7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 11)

--- 1 ---

I'm so excited: a good friend and I are going to do a big Baking Day sometime in December where we bake up fancy cookies and treats to use as gifts. The idea is that each person bakes a few different kinds of things and then you each get some of each other's so that you can create gift baskets with a large variety of homemade goods without having to make it all yourself. It should be fun, and also save a lot of money on gifts. (I should note that this is not my original idea -- I got it from a very creative and clever friend of mine.)

For inspiration, I used an Amazon gift card to go on a little book buying spree and got all of the following books used for around $2 each:

• Gifts from the Kitchen (Williams-Sonoma)
• The Perfect Basket: How to Make a Fabulous Gift Basket for Any Occasion
• Favorite Brand Names: Gifts from the Christmas Kitchen
  

--- 2 ---

Since Yaya was here this week, I was able to get out and go to the library to do some writing work. I emailed my husband to tell him I was there, and he responded by saying only:

watch out for pirates.

At first I didn't know what he meant...but then I remembered. (See #2 here). My husband the comedian was still laughing about it when he got home that night.

--- 3 ---

Yaya spontaneously decided to give the baby a bang trim with kitchen scissors on Wednesday. "Wednesday" as in "Day Before Christmas Card Pictures" Wednesday. Though I wasn't there, my guess from seeing the results is that she did it blindfolded with one hand tied behind her back. Or something.

Let's just say I'm glad I'm good with Photoshop, otherwise I'd have to try to convince people that the "stair-step" look is in this year.

--- 4 ---

Elizabeth Esther's recent hilarious post about Facebook trying to lure her back in after she quit reminded me of the most impressive unsubscribe guilt trip I've ever seen. I love FlyLady and used to get her routine reminders by email, but eventually unsubscribed as an effort to declutter my inbox. I immediately got this auto-reply:

Dear Friends,

Our members either love our reminders or get mad at them because they hear a nagging voice. These reminders are here to gently keep you from forgetting. They are said in our loving voice and not a negative voice from your past.

[People] join and get overwhelmed by the reminders. I know how much we all hate change. [...]

We are here to help you and it breaks my heart that we are pushing away the people that need us the most.

FlyLady

Breaks her heart! She's trying not to be a voice from my past! Ack! The guilt! But the unsubscribe notice wasn't done. It then included an email from a reader who had herself unsubscribed a while back in which she shared the real reason she left the list:

I had joined in 2000 and quit after six months. I joined again in 2003, and quit after two months. Here's why I quit both times: as I read your emails, I heard my mother's voice. The negative, critical voice. I didn't like being bossed around, and being reminded I was a failure. That's how I read your messages, despite all your efforts to the contrary. [She ended up re-subscribing and all was well. -JF]

So if I don't re-subscribe, FlyLady is going to think that I thought she was bossing me around and making me feel like a failure?! Should I contact her and clear things up, explaining that the issue wasn't that I thought she was telling me that I was a failure but just that I was actually failing and too lazy to care? It was agonizing.

Although...if I ever start an email list I'm going to remember this tactic. :)

--- 5 ---

My husband and I are going to watch our annual movie this weekend. We only watch one movie a year, to play in the background while I work on Christmas card stuff. (And we actually haven't been to a movie in the theaters since 2004!)

All that is to say, we don't even know what's out there. Any suggestions? What's the best movie you've seen in the past few years?

--- 6 ---

We did get Christmas card pictures taken yesterday, and we actually got one with all five of us that meets all of my Christmas card photo requirements:

• nobody had their eyes closed
• at least one person was looking at the camera
• less than half of the people in the photo were screaming.
  

It was supposed to be photo taken in the wan afternoon light, perhaps with a sunset glowing in the background; by the time we got everyone dressed, groomed and out the door it ended up being a night photo. Maybe people will think we were being artsy.

--- 7 ---

We had a lovely day yesterday. My 94-year-old grandfather fixed up a feast and my mom made some wonderful pumpkin and apple pies. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

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Below is a Mr. Linky list if you'd like to add a link to your own 7 Quick Takes post. (1) Make sure the link you submit is to the URL of your post and not your main blog URL. (2) Include a link back here.

NOTE: Since many of us were away from our computers a lot this week, feel free to add your link later in the weekend if you can't get it up by Friday.

Two announcements

Blogging Mini-Vacation This Week

The theme of this week is Working Like a Madwoman to Make Up for All The Slacking I Did Earlier this Month. Yaya came up again and has given me yesterday, today and tomorrow to have as vacation days where she'll take over everything and let me do whatever I want. Whoo-hoo! In my effort to cram about three weeks of work into three days, I'm going to keep the blogging to a minimum this week. Although we're still on for 7 Quick Takes Friday -- I can always come up with seven random thoughts.


Exciting Book News

Big news: sitting here on my desk is a contract that says I officially have a literary agent for my book. Very exciting! Having an agent isn't a guarantee that a book will be published, but it's a big step. Interestingly, this is a secular agency. I was wondering if my story would be "too religious" for them, but I guess they didn't think so. I have a lot of confidence in this agent and am extremely excited to be working with him. Now I just need to finish the thing... :)


Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone! I'll be back on Friday.

Guest Post: We Can't Have the Hours Back, So Use them Well

I originally "met" Jenny Reosti through an email shortly after her seven-year-old son died unexpectedly in 2007 of a condition called SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epileptic Patients). Over the past year we have corresponded regularly, and I have been so touched and inspired by her faith in the face of tragedy that I asked her to do a guest post to share a bit of her wisdom and her son's story with all of you.

We Can't Have the Hours Back, So Use them Well

by Jenny Reosti

I feel that I owe it to my son to make some positive changes in my own life after his tragic death. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what God wants me to do and the message I have received is to spread the word. Tell others not only his story but let them know how precious each day is. There is a prayer I say with my children at the start of the day that has really hammered God's message in my head:

Lord, thank You for another day
within this life of mine.
Give me the strength to live it well,
whatever I may find.

Bestow from Your abundance
whatever I may lack.
To use the hours wisely,
for I cannot have them back.

Lord, thank You for another day,
in which to make amends
for little slights or petty words,
inflicted on my friends.

For sometimes losing patience
with problems that I find.
For seeing faults in other lives,
but not the ones in mine.

Lord, thank You for another chance,
in which to try to be
a little more deserving
of the gifts You've given me.

For yesterday is over,
and tomorrow's far away,
and I remain committed
to the good I do today!

Ben definitely lived his life to the fullest. He did all things whole-heartedly, whether going to Mass, playing with friends, or just pretending in his imaginary world. So many times each day, I will catch myself not appreciating all that God has bestowed upon me. I am working on enjoying the moment rather than planning for that perfect moment that may never happen.


The day Ben died was an ordinary Saturday, with the exception that the piano tuner was coming by to fix our piano. I remember wanting to have the house looking clean for when he came. I am forever grateful that I took the 15-20 minutes to watch Ben and his 7-month-old brother play together in my room, rather than try to run downstairs and clean. Jack had just started sitting well, yet Ben was watchful for any signs that Jack might fall. They were playing so sweetly and I just watched and thought about all the great times these two would have together. I could never have imagined that in 2 short hours, all these dreams would never come true.

Ben came into this world screaming and didn't stop complaining for a year. Then, like a switch being turned off, he stopped crying. He was suddenly happy, funny, and loving. It was such a joy to see all the sorrow gone and this zest for life developing. Then, when he was 14 months old, he had a seizure while he was sick with a fever. The doctors reassured us that this was a common thing to happen with a fever. But over the next days, he continued to have seizures even though the fever was gone. After many tests and a hospital stay, the doctors put Ben on seizure medication and sent us home. By the age of 3, he was diagnosed with epilepsy but the seizures were almost completely controlled by his medication and he lived the life of a normal kid.

Saturday morning. Ben came to me a little later and said his head hurt. The other kids had recently had head colds and so I figured he was the next one to get the cold. I gave him some medicine for the headache. He wanted to lie down so he went to his room. I went downstairs at that time and finally did a fast clean-up before the tuner arrived. He stayed about 90 minutes. It was getting close to lunch by the time the tuner left. I called for Ben but he did not answer me. I went upstairs but I had this horrible feeling that something was wrong. I found Ben in his bed, dead.

We now know that he died of SUDEP, which stands for Sudden Unexpected Death in Epileptic Patients. We had never been told that this was even a possibility. Our little world as we knew it was shattered. Over the next days and months, I had so many thoughts and feelings. They were mainly things that usually seem so small. I didn't tell him good-bye. I didn't get to say "I love you" or hold him as he left us.

Life is so precious. It is easy to get caught up in the day to day tasks and forget what is most important. Ben was a very affectionate child. He did not hold back on the hugs, kisses, and smiles. I truly feel that Ben wants me to let others know that those little things you do each day are so important. We can't have the hours back, so use them well.

I believe that God is also asking me to raise awareness of SUDEP and to provide a support group for those who are grieving because of SUDEP. This is a huge undertaking for me. I will take it one step a time and pray for God's guidance. At this time, I have a blog page set up in remembrance of Ben that I am slowly transforming into a site to provide support and information about SUDEP. Please stop by at reosti.blogspot.com.

7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 10)

--- 1 ---

Both my husband and a friend pointed out last week that the title 7 Quick Takes Friday is a bit clunky. When I asked for suggestions about how to smooth it out, they both suggested dropping the 7 and calling it Quick Takes Friday, letting people choose their own number of takes to list. In both conversations I believe my reaction was to throw my head back in maniacal laughter.

To my husband and my friend (and probably most of you normal people), it would be an immediate, inconsequential decision as to how many little blurbs to write up for a Quick Takes post. That's not how some of us roll.

There are actually people like me out there who would find this to be a paralyzing decision every single week. If the number were optional, YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW how much mental energy I would pour into analyzing how many takes I should post. If for nobody else than me, the 7 must stay.

--- 2 ---

I already said this on my links blog, but I am loving going back through Barbara Curtis' series about her 90+ pound weight loss (she went from a size 22w to a size 10 and has kept it off!) Especially as I re-think the impact that food has on my physical and spiritual life, I find her thoughts on the subject to be a breath (or, more accurately, a gale-force wind) of fresh air. Some of my favorite posts in her series: Diet Update; More Diet Discussion; and When Your Spouse is Overweight. (Also, keep the Curtis family in your prayers for the difficulty they've been dealing with, which Barbara talked about recently here.)

--- 3 ---

There aren't words to describe how much I hate getting shots. I've made peace with giving myself shots every night -- in the stomach while pregnant, no less -- but for some reason someone else giving me a shot is beyond terrifying to me.

So yesterday my OB/GYN did some mind control thing that made me say yes to getting a flu shot. I requested his most experienced nurse to administer it (in front of the student nurse who normally does it -- sorry, I'm crazy!) and broke out into a cold sweat when she brought it in. She came over with the needle, pinched the skin on my arm a couple times to get it ready, then, just as I was all psyched up for the pain...she didn't do it. She walked away to check some paperwork first.

I asked her what was wrong. She said she was done. Done?! She already did it. I am not exaggerating when I say I felt nothing -- and this was an intramuscular shot.

She needs to open up her own shot-giving business. I'm not kidding. She could bilk people like me for so much money! I would easily pay $50 to get a shot from someone who could do it that well (not that I have an extra $50 lying around, but believe you me, I WOULD FIND IT). If there are any nurses out there with similar skills: this is your ticket to riches.

--- 4 ---

My husband and I moved all our personal sites to a new, cheaper hosting service this weekend. By "my husband and I" I mean he watched the kids while I sat at my desk for six hours straight. It was quite a dance to get all the email and databases set up for our 21 personal domains before switching all the DNS over (and the domains are registered at different places, which made it even more fun).

It reminded me why I did so well in my career days despite my notorious laziness: if there is one thing I do well, it is sitting in front of a computer and focusing on a project for hours on end with no interruption (and listening to rap, although I doubt that contributed either way to my success).

When I worked as a developer I would occasionally work for like 16 hours straight on programming projects, taking only brief breaks to grab a vending machine snack or go to the bathroom. I actually enjoyed it. A lot.

--- 5 ---

A lot of people just thought, "21 domain names?!"

Yeah. My husband and I have this thing where every time we have an idea we register a domain name and put up a website about it. Some of them are business-related, some we just use for email, one is for my mom's side of the family to use for email accounts and group lists, but a lot of them are little personal projects like Suburban CEO.

--- 6 ---

Everyone is talking about Facebook. Everyone. It seemed like fully half of the participants in last week's Quick Takes Friday mentioned it in some way or another, then when I brought it up on Twitter I got 5X the replies I normally get to a tweet. Is everyone on Facebook these days? Am I missing out on something because I don't have a Facebook account?

Oddly, the pitch that seems to reel everyone else in is exactly what makes me run screaming: "People you knew 10 years ago can contact you and y'all can get back in touch!" Uhh, no thanks. I harbor no ill will toward my old group of friends, but there is a reason we're not in touch anymore. (Although I hear that prisons block Facebook, so maybe I have nothing to worry about.)

--- 7 ---

I accidentally hit a deer with my car on Monday night. It was upsetting and traumatic and caused a fair amount of damage to the car, but at least the deer was killed instantly and didn't suffer.

My husband called his buddy down in Houston who is our car insurance agent to tell him about the damage, and the guy's first question was, "Is it still fresh?" My husband asked what he meant. "In most parts of Texas," his friend explained, "You can call someone to come pick up the deer off the road and they'll clean it and give the venison to local food banks!"

Only in Texas.

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Below is a Mr. Linky list if you'd like to add a link to your own 7 Quick Takes post. (1) Make sure the link you submit is to the URL of your post and not your main blog URL. (2) Include a link back here.

Can't wait to read your quick takes!




photo by Jill Greenseth

Book Chat: Books about writing, mental illness and conversion

The books from my first-ever library haul are due back at the library. Here are some thoughts on each one off the top of my head before I take them back this afternoon...


The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

I don't think this book was supposed to be as funny as it was. Quite a few times I laughed out loud at Dillard's reflections on the life of a writer, guffawing to my husband over my shoulder, "Aaah! She's at another cabin in the woods!" adding through laughter, "She's talking about writing for hours on end with no interruption again!" I would read excerpts like this:

During some of the long, empty months at work on the book, I was living in a one-room log cabin on an empty beach...My husband wrote his book in another cabin...When my husband left after breakfast, I looked around the one-room cabin and out at the water and strip of beach. Nothing changed but the tides. [...]

I walked on water. I played the hateful recorder, washed dishes, drank coffee, stood on a beach long, watched bird. That was the first part; it could take all morning, or all month.

...And compare it to what my own version would be like:

After the epic process of putting my two youngest down for nap, I tripped over laundry while taking my beat-up laptop over to the couch to write while my four-year-old had quiet time. Was that a poopy diaper I smelled? I wondered if I might actually throw up on my keyboard from morning sickness. I had about 90 minutes to write before the girls woke up and the house degenerated into chaos again.

I closed my eyes to gain inspiration and was hit in the head by a tennis ball that my toddler threw in my general direction. After putting him in time out I still had all the inspiration of a wet wash cloth but now only had 84.7 minutes left so I just started typing out a bunch of crap and prayed that I could fix it later.

I did enjoy the book as a glimpse into the life of a brilliant, famous writer, and there were some helpful gems to be found like the one that Kelly at Love Well once talked about here. But in terms of gaining insight that's applicable to writers who are not able to retire to seclusion for months on end and devote hours and hours a day to the craft of writing, I think I've learned more from the 10 Minute Writer blog (run by a writer and homeschooling mom of five) than I did from Dillard's book.


Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

I have to say, I didn't think I'd like this book. I've read some recent articles by Lamott that I didn't care for, so I was prepared to have the same take when it came to her memoir about her conversion to Christianity; I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a good read and maybe the most well-written memoir I've ever read.

Her stories of the drug- and sex-drenched culture in which she grew up (and of her own addictions to both that followed) make her eventual conversion to Christianity all the more stunning. And she somehow manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and painfully eloquent. This excerpt, talking about her pre-conversion life, is a good example of her ability to explain complicated situations concisely:

If I could just do a little better [in school], I would finally have the things I longed for -- a sense of OKness and connection and meaning and peace of mind, a sense that my family was OK and that we were good people. I would finally know that we were safe, and that my daddy wasn't going to leave us, and that I would be loved someday.

Drugs helped. More than anything else, they gave me the feeling that I was fine and life was good and something sacred shimmered at its edges.

Maybe it's because in my own pre-conversion life I knew so many people who had issues with drugs, but that last sentence actually brought tears to my eyes with its poignancy.

It dragged a bit in a couple parts, and sometimes it seemed like more of a collection of essays than a memoir (maybe that's what it was supposed to be?), but I was blown away by Lamott's raw talent for writing and found it to be very good overall.


Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing by Patricia O'Conner

This is a great, no-nonsense book of quick tips for writers. O'Conner was an editor at the New York Times Book Review and wrote a bestseller of her own, so she's in the perfect position to give advice to writers. Each chapter is quick, and the variety and number of books she draws from to excerpt as examples is amazing.

If you've read a lot of books about writing you might find that quite a few of the chapters repeat information you've heard in other books, but there are enough gems in this one (e.g. the importance of imagining a friendly reader) that it's worth a place on every writer's bookshelf.


Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

I almost didn't read this one. I only got it at the library because it was one of the few memoirs I could think of off the top of my head; then when I got it home I thought the subject matter -- a young girl in a mental institution -- sounded too depressing. I picked it up one night after the kids went to sleep and found that I couldn't put it down, finishing it in just a couple of days. Kaysen has a unique style of writing that stops just short of being what you could call stream-of-consciousness (or even rambling). It takes a lot of confidence to pull of a style like hers, and she does it flawlessly.

Probably the thing she does best is offer a surprisingly lucid description of what it's like to have mental illness. In one chapter she explains it using the example of how we all have two "interpreters" in our brains, one that gets the sensory data from the world and another that processes it:

Think of being in a train, next to another train, in a station. When the other train starts moving, you are convinced that your train is moving...It can take a while -- maybe even half a minute -- before the second interpreter sorts through the first interpreter's claim of movement and corrects it. That's because it's hard to counteract the validity of sensory impressions. We are designed to believe them. [...]

Sometimes, when you've realized that your train is not really moving, you can spend another half a minute suspended between two realms of consciousness: the one that knows you aren't moving and the one that feels that you are. You can flit back and forth between these perceptions and experience a sort of mental vertigo. And if you do this, you are treading on the ground of craziness -- a place where false impressions have the hallmarks of reality.

There are some really depressing stories in the book and a heaping serving of profanity; but Kaysen manages to highlight such interesting little details of life in a mental hospital, showcase just the right observations about the personalities of the people involved, and describe her experience with such clarity that you can't help but enjoy reading her memoir.


Whew! I can finally get those books off the top of my refrigerator now (where I keep them so that they're safe from little hands). If you've read any of these books or have thoughts you'd like to add, I'd love to hear from you.

A quick update

Just a reminder that I'll be hosting 7 Quick Takes Friday again this week. I loved loved loved reading all the posts from last week! If you haven't had a chance to click through and read other bloggers' 7 Quick Takes, you really should (go to this post and scroll down for the list). I was surprised at how many fun / funny / interesting little gems I came across, and each post doesn't take long at all to read.

Also, I finally added a profile picture. Unlike you fancy Wordpress people I can't create a separate "About Me" page, so there it is, on the left sidebar. I always enjoy knowing what other bloggers look like, so I thought I'd go ahead and post a picture of myself as well.

Have a great evening, and thanks for all the fascinating comments from the Saint Diet post -- follow-up coming soon.

The Saint Diet

This post is part of a series about re-thinking my relationship to food, which I call "The Saint Diet" to remind myself that the ultimate goal is deeper union with God. You can read all the posts on the subject here (scroll down to see them all).

• A couple weeks ago I was talking to my spiritual director about my slack prayer habits, and I happened to mention in passing how tired I am all the time. Interestingly, she wanted to focus more on addressing the tiredness situation than the specifics of the prayer issues, pointing out that if you're exhausted it's going to make everything an uphill battle, including prayer.
  
  
• Then, as I wrote about here, I went to Adoration with a laundry list of concerns and ended up feeling called to one thing and one thing only: to put some serious thought into what I eat on a daily basis to help control the "carb crashes" that regularly put me in a sluggish, angry mood.
  
  
• Then one morning I found myself acting like a maniac in my car, about to harass a weary woman in the minivan in front of me, all because I was overbooked and in a huge rush. I wrote about it at the time here.
  

These three lessons have been rolling around in my mind, and finally coalesced into an ah-hah moment when I realized: there are ways you can structure your lifestyle to make it more conducive to holiness.

I know this is probably obvious to a lot of people, but it was a real lightbulb-going-on moment for me. As a new convert, I'd always thought of living a life of holiness and avoiding sin as confined to the spiritual level alone, that there was nothing I could do in my physical life (other than receive the sacraments) to impact it one way or another. But, now that I think about it...

If prayer time rolls around and I'm tempted to read blogs instead of pray, am I more likely to turn to God instead of Bloglines if...

a) I went to bed around midnight, leaving me feeling exhausted, sluggish and weak.

b) I went to bed at a reasonable hour and got plenty of good sleep, leaving me with an ample store of mental and physical energy for the day.

If I am at the grocery store and someone is rude to me, am I more likely to respond in Christian charity if I have eaten a lunch that consists of...

a) Greasy pizza, Coke and a cookie.

b) A mixed greens salad with lean chicken and hardboiled eggs.

If my children misbehave and do something that costs me time and throws my schedule off track, am I most likely to resist the urge to lose my temper and start yelling if...

a) I have more on my plate than I could possibly handle and am trying to accomplish 20 hours of work in a 12 hour day.

b) If I have kept my commitments to a reasonable level and have buffer in my schedule to allow for the unexpected.

And so on. Obviously, choice (b) is going to help me do the right thing in every case.

Similar examples could be given about the spiritual impacts of not getting enough exercise, carrying too much extra weight, not getting enough sunlight and fresh air, etc. (all things that apply to me to some extent or another). It's not to say that any of these things make it impossible to be Christ-like, but the battle against our fallen natures is certainly more of an uphill battle when our lifestyles set us up to feel stressed, overwhelmed and fatigued all the time.

Over and over again lately I've felt called to focus on this to the exclusion of almost everything else. I think that God is basically trying to tell me, "Look. It's going to be hard enough for you to be a saintly person. You really, really don't need lifestyle factors to make this any more difficult than it's already going to be for you."

So I've been attempting to embark on a lifestyle makeover, starting with my diet. Since I have some obvious insulin sensitivity issues and turn into a very angry, very tired person after I eat processed foods (seriously -- we're talking Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type stuff), I've realized that eating a "whole foods" diet would have a big impact not just on my physical health, but on my spiritual health as well. I've been calling it The Saint Diet in my head, an eating plan that consists of foods that will maximize physical health, energy levels and mental peace (and, when I'm not pregnant, I'd love to also incorporate some traditional fasting practices to help temper my attitudes toward food...but that's the subject of another post).

So that's what's going on with me this week: I'm working on coming up with a list of foods, particularly lunch foods, that are nutritious and free of processed carbs, yet are also fairly easy to prepare and keep on hand. It won't be easy to make these changes, especially with my issues with simple carb addiction, but it's something I feel strongly called to do.

I'd love to hear any thoughts or suggestions!


RELATED: Check out the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity that I posted in this post (scroll down), and notice how it speaks of a life of balance and buffer. I find it so inspiring!

Planning to do great things for God

This post is part of the Flashback Series featuring posts from the site archives. It was originally published on November 9, 2007. I thought I'd re-run this one since this book was the inspiration behind the five-second prayer concept I was talking about the other day, and since the holiday season always temps so many of us to paralyze ourselves with perfectionist tendencies.



While I still have Finding God's Will For You out on my desk from my recent post I thought I'd share one of the main points I took away from the book, a concept that has changed my life.

When I first sat down to read this book back in late July, I was in "nesting mode" for the impending arrival of my third baby. Now, what "nesting mode" means for me is probably different than what it means for other people. I think that, for most women, it means that they get their houses all cleaned up and organized before the new baby comes. For me, it means sitting around and drawing up grand plans that will take my house from plain and cluttered to something fit for a spread in Architectural Digest in about three weeks. My plans are so grand that when I go to start the work I end up shuffling around in an unfocused daze, hopping from one to-do item to the next, working hard but having only unfinished projects to show for my effort.

So as I sat in bed one July night, a pile of clothes stacked on the floor in the corner from an unfinished closet reorganization attempt and a stack of boxes at the foot of my bed for a storage project that never got off the ground, it once again felt like St. Francis de Sales was talking directly to me when I started reading. In discussing how to determine which "inspirations" are from God and which are from a more malevolent force, he writes:

We should not want to practice many exercises at the same time and all of a sudden. The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests we undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. [...]

Very often...the evil one deludes us, and to distract us from achieving some good, he proposes another that seems better.

It only took a quick glance around my bedroom to see that this was advice that I really needed to hear. Not that any one unfinished household project was a big deal, but in total they spoke of a life of distraction and disorder, as well as a certain level of sloth -- when a project got challenging and required discipline and hard work to carry it through, I would suddenly be "inspired" by a far better, more valuable task that I could go start.

St. Francis continues:

Just as a shrub that is often transplanted cannot take root and, as a result, cannot come to maturity and yield the desired fruit, so the soul that transplants its heart from plan to plan cannot profit or gain proper growth in perfection, since perfection does not consist in beginnings but in accomplishments. [...]

Possession of a little treasure actually found is worth more than expectation of a greater one we must still go out to seek. An inspiration urging us to give up some true good we already posses in order to pursue a future better good is suspect.

Until I read this it had never occurred to me that a spiritual attack could come in the form of a suggestion of a good plan. I assumed that as long as I wasn't being tempted to do anything sinful that I must be on the right path. But then, thinking of my recent attempts at regular prayer, it was glaringly obvious that suggestions of good -- even great -- things could be dangerous hindrances to spiritual growth.

For example, for months I had been planning to incorporate daily prayer into my routine. Each night I thought about praying before bed, but my circumstances were never "good enough." The only prayer I could muster tonight would be a quick, sleepy, rushed endeavor, so I should really wait until tomorrow, when I'll have everything under control to have time to pray a full Rosary. And, really, I should have a special place in the house to pray to put me in a properly reverent state of mind -- how uninspired would my prayers be if I simply said them while lying in bed! In fact, I should designate a separate area for prayer in my room, complete with a table for a Bible and a prayer book, candles, maybe even a kneeler! I wonder if I could find a cheap kneeler online? And maybe some incense...

And so on and so on. Meanwhile, no actual praying was getting done.

Now, I don't know whether that was an actual spiritual attack or not, but I do know that my planning to do great things to glorify God in prayer were not actually glorifying God. I was just wasting time. And I was surprised at how hard it was to change.

Inspired by this advice, I decided that every night I will simply kneel down at the side of my bed, cross myself, and say a quick prayer. If I am able to do more, I will. But I will at least do that. It's not as much as I'd like to do, there are so many "better" options, but at least it will get done. Simple enough, right? Not for me. Every single night I still hear myself think something like, "Kneeling down at the side of the bed? That's for children! The real way to show respect for God would be to go downstairs to the office, light a candle, read from the Bible for a few moments, then spend at least thirty minutes in deep prayer. Now, of course, there's not time for that tonight. Maybe I could just do it tomorrow..."

It's been surprisingly difficult to silence this voice that always distracts me with suggestions for "better" options for growing in my newfound faith. But, when I have been able to stop planning and just do it, the results have been great. Almost every night I do kneel down and say a very quick, very imperfect prayer, and I have received noticeable grace from it. The past few weeks have been difficult ones in terms of sleep deprivation and the usual challenges that go with having a three-year-old, a one-year-old and a two-month-old, yet I have felt closer to God than at almost any other point. I think a large part of it is from following St. Francis' advice and simply keeping my head down and getting things done, even if they're only very small and humble tasks, even when I'm strongly tempted to wander off to do something "better".

As I kneel to say my little prayer, even though it's not long enough or serious enough, as I put that stack of books on the shelf, even though I haven't had time to create that grand Master Plan for Book Shelf Categorization, as I clean up the house before my husband comes home, even though it's still pretty messy, I realize that this is how you glorify God. As Mother Teresa once said in her famous quote, God doesn't expect us to do great things in life, only small things with great love.

7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 9)

--- 1 ---

Phrases I have used in emails to a friend to describe the way I feel in late afternoons when I eat simple carbs for lunch:

• "Darth Vader without all the good cheer."
• "A hungover gremlin on quaaludes."
• "A pile of steaming sludge with an attitude."
• "WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF? SOMEBODY KILL ME!!!"
  

(Those are the ones that don't include profanity, anyway.)

--- 2 ---

Do you ever wonder what's up with these huge bloggers who say they don't make much money on their sites? If I understand it correctly, "CPM" means "cost per 1,000 impressions." If you look at the CPM's and page impression stats like this and this and do a little math...it seems like the big bloggers should be raking in the cash from their sites. Yet you never heard about Dooce taking Champagne baths or Pioneer Woman grabbing some milk, eggs and a Bentley on the way back to the ranch just because she felt like it.

I guess my bewilderment is that you hear about things like $10-15 CPM, yet you don't hear about bloggers building mansions or naming yachts after their blogs, which seems like it should be possible for the folks who are getting more than 1,000,000 page impressions per month. Hmm. (I'll blame this one on my web marketing background and not my tendency toward rude curiosity.)

--- 3 ---

An atheistic group is running a "Why believe in a god?" ad campaign during the Christmas season. [Insert Grinch joke here.]

--- 4 ---

I think I'm just destined to live in a house of horrors. Just when I expressed pleasant surprise that there were few scorpion sightings this summer (one of which was a particularly embarrassing experience that I wrote about here), the outdoor cat we inherited with the house started bringing dead vermin to our porch. I'd heard that cats sometimes do this and pictured that her little "presents" to us would be small lizards of fieldmice. Wrong. We're talking big, fat rats and cardinals and squirrels. I would tell you my "cleaning up rat entrails off the back porch before a playdate when I had morning sickness" story but it's just too disgusting.

--- 5 ---

A couple weeks ago our priest was mic'd up before Mass and had an entire phone call broadcast through the sanctuary for all the parishioners to hear. It was incredibly uncomfortable, mainly because we were all desperately wondering how we should react if he were to say something wildly inappropriate. Do you look at the person next to you? Do you clear your throat loudly and act like you didn't hear it? Maybe just hide under the pew? (Or, knowing me, maybe I was the only one wondering about that.) Anyway, luckily he is a very holy man and didn't say anything inappropriate.

--- 6 ---

Speaking of which (except for the "very holy" part), I had one of the most sobering, horrifying experiences I've had in a long time yesterday.

A close friend was over for a playdate and we were speaking very freely and casually within the privacy of my home while the kids played outside. I missed a call on my cell and about three minutes later heard the voicemail chime. I went to check to see who called. Weird. It said it was her. And then it occurred to me: WHERE IS HER CELL PHONE? I looked over to see my one-year-old sitting in the midst of the scattered contents of my friend's purse, happily dialing saved numbers on her cell phone.

I checked voicemail to hear the past three minutes of our private conversation recorded loud and clear.

If you are a saintly person, you won't see what the big deal is about this. But if you are, like me, a less than saintly person with a slight proclivity towards talking trash, you can easily imagine my horror. I thought about all the other numbers the baby could have called (say, my friend's elderly grandmother), thought about all the things I could have said and had recorded unbeknownst to me, and immediately understood this situation to be a bone-chilling, terrifying, direct message from God to clean up my act.

--- 7 ---

Book Update: I'm probably more than half-way through now, starting on Chapter 8 tomorrow. I never cease to be amazed at how much more difficult it is than writing blog posts.

---------

Below is a Mr. Linky list if you'd like to add a link to your own 7 Quick Takes post. Just make sure the link you submit is to the URL of your post and not your main blog URL, and include a link back here. Can't wait to read your quick takes!

"My son is an atheist - what should I do?"

One of the most frequent types of emails I get says something along the lines of:

My [son/daughter/husband/wife] is an atheist. Since you used to be an atheist, please tell me what I can do!

Jason Anderson and I wrote an article a while back that offered some nuts and bolts tips for talking about faith with atheists, and I often point people to that (with the caveat that we must always remember that conversion is God's work, not ours, and that there is nothing we can do to make anyone come to faith).

But I sense that people in this situation want more than that: they want to understand.

I think the reason people email so frequently about this is because they want a glimpse inside the mind of someone who has actually walked the path, who experienced the transformation of going from complete atheism to complete belief. I'm starting to see that the best advice I could give to these folks would not be advice at all, but rather just a glimpse into the way I thought about it and what happened with me so that they can make their own decisions about the best way to approach loved-ones about this topic (if at all).

So, for anyone who is interested, the following is a very brief overview of the process I had to go through in order to "see" that God exists.

-----

My own conversion process can basically be distilled down to this:

Belief in God = Reasonable Basis + Openness to Love

Here's what I mean by that:


Reasonable Basis

I don't know whether it's because I was raised as an atheist or I'm just wired to be hard-headed when it comes to belief, but I could never believe something that was fundamentally unreasonable. The foundation for the rest of my conversion was laid by the discovery that belief in a nonmaterial reality is not unreasonable -- in fact, I came to see that belief in a human soul and a Creator of the universe was actually a position more reasonable than atheism. (The details of why I came to that conclusion are the subject of another post, but I mentioned some books and authors here and here that offer an introductory-level glimpse at the subject.)

For me, any talk whatsoever of leaps of faith, Jesus' love, salvation, redemption, etc. fell on deaf ears until I had some basic understanding of the rational basis for these beliefs.


Openness to Love

What I quickly found, however, was that reason will only get you so far. As I talked about back in March, I came to understand that God is Love (literally), and that love is not something that can be proven through the scientific method. The hypothesis of God's existence is the hypothesis that love exists as its own reality, external to the chemical reactions in our brains -- and that's not a hypothesis that can be tested using only your head and not your heart; it takes both.

If I had heard a reasonable case for God when I was in my early 20's, back when I was in a hard-charging career and surrounded by all the pleasures of the world, I don't think it would have had much impact on me. I was not incentivized to take a risk on love; I was not in a state of mind to put my heart into the question of whether or not love is something that transcends the material world. Something had to happen for me to value love more than I valued success, acclaim, money, pride or personal freedom. (In my case, that was the birth of my first child.)


An Analogy

To ask someone to prove to you that God exists is very similar to asking someone to prove to you that they love you. It would be best to start with a reasonable case -- they could point out the kindness they've shown you, remind you of the loving sentiments they've expressed in cards and letters, bring up all those times they sacrificed something for you -- and this can and should lay the foundation for you believing them. After all, if their actions blatantly contradict the claim that they love you, it would be unreasonable for you to believe their claim.

But reason can only get you so far when you're trying to prove love; and so it is when you're trying to prove Love.

You could go back and forth forever with arguments and counter-arguments based on reason and material evidence alone. At some point, if you're going to really know that that person loves you, you have to take a leap of faith. You have to put your ego aside, get your heart involved, and take the risk that you might be wrong or that you might look foolish. You will never know if real love exists between you and another person if you only explore the matter using your head.

This same approach is necessary for knowing God.

-----

I hope that sharing my experience might be helpful to people who'd like to know more about conversion from atheism. From my experience, I think the most important things to do if you find yourself in conversations with an atheist friend or family member are to know your own faith; pray (then pray some more); and, whatever the specific approach you decide is best in your unique situation, always make sure your words, thoughts and actions reflect the fact that to make the case for God is to make the case for Love.

7 Quick Takes Friday

This week I was delighted to see that quite a few other bloggers did their own "7 Quick Takes" posts and linked back here. I really enjoyed getting to see a different side of some of these folks and read interesting little "takes" that might not normally make the cut for a full post, so I thought I'd try putting up a Mr. Linky list next time I post mine so that we can all see one another's posts.

So here's a heads up: starting Friday, for the next couple of Fridays I'll reserve my Quick Takes posts for those days and add a Mr. Linky list if anyone else would like to share seven random thoughts as well.

We'll see how it goes -- if y'all enjoy it (and if I can overcome my notorious inability to follow anything that even remotely resembles a routine) then maybe it'll be a regularly recurring feature.

Let's try it!

7 Quick Takes (vol. 8)

--- 1 ---

Lest new readers get the impression from recent posts that I only write about insanely depressing topics, I point you to the "On a Lighter Note" category of posts in which you will learn that I also talk about the fact that I am a fool with a crazy mother-in-law who lives in a scorpion-infested house.

--- 2 ---

Today I went to a fancy luncheon for executive women (long story about how I got invited to that). Seeing as how the group was going to consist of executives, successful entrepreneurs, professors and...me...I got up early to painstakingly blow dry my long hair (please keep this image of my hard-earned, sleek hair firmly in your mind), put on makeup, and excavated my closet to find the one business attire outfit in my wardrobe that I can squeeze into when I'm six months pregnant (inventor of the Bella Band: YOU COMPLETE ME).

It was cloudy when I walked my toddlers into the church to go to Mother's Day Out; when the baby and I went to go back to the car, a downpour started. When I say "downpour," I mean "exactly equivalent to turning the cold water on full throttle in your shower and standing in it"-style downpour. Rivers of mascara-tinted water streamed down my face from my fully saturated hair as I strapped my wet, angry baby into the carseat and tried to ignore the fact that my only appropriate outfit was now sopping wet, cold, and clinging to me in a very unflattering way.

It was bitterly that I recalled that I prayed for rain recently since we've been in a long drought (was that the time I also said a prayer for humility?!), and that the other 364 days of the year it would not matter if I got stuck in a downpour since I never have any formal daytime plans.

After I dropped off the baby with my mom I barely had time to throw the clothes in the dryer for a minute and do an emergency makeup repair job (and, well, complain about it on Twitter -- I wasn't in that much of a rush), so I ended up going to the luncheon much colder, wetter, and soggier than I had planned. As theresalynn said, God certainly has surprising ways to keep us humble.

--- 3 ---

So I've started reading that Organizing Solutions for People with ADD book that I mentioned a while back. Be prepared for me to rave about it in a forthcoming review. Life changing.

--- 4 ---

The readers have spoken, and the overwhelming response seems to be that I should go introduce myself to cool-seeming women I meet whom I'd like to know (#6 here). I don't know if this is really good advice for the person who is the #1 Google result for socially awkward person, but I just might try it.

I know! Maybe I'll walk up to that mom at Mass and say, "I wrote about watching you at church on my blog. The people on the internet told me to talk to you. Could I get your phone number?" That wouldn't be weird or awkward, right?...right?

--- 5 ---

Mrs. Darwin and I have been corresponding about rap. It started with me telling her about the coffee spewed on my keyboard when she commented here that she was surprised that the Busta Rhymes video for that "Wooha, I got you all in check!" song did not, in fact, feature any chess players; this turned to a conversation about our deep disappointment that we were the only ones to discuss the all-important topic of rap videos in that thread.

This all led to me finding a video of Busta Rhymes on the night of the election (I'd link to it but it would set your computer speakers on fire if you played it) in which he dropped about 20 f-bombs to point out that the country was now going to be run the Democrat way and yelled into the microphone that any "MF's" who voted for McCain can "EAT A [EXPLETIVE]!" Maybe it was because I'd just seen this, but I was surprised that my first reaction to the video was to find his honesty kind of refreshing.

--- 6 ---

Get this: Anne Rice makes an effort to reply to all emails.

Garden Gal pointed me to this article about Rice's profound conversion (this one is good too) and, on a lark, I decided to go to Rice's website and email her to tell her that I just loved hearing about her story as a fellow atheist-turned-Catholic. She actually replied! I was so impressed (and humbled to think of my own whining about keeping up with email).

--- 7 ---

Hmm. I really don't have anything else to add today. What are some of your quick takes? What's on your mind?

Abortion and Holocaust comparisons

This is a Part II to my post from last Wednesday. (*) = link contains photo or video of an abortion or its results.

A little over a year ago, shortly after I converted to the pro-life position from being rabidly pro-choice, I started to come across pro-life writing in which abortion was compared to the Holocaust. I balked at such comparisons. The rhetorical strategy of comparing whoever you dislike to Hitler and any kind of oppression you disagree with to the Holocaust is as weak as it is offensive, and I didn't like to see pro-lifers stooping to that level.

The injustice I sensed in the comparison was that the victims of the Holocaust experienced a level of suffering that is unparalleled in the human experience, a kind of suffering that no unborn baby, even the victims of late-term abortions, would or could ever know. During the Nazi reign mothers had toddlers torn from their arms to be sent to their deaths or, perhaps worse, walked hand-in-hand with their children into gas chambers. Millions of people were yanked from their homes, shoved into cattle cars, then starved, shot, gassed, and subjected to sick medical experiments -- and they all knew it was coming.

Ever since I learned about the events of the Nazi Holocaust in grade school not a week has gone by that I don't think of its victims and feel a little queasy to imagine what they went thorough. To minimize the horror that took place there is unconscionable, and I detest loose comparisons to the Holocaust.

One thing that has surprised me, then, as I've researched the pro-life position further, is that I do see a critical similarity between abortion and the Holocaust. To be very clear, I do not think it's the same thing. I do not think that they are directly analogous in every way. But I do think that both scourges are born of the same seed, and that it is not only appropriate but important to highlight what that is.


Radio Silence

As I looked more closely into the issue of abortion, one thing that struck me as odd is that you hear so little about the details of it in the media. One of the unfortunate hallmarks of our modern media is a zeal for reporting ratings-boosting stories of graphic crimes (the expression "if it bleeds, it leads" being common wisdom at modern newsdesks). From the local news to primetime shows like 20/20 and Dateline to much of the programming on networks like A&E and TruTV, salacious stories of blood and gore, cruelty and violence are recounted in detail, sometimes even showing photos of the bodies of murder victims.

These same camera crews probably wouldn't even have to drive two miles to get shots of arms and legs and heads in medical waste bags* outside their local abortion clinics, yet you never hear anything about it. Shocking stories of murder and drama and coverups, such the Shanice Osbourne story, get zero airtime so long as they happen within the walls of an abortion clinic. The footage from the Spanish TV crew that filmed an abortion* that included shots of chubby little arms and legs stacked on a medical tray* was not picked up here. When the documents from the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart were released, the following grizzly testimony was given by abortion doctor Leroy Carhart:

The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off. Dr. Carhart agreed that "[w]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." Dr. Carhart has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed," and testified that mere dismemberment of a limb does not always cause death because he knows of a physician who removed the arm of a fetus only to have the fetus go on to be born "as a living child with one arm."

It was met by the sound of the proverbial crickets chirping

The more I thought about it, the more I found it to be an odd inconsistency that in our modern world where we love gore and sensationalism, the horror and drama that take place in abortion clinics in every major city every day are met with complete radio silence.


Inconsistent Terms

The inconsistencies weren't only in the media.

I've mentioned before that I did a lot of looking the other way when I was pro-choice. I never watched a video of an abortion* to get a good look at just what I was supporting, and just rolled my eyes when those lunatic pro-lifers put pictures of aborted fetuses in my face. I went into more detail here about the psychology behind it, but even glimpses of bloody little severed arms* from first-trimester abortion photos didn't raise my heart rate when I saw them -- because they were just photos of "fetuses."

Yet I noticed that when I became pregnant with my first child, I wasn't terrified of losing the "fetus" to miscarriage; I was terrified of losing the baby. When I was 10 weeks pregnant I didn't buy a handheld Doppler so that I could lie in bed and listen to the "clump of tissue"'s heartbeat; I was listening to my child's heartbeat.

When my doctor first told me that I was pregnant, I remember her asking me what vitamins I was taking. I told her about a brand I liked from Whole Foods, and she cut me off in mid-sentence to give me a stern lecture. It was my responsibility to look out for this little person, she told me, and proceeded to inform me of all the amazing development my baby was going through right now. She gave me a prescription for superior vitamins and rattled off a list of dietary changes I needed to make to nourish my baby.

Less than a year later an acquaintance went to this same doctor with a surprise pregnancy that she did not want. The doctor assured her that the procedure for expelling the "fetus" was a simple one and scheduled her for an abortion. This woman was at the same stage of pregnancy as I had been at that first visit, but the word "baby" was not used at her appointment. I was offered an ultrasound to see my new child with my own eyes; she was not.

I once visited a friend's baby who was born prematurely in a local hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and became dizzy when I realized that these children, with the little cards and decorations on their incubators, these precious little boys and girls who had names and moms and dads, were the "fetuses" described in late-second-trimester abortion medical literature. It would be a horror to think of someone reaching into one of glass cribs and harming one of these children, yet to kill them in the most gruesome of ways was legal and accepted as long as it was called an "abortion." When I was exposed to videos of doctors smiling when talking about such practices (and acknowledging that they're often performed for non-dire reasons) and applauding their colleagues when it was demonstrated live [MP3], I felt ill; when I saw the smooth, euphemistic terms abortion clinics used to describe their procedures in their literature and then compared that to the accurate details of what actually happens in those procedures without the glossy terms, I felt like I was surrounded by widespread misinformation and deception.

I began to notice that as a culture, by default, we consider new life in the womb to be babies -- precious children. But as soon as they get inconvenient we downgrade them to "fetuses" and exile them from human society. It was around this time that I began to see the common thread between abortion and the Nazi Holocaust.


The Root

The practice of abortion is far different from what took place in the Nazi concentration camps.

Even in later-stage abortions, infants don't experience the horror of knowing ahead of time that they've been marked for execution. They don't know what's happening to them as they're dismembered or burned with chemicals (or, as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends, delivered alive and killed outside the womb so that their bone fragments and "free-floating heads" don't cause complications). And though we have video* of babies at 12 weeks pulling their heads back, moving their arms and legs and contorting their bodies to avoid abortionists' instruments before they're killed, we can be certain that at their young age they experienced nowhere near the level of sickening dread that the people in the concentration camp barracks lived with every day.

What I came to see, though, was that for all the many differences, there is one thing that is the same about the Holocaust and the modern practice of abortion, and it is something critical:

At the root of both scourges is a particular strain of evil, the most virulent that the devil possesses. It is the kind of evil that works to take away the humanity of human beings. It whispers in the ears of one group of people that a certain other group of people are something less than human, less worthy of life because of race or religion or physical ability or age. And once this is accomplished, once a group of people have been thoroughly dehumanized in the mind of their society, evil can run wild while the populace yawns.

From personal experience, I came to see why it is so very important to always be on the lookout for this most insidious, malignant type of evil that spawned both the Holocaust and the modern abortion movement: because it is the kind that allows normal people like you and me to look at the corpses of our fellow human beings*, to know that they're piling up around us, and shrug.

Five second prayer

Getting into a prayer habit after a life of atheism is no easy thing.

Up until my late twenties, I'd never said a single prayer in my life. I tried to follow advice like, "Start by committing to only five minutes of prayer per day!" but I actually managed to fail at that. Maybe it's that it was a brand new habit or that I have some strong ADD tendencies, but my efforts at five minutes of prayer tended to go something like this:

Is this thing on? No, kidding. Hi, Lord, it's me. I guess you knew that though. Anyway, I am grateful for all the good things in my life today, and sorry for the things I did wrong. (What can I say, I just don't know where those f-bombs came from. At least it wasn't in front of the kids.) Anyway, I ask you to strengthen my faith, and to help me be a better person...

72 seconds later:

...and when they say "dolla' dolla' bill, y'all" in Sweetest Girl, I wonder if that would be considered sampling WuTang. Let's think here about what technically constitutes sampling: to use a portion of a recorded song. So since they did not actually play anything originally recorded in C.R.E.A.M., it would probably be more accurate to say that Wyclef Jean was "drawing upon the wisdom" of Wu rather than "sampling" Wu. That reminds me of Busta Rhymes lifting Dangerous from a public service announcement. You cannot tell me that was an accident...

That is about a direct transcript of my first attempts at prayer. Trying to read the Bible for five minutes didn't go much better. I'd end up getting hung up on some technicality, getting lost in the footnotes and wandering over to the computer after about 45 seconds to Google questions about some verse.

What I found was that going from a lifetime of zero seconds of prayer per day to a full 300 seconds of prayer was just too much. As silly as it sounds, what ended up working for me was to just start with not five minutes of prayer, but five seconds. I committed to do one extremely simple thing each day: I'd just kneel down at the side of my bed before I went to sleep, cross myself, and say hi to God before going to bed. That's it. My prayers were usually something like:

Lord, thank you for everything, and I'm sorry for all those little sins I committed today. Strengthen my faith, show me how to do better and, most of all, please show me how to pray more. Amen.

Saying these short little prayers is one of the best things I ever did.

As simple as it was, it gave me a surprising sense of accomplishment to actually hit the prayer goal I set for myself, and it gave me at least some time focused completely on God (as opposed to zero time, which was starting to happen when I'd get frustrated and give up on my five minute prayer goals). Also, God answered my prayer in a big way. It didn't happen immediately, but after a few months prayer began to get easier and easier, and I began to "get" it more. Then I was led to the Liturgy of the Hours and ended up regularly praying three times a day for a total of about 30 minutes, and having it not only not be a chore but be something that actually made my life easier. I think that discovering the riches of the Liturgy of the Hours all started with saying those little five second prayers.

As I've mentioned, this spiritual dry spell has made prayer less fun and interesting than it used to be, and I find myself skipping prayer times more often than I'd like to. During those weeks when it feels like everything is spiraling out of control and it's just impossible to pray as much as I'd planned, I need to remember that there is still value in even five second prayers. On those days when even praying one Office is a goal that I just can't seem to hit, I can always kneel down next to my bed and just say goodnight to God. As I've found, even five seconds out of your day focused solely on the Lord is exponentially better than none at all.

How would you know?

This picture haunts me:


It's just one of many pictures from a photo album full of pictures of the staff at Auschwitz relaxing and having a great time, sometimes with their children, during on-site retreats. I originally posted it as part of my post about "good people" and "bad people," but I've thought about it many times since then.

For me, this picture symbolizes all average folks who ever lived during times where particularly dark shades of evil gripped societies. It reminds me that though today we can see through the distance of history the thick pall of darkness that overshadowed the world in which these people lived, many of them could not see it themselves when they were in the midst of it. Like being in a city with air pollution, it's easy to think that the air is clean and fresh when you're standing in it; it is only when you get some distance and look back that you can see the dark cloud looming over where you were, and know that you were breathing soot all along.

I tend to be an easygoing, optimistic person who focuses more on my little corner of the world than the macro issues of the day. I tend to want to believe the best about people, and guard against buying into hyperbolic rhetoric that makes generalizations about the activities of certain groups of people being particularly heinous -- so often, upon reasonable analysis, that type of claim pans out to be nothing more than a lame attempt to vilify people you disagree with.

So I wonder:

If were a 31-year-old woman with three little kids in a busy house in Germany 1941, would I have fully understood the evil that surrounded me? As a woman living in 2008 I can see the horror that was going on there, but at the time there were some awfully sleek lies being told about the situation; it would have been really, really convenient to let myself be persuaded by the lies and just make the nasty little problem go away by telling myself that it wasn't really a problem at all.

What if I were living in a time and place in India where it was common and accepted for wives to be burned alive on their husband's funeral pyres? Or living in Rwanda when an entire race of people were murdered by their neighbors? Or a citizen of pagan Rome where newborn girls were frequently "discarded" with hardly a second thought? The people in those times and places had cheery, sunny days, went to birthday parties and get-togethers with friends with lots of yummy food, and had daily lives not terribly different than our own. There are no records in any of these cases that indicate that average people fully comprehended what was going on around them or were as outraged as they should have been at the atrocities in their midst.

It is sobering to realize that the odds are that I would not have been one of the very few people who saw it all for what it was.

Recently I was looking through some genealogy documents and noticed that a distant ancestor of mine owned a slave. My own flesh and blood, people probably not unlike me at all, participated in the horror of slavery. Can I be so sure that I would have seen the truth? Or, if I had lived alongside my ancestor, would I have included a human being on the list of possessions I owned? Even if I didn't own a slave myself, would I have shooed the distasteful subject from my mind by surrounding myself with the comfort that all my friends seemed to think it was fine and, after all, it was perfectly legal? Evil's most powerful tool is that it always works through lies; the lure to tell yourself that something bad is not really bad at all is a powerful temptation, and one that I'm not sure I could have resisted.

Sometimes I think about this, and wonder what advice I would pass along to my own descendants to make sure this never happens again; to help future generations guard against being blinded should they find themselves in the midst of a culture where something terrible is taking place.

But the question is: How would you know?

What litmus test could you offer that would apply to all places and all times as a way for a person to look around themselves with completely clear eyes, piercing through even the thickest fog of self-delusion and widespread cultural acceptance, and see that they are surrounded by grave evil? Is there any simple way for a person to immediately undergo an earth-rocking paradigm shift in which they look up and realize that the world around them is not what they thought it was?

One thing that stands out in all these examples is that the victims of the widespread evil were categorized as something less than human. In fact, though the exact level and degree of evil that took place may vary, one thing that unites all of these practices as worthy of a place in the Human Depravity Hall of Fame is not only that innocent people were killed or enslaved, but that their humanity was taken away by the societies around them. The Nazis classified their victims as sub-human, less worthy of life than the better members of the race; wives were burned with their husbands because they were seen as nothing more than property; in the 90's in Rwanda the media fueled the genocide by assuring citizens over and over again that Tutsis were not fully human, referring to them as insects rather than people; the Romans accepted it as a matter of fact that baby girls inherently had fewer rights to live than baby boys; and in early America enslaved men, women and children were accepted by both government and society at large to be barely above livestock in their dignity and worth.

So here is the advice I would offer to my children, and to my children's children:

Every decade or so, take a look around the society in which you live, and ask yourself if there is any group of human beings who are seen as something less than human. A big tipoff is if dehumanizing words -- terms other than "man," "woman," "child," "baby," or "person" -- are used to describe any category of people.

And if you ever see that going on, you might be in the midst of something gravely evil.




UPDATE: A Part II to this post is here: Abortion and Holocaust comparisons

RELATED: the Supreme Court documents of Stenberg v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Carhart. Also, how I became pro-life.