what motivates us.
Presented by FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, SEEK 2013 is an adventurous five-day event in Orlando from January 2^nd – 6^th.  With unexpected twists and turns, you will be challenged, inspired and left wanting more.”

How in the world could I be let down by that?? (Ignoring the fact that I’m not actually a college student anymore. Haha not important). But really. God is going to be doing some amazing things there. And as long as I have an open mind and participate in the activities and give everything up to Him, I’m going to leave a changed woman, or at least a more enlightened one! Especially if I pray about it before I hop on that 20+ hour bus ride and really think about what I want to take away from the experience.

And that’s my rambling for the night. Basically I’ve noticed that I tend to forget that God can do anything. But He wants me at this event for a reason, and I’m ready to figure out why! (and maybe ask for a thing or two along the way ;) )

Wisdom from Wizards

Need a good source of entertainment? Go see The Hobbit.

Need a little adventure in your life? Go see The Hobbit.

Need a break from studying? Go see The Hobbit.

Need to get your mind off something? Go see The Hobbit.

Need a cure for writer’s block? Go see The Hobbit.

(I’d read the book before you go watch the movie, but that’s just because I love to read and get all the extra details).

I’m not sure if you figured it out yet or not, but I went to see The Hobbit tonight ;) and it was awesome! I loved all three movies in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (during a snow day a couple of years ago, my friends and I watched them all in a row) so I was really excited when I heard Peter Jackson was doing this one, too.

Luckily it’s been about 10 years since I read the book, so I had forgotten most of the storyline. I knew the very rough outline, but I could have gotten that much simply by watching the previews. And that’s the way I like it! When the Harry Potter movies were coming out, I used to reread the book right before I saw the movie, and it was the worst mistake I could have made! Apparently I thought it would be a good idea to be aware of all they have to leave out in the interest of time…well, let’s just say, it wasn’t. I’d walk out of the movies angry because they didn’t put this in or they didn’t put that in. Dumb dumb dumb. And I almost made the same mistake this time! Luckily, I recalled the anger that was sure to flare up just in time and stopped myself from experiencing it for the 8^th time.

Anyway, on to the point of this post (as if there is one).

During one of the scenes, Gandalf is talking to Galadriel (don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away) and he says:

“Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

As soon as he said it, I wanted to write it down because I knew I’d never remember it once the movie was over. I can’t even remember the responsorial psalm after the first verse is read, so me keeping that quote in my head for 2.5 hours was not going to happen. I’m surprised I even remembered who the conversation took place with! Luckily the internet helped me out with the rest ;)

I guess I just really love the message in those simple words. We don’t need to be rich or powerful to do good. We don’t need to have armies standing beside us in order to make a difference. We don’t need to be the best or the fastest or the biggest or the brightest or the strongest to have an effect on someone. We just need to be ourselves. Because God has endowed each of us with a gift, a piece of Himself, that will allow us to make a difference. We all have some characteristic within ourselves that will help us fulfill whatever plan God has for us each and every day. Sure we can’t all be the next Mother Teresa, but we’re not supposed to be (just ask Danielle Rose). And there’s so much we can do without simply copying her beautiful ways. We can take the time to smile at someone as we pass them on the sidewalk. We can volunteer somewhere. We can offer to babysit for a family at church. We can put something into the second collection on Sunday. We can bake cookies for a friend. We can send someone a text to say we care about them. We can hold the door open for the person behind us. We can recycle. We can donate our old clothes and toys and books. We can spread joy instead of sorrow. We can smile more and frown less. We can give more and take less. We can be kind. We can be loving.   

What do you think? How can we be ordinary folk keeping the darkness at bay? 

Spreading Joy

In order to keep my brain from turning to mush, I decided to take a break from my most recent TV obsession (The Good Wife) and find something that would inspire me. I remembered someone saying that Papa Benny (or Pope Benedict XVI for those of you who only know him by his more formal name..hehe) would be gracing the world with his first tweet today, and my source turned out to be true! I'm sure his 873,000 followers were elated. I, however, needed more than 140 characters from him. Naturally I enlisted Google’s help, because no one knows more than Google, and eventually I found this gem: 

“Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.”

I know I find myself getting caught in this trap. *I’ll preface this by saying I’m a bit of an over-analyzer and a worrier.* Whenever I’m around friends who are going through a rough patch, I’m hesitant to tell them about any good event going on in my life for fear that it will make them feel worse about whatever is going on in theirs. I don’t want them to feel like I’m brushing off their sadness or trying to glaze over it. And I never know whether people want to hear about happy things when they’re not happy. It’s so situation-dependent or even minute-dependent. There are times when I welcome a distraction from my sadness and other times I just want to wallow a bit, so I’m sure everyone else feels the same way. But just because we’re sad doesn’t mean that happy things aren’t going on in our lives or in the lives of those around us. We should want to encounter that joy and allow it to overshadow the sadness instead of shutting it out and focusing on the bad. Easier said than done, right? I know it is for me. Even though I know that hearing about and seeing someone else’s joy always brings a smile to my face, I still hesitate to look for it when I’m in a funk. Even though I know how refreshing and relieving it is to laugh, I still find myself listening to sad music or reading a sad book when I’m down. Why is that? I would heal much more quickly if I allowed myself to seek and experience that joy. I think it comes down to trust, just like Papa Benny said. If I would just put my trust in the Lord and in His plan for me, it would be much easier to encounter that joy because I’d be more likely to look for it. We can’t find something if we’re not looking.

So that’s my goal for the rest of this week—offer up everything to God each and every day so that I can see how much different the days are when I allow and welcome His control and so that I can experience and share more joy :)

Scripture Sunday (1)

I also hope you don't mind that I grabbed your image!

I really enjoy reading Claire’s Scripture Sunday posts, so this week I decided to join her. (Hopefully you don’t mind, friend!)

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m so glad to be done with the doom and gloom apocalyptic readings we’ve been getting the past couple months! (Now if only the sun would show its lovely face…but alas, one thing at a time). I’m ready for some hope-filled readings! And today’s definitely did the trick. The verse that really stuck out to me was from the Gospel (Luke 3:1-6)

            “The winding roads shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth.”

The first thing that came to mind when I read the passage right before Mass was Heaven and Jesus’ second coming. I assumed St. Luke was talking about what the world would look like after Jesus returns and sets all things right. It makes sense, right? Heaven is going to be perfect, so we’ll no longer carry the burdens we do now. We’ll have overcome all the trials, tribulations, and heartaches we’re going through. Everything will be straight and smooth and Jesus will be the one to do it.

Well, turns out my way of thinking may only be partially right. Yes, it will be because of Jesus that the world is made perfect, but He’ll be using US to do it. During the homily, my priest spelled out this message for us. He confessed that he originally thought the same thing I just wrote due to the fact that the verse is written in future tense whereas the one before it is in present tense. But after reflecting on the reading more, he decided that it’s talking about us, not Jesus. We’re the ones being called to make the roads straight and the ways smooth for others. We need to be the ones to bring Christ to others so that we can all be prepared for His second coming. Obviously, we can’t do it without His help, but we are to be His hands out in the world. People need to see His face when they look at us. We need to make ourselves pure vessels so that Jesus has something pure to come back into. The first coming was obviously in Mary, and we all know about her Immaculate Conception and her purity. But the second time He comes, it will be in us. So we need to make life worth living so that people can encounter Jesus. We are how people will see the salvation of God. We are how Jesus will be made manifest again. We are Jesus in the world.

The priest even went so far as to speculate that Jesus won’t come again until everyone in the world has had the Gospel shared with him or her.

So what are we doing to share our faith with others? How can we help each other grow in holiness? How are we showing others the love of Jesus? I know I need all the help I can get!