Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

Looking for the tow truck driver

A recent comment I left over at one of my regular reads, A Former Leader's Journey, got me thinking about some of the best advice I've ever received in terms of understanding God's will:


Coming from atheism, the whole concept of there being a personal God who is somehow involved in all that we do was amazing...and intimidating...and confusing. As anyone who has read my 2007 archives knows, for many months I was fascinated with the concept of knowing exactly what God's plans were for all the little details of my life. I looked everywhere for signs: did my invitation to a friend's wedding get lost in the mail because I wasn't supposed to go? Did my computer crash while writing for my blog because God didn't want me to publish that post? Did all the difficulty we had getting to church mean that we should switch parishes? I wanted all the answers NOW, and wanted the world around me to act as a sort of spiritual Ouija board in which God gave me clear Yes's and No's when I asked him questions (that way there'd be no uncertainty and I wouldn't have to mess around with that sticky "childlike trust" thing).

At some point I realized that, unless being a Christian was supposed to make you neurotic, I was probably doing it wrong. So I emailed regular commenter Steve G. and asked him for advice. The details of my question and his answer are here (I highly recommend that you read the whole thing), but the summary is this: I offered him a hypothetical situation in which my car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, and asked how to know the mind of God based on that situation. How do I know if God means the car breaking down to be a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down about the subject matter of my meeting? Or could it be that God is trying to tell me something about my relationship with the person I was planning to meet? Steve G.'s response was not what I expected, not what I was looking for, and not what I wanted. But it was a profound insight, and it changed the way I saw the world. In summary, his answer was:

Maybe it's not about you at all. Maybe it's about the tow truck driver.

He countered with a hypothetical situation in which there is a tow truck driver who is in a bad place in his life and is having a crisis of faith. He takes a call about a woman whose car is broken down on the side of the road. When he gets there he sees a Bible or something on her seat that indicates she's a Christian, strikes up a conversation about faith, and ends up being led back to God through the discussion they have. In other words: I am not the protagonist in that story. I'm just "the Christian woman whose car broke down," a bit player with a small speaking role.

It was this advice that led me to one of the biggest paradigm shifts in my entire conversion: the realization that to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God's story (that phrasing borrowed from this fascinating post at Purify Your Bride). Up until this point, I would have described my goal as a Christian as "to make God a big part of my story!" To understand that it's not about me, that the story was never mine to being with, was so humbling, so intimidating. What would this mean? How was I supposed to control everything if I didn't even know where God was going with all of this?!

Though Steve G. actually offered the ultimate answer in his response, it took months for it to sink in. I had to learn it on my own, the hard way (as usual), after banging my head against the wall by trying to do it my way a few more times. Eventually I realized that what it means to accept I am part of God's story is to ask in every moment not "What is God trying to tell me with this situation?" but rather, "How can I better know, love and serve God through this situation?" It is to stop reading tea leaves to see what God thinks of all my great, important plans and to realize that my plans are neither great nor important in the grand scheme of things.

Whenever I am tempted to forget this lesson (which is often), whenever I get so mired down in the frustration or difficulty of a situation that I can't imagine how this could possibly be part of God's plan, whenever I get so fixated on my own desires that I fall into thinking of all events in my life as related to them, I remind myself to "look for the tow truck driver." The tow truck driver has become a symbolic reminder for me, a call to put it all in perspective and remember that I have the great honor of being but a small player in the story that God writes. And, sure enough, nine times out of ten when I set my gaze higher and look outside of my own little bubble to see what's going on with the other players on the stage, I find that it is surprisingly obvious that the drama that I find myself in the midst of is actually not about me at all. Indeed, it's usually about the tow truck driver.

What does it mean to "turn it over to God"?

When I first started looking into Christianity, one of the things that most perplexed me was the concept of turning a situation over to God.

When I would receive advice like, "Jen, you need to just turn it all over to God," it kind of sounded like a bad idea. Being the dense person that I am, I took the statement a bit too literally. I thought that that would mean setting all reason aside and taking no further actions of my own free will. Basically, I pictured myself lying in bed in my pajamas, waiting to do anything at all until I heard the booming voice of God give me detailed instructions.

I think that this concept might be at least somewhat confusing to others as well. I frequently get emails from people who are looking into religion for the first time, and one of the things I often hear is confusion about abstract concepts like this one. (As one reader put it, "So often in this journey I'm completely lost in abstractions, like there is some decoder ring needed to discern what real things I can do to learn and grow.")

In case it's helpful to anyone else, I thought I'd elaborate on what I've learned. Here is an example of one of the first situations that I attempted to put in God's hands, including specific examples of the actions I took:


Background: Early last year, my husband and I desperately needed a house. We'd been living with my mother for two years while we got our business off the ground, and while it was a wonderful experience, we both felt that it was time for us to move on. We both felt strongly that we wanted to buy a house near my mother's so that we could still see her frequently. Our budget was very limited, however, and it was going to be hard to find a house in our price range in the specific area we wanted.

We had been leaning this direction for a while, but when we discovered that we were expecting our third child (when our second was only five months old), I started to feel panicked. Not only were we cramped already, but I was growing weary of being a housewife living in someone else's house. Yet there were so many options swirling around in my head: "What if we can't find a house that meets our needs? Should we rent an apartment? Should we stay here?" I didn't know whether I should be looking at local apartment complexes, looking at houses for sale, trying to find ways to make it work to continue living with my mom -- I was so overwhelmed and confused.

After spending a couple months agonizing over the situation, I decided that I wanted to let go and turn it over to God. But what would that mean? Should I stop looking at houses? Should I try not to think about the situation at all? After getting some great advice from wise friends I finally felt like I had an idea of what it would mean to turn this situation over to God. Here's what I did:

1. Followed the path of peace: First, I began to pray regularly for direction on this matter. When I contemplated the logical arguments for and against each of our choices, I found that only the option of buying a house gave me a sense of peace. Even when I approached the other options in a positive, "can-do" way, they left me feeling uneasy. I was cautious not to assume that that therefore was a sign that we were meant to get a house, but just took it to mean that this was the path we should pursue at that moment.

2. Stopped pursuing paths that unnecessarily distracted from living my vocation to the best of my ability: Another way to phrase this one is that I "stopped banging my head against walls." My old way of searching for a house would have been to stay up until the middle of the night surfing real estate websites, let thoughts of mortgages and closings consume my mind, walk around grouchy and irritated because I felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, etc. A big change in my behavior after turning it over to God was that I only worked on house research as time allowed. I trusted that if we were meant to get a house, I would find time to do the necessary legwork without having to set aside the foundational work of my vocation like taking care of the children, keeping some semblance of order in the house, going to church, etc.

3. Kept the ultimate goal in mind: What I found was that to turn the housing dilemma over to God was, ultimately, to set my goals higher -- much higher -- than the details of the situation at hand. Early on in the process I thought of my goal as, "TO GET A NEW PLACE TO LIVE! NOW!" To turn it over to God was to focus on the fact that my ultimate goal in this or any other situation is simply to know, love, serve, and grow closer to God.

We ended up finding a perfect little house at a great price. We found it by driving through our desired neighborhood on the way home from running some errands one weekend -- the owner had put the For Sale by Owner sign up less than 24 hours before. When we told him we wanted to make an offer, he said a bit hesitantly, "I hope you guys don't think it's weird if I tell you this, but I really feel like this is an answered prayer." So did we.


So, if that's helpful to anyone, those are some specific details of what I did when I turned a dilemma over to God. I should note that my actions weren't really as perfect as I described there -- I glossed over a lot of ups and downs for the sake of brevity. Also, just because that's what I did doesn't mean that that's the perfect way to do it.

I would love to hear from readers as well: What is an example of a situation in which you made the choice to "turn it over to God"? What are some specific actions you took (if any) after making that decision? How did it turn out? Long comments welcome. :)

The Adoration List update

On Friday I told you about the idea of keeping an "Adoration List." The idea first came to me in the beginning of March, so though it was frustrating to have to wait almost 30 days to see the fruits of the habit, it was a great relief to have a way to let go of the little daily worries that linger in the back of my mind. At least once a day I thought of how eager I was for the first Friday to roll around!

When Friday finally arrived, I was so eager to get down to the nearest Adoration chapel and go over this list. It had grown rather long, and I couldn't wait to see what I'd find through prayer: what would I find to be the big issues worth addressing? What would turn out to be things that seemed like a big deal at the time but are really not worth worrying about at all? There were so many scattered thoughts scribbled down on that paper, I was glad I wrote everything down since it would be impossible to remember it all.

As I prepared to get out of the house, things were already Not Going How I Wanted Them to Go™. I had let time slip by and it was getting late. I didn't finish some things I wanted to get done before I left. My mother had made a wonderful last-minute offer to babysit so that my husband could go with me, but the kids were uncharacteristically fussy about us leaving, and it required the skill of a snake charmer to extricate ourselves from the chaos without all three of them having simultaneous meltdowns. When we were finally in the car and on the road, I still felt tense and stressed, but took great comfort in knowing that I would finally be able to bring my long list of worries before the Lord. I will leave it up to your imagination as to how I reacted when I realized:

I forgot the list.

I. Forgot. The. *%@!&#. List. And there was no turning back -- it was already late, we were more than half way to the church, going back in the house would get the kids all wound up again, and I had no idea where I'd left it anyway. I was beside myself. I had been looking forward to this every single day for weeks, I really felt like it was an idea I'd been led to through prayer, and now it was all for naught because of an absent-minded mistake (it was with bitter irony that I recalled that one of the items on the list was "Am I too forgetful?").

To be honest, I'm not sure if I would have even gone to Adoration if my husband hadn't been with me. The self-pitying, control-freak, not-trusting-in-God side of my personality had been kicked into overdrive by this situation, and I was so frustrated about it all that I wanted to just forget the whole thing and go pout somewhere. At some point it did briefly occur to me that perhaps I should turn to God in calm trust that this was part of his plan and he'd lead me where I needed to go, but that thought was quickly drown out with more important concerns like, "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE A PRODUCTIVE ADORATION WITHOUT MY LIST?!" (That is what John Paul II emphasized in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, right? That Adoration of the Eucharist is supposed to be productive?)

Anyway, when we arrived at the church my heart softened a bit. Outside the chapel was a write-on/wipe-off board where people could list their prayer intentions, and just reading through all the things that other people were praying for helped put it all in perspective. I added my own note to the board and was about to head into the little chapel when something else caught my eye: the schedule of people who had signed up to sit with the Blessed Sacrament while it was exposed for Adoration.

I'd known about this, but until I saw that schedule I'd forgotten that the consecrated Host is never left alone; so in order to offer Adoration a church has to make sure that at least one person will be there at all times. I was amazed as I looked at the schedule for the 24 hours of Adoration: there were names next to the slots for the 1:00am - 2:00am hour, the 2:00am - 3:00am hour, the 3:00am - 4:00am hour, and so on. It was so touching to see all these people who were willing to get out of their beds in the middle of the night and go sit with the Lord. It reminded me of why I think of churches as places of hope.

When I walked into the silent chapel, I saw the man who was scheduled to sit with the Blessed Sacrament that hour sitting in the back row. I noticed that he wasn't reading or doing anything. He was just sitting quietly. I took a seat and immediately set about the task of trying to mentally review my forgotten list. But it wouldn't work. I just couldn't. It was like my mind was being blocked from doing any efficient, analytical thinking. I am the type of person who always has about a million different trains of thought running through my head, and for the first time in a long while, all my scattered thoughts were silenced. My mind was quiet. The only thing I felt like doing -- really, the only thing I could do -- was bask in feelings of overwhelming appreciation of God's presence.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was not meant to bring a list. I wouldn't have looked at it even if I'd had it.

For the longest time all I could do was offer prayers of thanksgiving and adoration. I didn't feel like I needed anything anymore. The only thing I needed at that moment was to give God as much love and gratitude as possible. (I've gone back and forth a few times about whether or not to mention this next part because it sounds kind of odd, but here it is anyway...) After a while I felt strongly drawn to pray for a specific person. Here's the crazy part: it's someone whom I never knew, who was not a believer, and who died in 2005. The only connection I had to her was that I read her blog a few times. But I spent the rest of my time at Adoration praying for her soul.

When I left the Adoration chapel, I felt lighter. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. My only concern was how I was going to do this more often. Later in the evening I was still marveling at how powerful the draw had been to spend most of my time in silent appreciation, to just be, and then I checked comments to my post about taking a list to Adoration. I was amazed as I read through others' experiences with this devotion.

Patty wrote:

It seems that whenever I go to adoration with something in mind to do (reading, journaling, decision-making, etc.) I end up just being quiet with Jesus, because that's what I really needed--some quiet and just to BE and not DO, because that's all Jesus wants is just plain old ME, and turns out what I needed most was Him.

I always leave peaceful. You're going to love Adoration, I'm sure of it.

Anne Marie wrote:

Adoration: My favorite devotion. Period. Like spending time with, well, GOD. I've been known to bail out of a particularly difficult day for a few hours to run up to the perpetual Adoration chapel an hour away from us just to get some perspective before returning to the fray...Perspective, yes, that's what's needed, perspective. Adoration is just the ticket.

Laura wrote:

Adoration is like a drug. Once you get a taste of it, you need to keep going back for more....I cannot even begin to expound on the graces that have come to our family because of our commitment to adoration. Give it a try and you will find yourself desiring it more and more!

Elizabeth wrote:

You might only have the opportunity to go monthly, but it will quickly become a much-anticipated ritual for you...I'm still not entirely sure what I should be doing in that first 40 minutes....but there is something undeniably moving about being in a still church with others in the presence of God...The best way I can describe it is that, short of attending daily Mass...it's the next best thing to keeping that Sunday feeling all week long. You are in the presence of a miracle.

Tausign wrote:

If you find yourself oozing out 'Praise and Adoration' do NOT stop, keep it up as that is the highest form [of prayer]...I'm sure you had a blessed time this evening. The Lord falls over those who spend time with Him.

Carol wrote:

I've only been to Adoration twice, but that was more than enough for me to get "hooked" on it!...I've noticed that while I take things along with me to do, in the end I tend to just fall silent and "be" there.

I can't remember where I read this recently but there was a little, old man who would spend hours and hours on end in Adoration. He was asked once what on earth he was doing in there for all that time and he replied to the effect of - "I look at Jesus and He looks at me and we are happy together."

Ashleyrae wrote:

Adoration will bring a certain kind of peace to you life...What I found out the first few times I went was that it's ok to just not do anything, to just be still. I think the Lord will guide you in your Adoration prayers. You may find yourself coming with a certain prayer in mind or with a book or journal and then God says, "I'd rather you do it my way." Funny how His way always gives you exactly what you need.

Those are just some of the comments where others shared their experiences with Adoration. What struck me all weekend as I watched these comments roll in is how precisely they pinpointed what had happened. It was uncanny to see how closely my experience of Adoration matched that of others. "Do these people have crystal balls or something?" I joked to my husband at one point.

So, back to the original subject, I don't really know what to make of the Adoration List. I still think it's a good idea and plan to keep that sheet of paper out in my kitchen. Maybe I'll try to take it with me again next month. All I know is that going to Adoration was like a spiritual cleansing, that even though I forgot my list and didn't think about solutions for any of my worries and the only active praying I did was for a deceased person whom I never met...I walked out of the chapel knowing that God had given me what I needed. I didn't (and still don't) know what the exact solutions are to any of my little problems...but I don't feel as much like I need to know. I'm starting to think that maybe all I need is more quiet time in front of the Lord.

AREWP Week 12: Refocusing

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


I'll just come out and say it: last week was a disaster.

Between a teething seven-month-old, a teething 20-month-old, and disastrous setbacks with potty trainwreck training my three-year-old, it was a really rough week. I had not only fallen behind on laundry and other housework, but the stack of unopened mail on my desk seemed to be somehow breeding and growing larger by the hour, and every time I tried to catch up on email I just felt like crying and legally changing my name to Sisyphus. My husband was helping as much as he could, but it didn't seem to even make a dent in all that had to be done. I was so overwhelmed that I kept forgetting to observe my prayer times. I felt like I was drowning.

One of the emotions I felt most strongly throughout the flameout of last week was simply surprise. "How has this happened?" I kept wondering. Things had been going to amazingly well ever since I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'd had other tough weeks since then where I didn't fall off track with prayer and maintained a sense of peace even throughout tough days. I kept wondering what had changed, what it was that derailed not only my prayer life but the wonderful sense of peace I'd found in daily life. After about the third or fourth time I forgot to pray one of the major hours because I was distracted by something else, I finally realized:

My mentality had totally, fundamentally changed.

For the first couple of months that I structured my days around the Liturgy of the Hours I never forgot to pray, because that was the purpose, the very center of my days. To give you some specific examples, here is a glimpse into my mentality throughout the past few months when thinking about what I needed to do the next day. Let's use examples from Thursday evenings, when, say, vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor were on my to-do list for the next day:

WEEK 1: "Tomorrow my goal is to serve God first and foremost. I will observe the universal prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours -- even when it's not convenient for me or what I want to do -- and thus anchor my days with prayer. No matter what else happens, these prayers will get said. Hopefully the structure of having my days guided by set times of turning to God will help me accomplish the other things I'd like to get done, like vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor."

WEEK 8: "Tomorrow my goal is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, but I really need to make sure I vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor too."

WEEK 10: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor. Oh, yeah, and I need to remember to pray too."

WEEK 11: "Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor."

I was so amazed at the practical benefits of having my days revolve around prayer that I slipped into the mentality of seeing those practical things as the end I was trying to achieve -- and it all fell apart.

The reason my house was so much more clean and orderly after I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was not because I'd found a great organizational routine. It was because the way I approached daily life had fundamentally changed. Praying Lauds, Matins and Vespers at their scheduled times was a great exercise in obedience to God: it was never convenient to stop what I was doing and get out the prayer book. It always involved setting aside something else I felt like I should be doing. But in making these little sacrifices I was reminded, three times a day, that life is not about what I feel like doing, that I need to let go of what I want to get done and foster only a calm trust in God.

The grace and peace that entered my life after I started living this way set off a domino effect where everything else fell into place. The order that these prayer times brought to my days meant that housework fell into a gentle rhythm, and it was easy to fall into a routine without even having to think much about it. As I mentioned here, since my working hours were cut down to make more time for prayer, I had more energy to pick up the pace in the times that I did work. To my great delight, the result was a cleaner, more orderly house.

But then the temptation arose to take a shortcut: I loved having my household running so smoothly, so I began to elbow God aside and focus on that alone. As I showed in the example above, the thought process of "Tomorrow I will pray; and vacuum and sweep if it's God's will" drifted into "tomorrow I will vacuum and sweep; and pray if it's Jen's will."

This weekend I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict that I excerpted in greater detail in my first post about scheduling my days around prayer:

When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.

[Excuse me for a moment while I go tattoo that on my forehead...OK, I'm back.]

At the end of last week I felt like everything was in shambles. I felt like there was no way I could ever catch up on all that I had to do and regain a sense of peace in my daily life. With a laser-like focus on all those important practical matters I needed to take care of, I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, feeling crushed under the weight of it all. I looked at all the notes scribbled on my to-do list, on the disaster area that was my living room, and thought, "I can't do this." And in that moment I realized: it's true. I can't. I can't do it all. I need to let go.

And when I did just that, when I set aside my to-do list and stopped asking myself "How can I get X, Y and Z tasks done tomorrow?" and started asking myself only, "How can I pray tomorrow?" I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, and knew that I was back on the path to peace.

Daily bread, for the next 20 years

The the March Write-Away Contest over at Scribbit really got me thinking. The topic is simply: The next 20 years.

My senior year in college a professor actually asked us to write an essay about that very thing: where are you going to accomplish in the next 20 years? Boy, was I all over that one! I opened up my "Goals" Excel spreadsheet, categorized by short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, and started writing. I started with where I wanted to be in 20 years -- the founder and CEO of a thriving web development company with at least 30 employees -- and worked backwards from there. I also threw in the various hobbies that I was going to pursue, such as becoming a published author by the time I was 30 and learning to program in Java by the time I was 28. It felt great to know exactly where I was headed!

The problem was, my life veered off the Excel spreadsheet. At the end of each year I'd review all the great plans I'd laid, only to find that I'd accomplished barely half of them. "Goals for this Year - 2001," "Goals for this Year - 2002," "Goals for this Year - 2003," all had distressingly few items crossed off the list. I started to wonder if I needed to find better ways to motivate myself, if perhaps my tendency to procrastinate was to blame, if I was destined for failure.

And then, somewhere along the way, I started to believe in God.

After a life of atheism, I came to believe that there really is a Creator, that we can know him, and that he has a plan for our lives -- a plan better than anything we could come up with on our own. When I looked back on my discarded Excel spreadsheets with this newfound knowledge, I started to see something: in each of those years there were certain things I'd accomplished that were not on the spreadsheet, yet that brought greater peace and joy to my life than anything I'd planned to do. Most of these things didn't come with much acclaim and didn't have the worldly glamor that my goals had had, yet I could see now that they were far better. I started to wonder just how much more I could have done, how much more my life could have been enriched, if I'd stopped banging my head against doors that were closed, and started peeking into the doors that were open. I started to wonder if maybe Someone else had a better plan for my life than I did.

So, a couple years ago, I decided to set aside the spreadsheets and the goals lists. I decided to stop praying this:

Give us this day a detailed plan of how You're going to provide bread for us every day for the next 20 years with specifics as to what quantities You will provide and at what intervals we can expect to receive them so that I might work that into my goals milestones.

And to start praying this:

Give us this day our daily bread.

I would plan my life around much shorter intervals, discerning what I should do today or this week or maybe this month, and not try to speculate where God would lead me after that. I would seek not to follow my desire for worldly status or other people's approval, but to let go and let the finger of God be my guide. And as I reflect on this seemingly reckless abandonment of my life to an unseen God whom I had barely gotten to know, I keep coming back to the same thought:

This shouldn't work...but it does.

Perhaps it's my nonreligious background, but I continue to be amazed that my life has not fallen into scattered chaos without my planning it out to the last detail. What I secretly worried would happen is that this whole "following God's will" thing would lead to me jumping from one idea to the next, leaving a bunch of unfinished projects in my wake after I drifted off to do the next thing that I decided was "God's will." But that hasn't happened. Looking back at the past couple of years, there's more clarity in my life than ever before. It's like watching a play unfold: I see storylines cropping up, I'm starting to see a clear direction and purpose in where I have been led so far...I just don't know where it's going from here, or how it's going to end. As I've said before, it's more exciting than anything I could have ever planned.

So, what will happen in the next 20 years? It gives me a little thrill to say: I have no idea! There are a couple things I feel pretty sure about: e.g. that we're meant to stay in the city we're in for the rest of our lives, that I'll always do something involving writing, however informally; and we have taken basic measures for planning for the future such as retirement and college savings accounts. But other than that, I have no idea. I don't know where my husband's career will be. I don't know if I'll ever get any writing published. I don't know if I'll ever go back to work. I don't know whether we'll be rich or poor. I don't even know how many children we'll have.

When I think of the rest of my life here in earth, however long that may be, I don't expect that it will always be comfortable or easy. But, if the past couple of years are any indicator, I expect to find that God will indeed give me my daily bread, every day, and that with it will come a freedom and a deep sense of peace that I could have never found on my own.

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God and computer problems, Part I

Remember back when I said that the old domain for this blog, et-tu.blogspot.com, would always work? How I assured readers that, despite any epic sagas that might be unfolding in the custom domain registration department, one rock-solid anchor of stability was that at least there would never be any problems with the old address? In a sanity-testing turn of events, the new custom domain, ConversionDiary.com, is working fine (for now), but the old domain is not.

The reason I spontaneously decided to get a custom domain is because it sounded so easy (excuse me for a moment while I look for a pen and my "Worst Ideas Ever" list...); for some odd reason I thought my original Blogspot address would automatically forward to my new domain so that any existing links or bookmarks to my site would still work. Where on earth did I get that crazy idea? Oh, wait, I remember. Because Blogger said "your original Blogspot address will automatically forward to your new domain [so that] any existing links or bookmarks to your site will still work."

After a lot of researching, posting in the help forum and going through a few mental acceptance/denial cycles about the fact that there is really no way to directly contact Blogger technical support, I finally realized that there is nothing I can do. Nothing. When most people try to access my site through the original address (a.k.a. the only address anyone knows), instead of the promised automatic redirection they get an error page that asks if they want to go to the new address which HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED FOR VIRUSES OR MALWARE (hysteria emphasis mine). Any search engine ranking I might have had has plummeted. Though I have stats turned off for Lent, other bloggers with this problem report that they've lost more than 50% of their readers, and that in many cases their feed subscribers have stopped getting new content.

I was recounting this tale of woe to my husband, trying to fully convey the gravity of the situation with dramatic hand gestures and even a creepy, ominous tone in my voice when I said the word "MALWARE," and he started laughing. Laughing. [Warning: husbands, do not try this at home.] The following conversation ensued:

ME: I couldn't help but notice that as I was recounting my tale of blog agony, you broke out in laughter. Would you care to share what you found so funny? [Probably not exactly how I phrased it at the time.]

HIM: You're talking about the blog Et Tu, right? The one where you're always writing about trusting God?

ME: Yes. And...?

HIM: Umm, do you think that maybe you should trust God with the technical difficulties that happen on the blog where you write about trusting God?

ME: [Ran off to lock myself in a closet and scream.]

I didn't actually do that last part, but I thought about it. Instead I just mustered up that special look that I reserve for situations where I have nothing to say because I have been smacked upside the head with a cluebat, when I have been told something that is annoying but true and I can't even save face by pretending I don't think it's true because I wrote a blog post saying I thought it was true. (Sadly, I actually have had enough practice with that situation to have perfected a look in response to it.)

There have been things I struggled with in my conversion from atheism to Catholicism. The universe has a Creator? There is a loving God even with all the suffering we see in the world? God became a man? He died and was resurrected from the dead? The Bible really is the inspired word of God?

The dilemmas I faced when I pondered those questions, however, were mere pebbles in the road compared to this one, a teaching so challenging and difficult that it sends me into spiritual crisis to even ponder it: I really am supposed to strive for a calm trust in God, even with computer problems? Even if said computer problems could accurately be described as "horribly unfair" or "infuriating"? Even if it's preventing me from writing blog posts about trusting in God?!

Oddly enough, this little Blogger issue has become a sort of crucible for me this Lent. It seemed like it should have been a small matter to let go of my angst about a silly technical problem, and yet I found it harder to trust God with that than with even some of the big medical or financial issues we've faced in recent years. But why? That's what I've been pondering all week, and what I'll go into in Part II of this post.

UPDATE: Click here for Part II

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Thanks to Critical Mass for introducing me to the word "cluebat." I will get a lot of use out of it.

Christianity from the eyes of a new convert

At the end of my interview that aired last week, producer Judy Zarick asked me if there was any final thought I'd like to offer to cradle Catholics. I thought it was a great question -- if I could just get one message out there to people who have been Christians all their lives, what would it be? Unfortunately I'm not good at thinking on my feet, but I gave the best answer I could come up with off the top of my head. After I hung up the phone I wished that I could have done a better job of articulating my view of Christianity from the perspective of a new convert.

In the past few weeks since the interview was taped, I've been thinking: how do I explain it? How could I describe to lifelong Christians the way I see the world now that I know what they've known all their lives? I'm not sure if it's something I could really put into words, but here's my best effort:


Let me draw on the Narnia analogy again. A while back I wrote a post about how the way I felt when I discovered that the Christian claims were true was the way I would have felt if I had actually discovered my own portal to Narnia after reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a child: how exhilarating, how fantastic, how mind-bogglingly glorious it would be to discover that what you thought was a fairy tale was actually quite real, and even more wondrous than you'd imagined. Finding Narnia is not even close to a perfect analogy for finding God, but the part of the experience I think it does convey is the sheer sense of awe and wonder I feel at having found an entire other realm of existence that I didn't know was there before.

So, as a new convert and former atheist, one of the most perplexing things I've encountered is lukewarmness among Christians. It's hard for me to understand. When I've talked to Christians who believe in God but who aren't particularly interested in practicing their faith, I feel the same way I would have felt if I had discovered Narnia and the follow scenario played out:

ME: [Breathlessly running up to friend] Hey! You have GOT to hear this: I discovered Narnia! I found it -- it's ALL REAL. And all I have to do is go into this wardrobe and walk to the back, and I start to feel the cool air of the other world, and--

FRIEND: You mean Narnia, the mystical land where a battle for good and evil rages and you can fight for the forces of good and transform your entire existence while encountering beings that are not of this world? Yeah, we have one of those portals too. Over in the guest room.

ME: Whoa! Why don't you talk about this more often?! Why aren't you jumping for joy about it all the time?

FRIEND: Yeah, you know, I'd love to, but I've got a lot going on right now. I'm super busy at work, and have a million things I need to get done around the house. I'd love to explore it more often, but right now I'm just so busy.

To me, at this point in the conversion process, that example illustrates how it sounds to my hears when I talk to Christians who say that they do believe God but put him on the backburner of their lives.

When I first read the New Testament a couple years ago, one of the lines that stood out most to me was from the third chapter of Revelation, where Christ says: "I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." Of all the things I read, that really resonated with me. At the time I wasn't sure if I believed in God, but I thought that if these things were to be true -- the Creator of the universe becoming man, performing miracles, telling us what he wants us to do, being tortured to death on our behalf, and then conquering death once and for all by rising from the dead -- how could anyone ever be lukewarm about that? How could it even be possible that someone could acknowledge these things as true but then find worldly pursuits more exciting or interesting? How could a believer not live every day of his or her life overwhelmed with gratitude for what God has done for them, or even just rejoice in the simple fact that they're aware of the existence of God and the spiritual realm in the first place?

Now that the year anniversary of my entrance into the Church approaches, as these truths become more a natural part of life than a staggering new revelation, I see how it can happen. I see that we humans have an amazing power to take anything for granted, that there is nothing so good or so glorious or so beautiful that most of us couldn't become ho-hum about it if we lived with it long enough. We can become bored and ungrateful about anything -- even God. So I write this as much to myself as to anyone else, and say this not as some expert on Christianity but as someone who was once very lost and has only recently been found: let us never forget the magnitude of what we're dealing with here. As we enter the final stretch of preparing ourselves to celebrate Easter, let us always tremble a little bit when we think about just what happened at the Resurrection, and what it would mean for us if it hadn't. And though we may face bad days or spiritual dry spells, let us never view lukewarmness as an acceptable way of life.

As the year anniversary of my conversion comes and goes, and the newness of being a Christian wears off, I hope that I will always work to keep that sense of wonder alive, and to approach my beliefs with the awe of a child who just found Narnia.

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Listening for the answer

Last month my mother-in-law had a little spiritual crisis. I've mentioned before that she has always had a solid, common-sense understanding of God and Christianity. But a series of events last month led to a sort of dark night of the soul. Her real estate business had been slow for a while, and a run of bad luck in January left her with very little income for the month. A lot of the people she knows believe that financial prosperity is a sign of God's blessing and, indeed, it seems that they have been blessed in that department -- they have booming businesses and swelling bank accounts. One acquaintance recently implied that my mother-in-law must not be praying correctly if her business isn't doing well, and it just about brought her to a breaking point to think that not only is she having trouble paying her bills, but that the situation could indicate that she has somehow fallen out of favor with God.

One night while she was visiting us, she got a phone call about the one deal that she'd thought was a sure thing, that she was counting on to help her get by for the next couple of months. The buyers backed out. The deal had fallen through. It was nobody's fault, just an unforeseeable fluke.

"What am I doing wrong?!" she cried when she got off the phone. "I tithe, I pray every single day, I love God -- so why is he angry with me?!" She wondered aloud about retirement, about the future, if her financial struggles would ever end. She wondered why God hadn't answered her prayers for financial prosperity as he seemed to have done with so many of her friends. "What am I supposed to think about this?" she asked.

I wanted so desperately to help, but didn't know what to say. We talked for a little while but I couldn't come up with any helpful advice. At the time I had just started praying the Liturgy of the Hours, so I asked if she wanted to join me for Vespers. She was too upset. This deal falling through was the straw that broke the camel's back, and she just couldn't even pray right now. She turned on the television to take her mind off the situation, and I opened my prayer book to find the right page for the day's prayers. Not knowing what else to do, I offered the prayer for her, hoping that God would answer her prayer to better understand her current circumstances.

I couldn't believe it when I saw the heading for the day's evening prayer: Psalm 49: The emptiness of riches. Before the first excerpt from the Psalm was a line from the New Testament to meditate on while the Psalm is read, Matthew 12:23: "It is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

"Listen to this!" I exclaimed, excitedly asking her if she thought this was an answer to her prayers. But she was despondent, saying she just didn't want to hear it right now. I fidgeted in my seat as I read Psalm 49, which directly talks about money and wealth. "You should really check this out -- what are the odds that this would be the reading right now?" I said as I read verse after verse that specifically addressed her situation.

As I continued with the readings, I saw that the prayers for that evening were a treasure trove of wisdom on worldly riches and the Christian life. There was so much food for thought there, it was frustrating to see that she wasn't listening. I raised my voice a bit when I got to the antiphon for the second part of the Psalm ("Store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, says the Lord") but she didn't hear.


My point here is not to make a statement about what exactly God might have been trying to tell her there, and I am certainly not criticizing her since she's certainly light-years ahead of me in her faith. My only takeaway was that, from my perspective, it seemed so clear that God was somehow reaching out to her in the midst of her anguish, that perhaps meditating on these scriptures might very well lead her to a breakthrough, to the comfort she desired. But she couldn't see it, because she'd turned away.

The story has a happy ending: my mother-in-law reports that she eventually felt better about her situation. It's really stuck with me, though, to have had the opportunity to see someone as faithful and spiritually mature as mother-in-law miss an opportunity to see what might have been an answered prayer because she'd turned inward in despair. I realized: if someone as naturally devout as she is can do that...I must do it all the time!

I thought of how frustrated an outside observer looking at my own behavior would feel to see me do the exact same thing: when I cry out to God in frustration, do I even attempt to then put myself in a peaceful state so that I might be receptive to any answer he sends my way? No. When I ask for help with a certain situation and look out for God's answer to my prayer, am I open to any answer that he might give, in any form? Not usually. So often I look out for an answer that fits my requirements, and probably miss answers that don't look like what I expected them to look like.

Since then, I've thought of this lesson any time I've been tempted to say that God didn't answer one of my prayers: did he not answer it, or was I perhaps not really listening?

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God's 12th Man

I spent my first two years of college at Texas A&M University. As an atheist I never really fit in in the heavily Christian environment, but there was an infectious enthusiasm among the student body that was hard not to admire. The school is renowned for its many traditions, and it was oddly refreshing to see the zeal with which the students upheld them. I only realized after I left to go to another school that there was a real sense of hope and self-sacrifice on that campus that is rare to find among young people these days.

One of my favorite traditions was that of the "12th Man": back in 1922 the Aggie football team was the underdog in a game against the top-ranked team in the nation. They were slowly but surely pulling ahead, but had so many players injured that it looked like they might not have enough men to finish the game. The coach had seen that E. King Gill, a reserve football player who was now on the basketball team, was in attendance, and the coach asked him if he would be willing to go in the game if needed to keep the required eleven men on the field. Gill gladly said yes, and remained standing throughout the game as a gesture to the coach of his readiness to serve. Still today, all A&M students remain standing throughout the entirety of every game as a gesture that, like Gill, each of them is ready to be a 12th man, prepared to go out onto the field and slog it out for their team at the coach's word.

I've been reminded of this tradition over and over again as I think about my newfound faith, and how I hope to incorporate it into my life.

Now that the newness of being a Christian has begun to wear off, I find that I have to try harder to center my life around God. An initial shockwave of excitement at realizing that God actually exists carried me along for a while, making any kind of spiritual growth automatically fun and exciting. Now that the "new convert" energy has lessened, I find myself walking an increasingly fine line between being comfortable with my newfound religion and taking it for granted.

One of the things I've caught myself doing lately is setting limits on how high I should set my spiritual goals. It always goes something like this: I'll hear some inspiring story about the great level of abandonment to God that a saint achieved -- e.g. that St. Therese of Lisieux was humble to the point of getting on her knees to ask for forgiveness when accused of breaking a vase she did not actually break, or that St. Juan Diego was so dedicated to the Eucharist that he would walk on bare feet for miles to get to the church multiple times per week, or how St. Francis of Assisi did not require a single material possession for his extraordinary joy -- and I'll feel great awe and admiration...and then quickly tell myself that that's not something I should attempt to achieve.

My excuse used to be that it would be prideful to even attempt it, but then I learned that trying to become a saintly person is not a matter of pride since the only way to do it is to "die" to yourself, to move your ego out of the way and let God do all the work. Yet even after that realization I still couldn't quite seem to get on fire about the idea of trying to reach the level of holiness of the great Christians, to aim to be among the men and women throughout history, known and unknown, who truly put God first in every single part of their lives. Though I didn't realize it until recently, in the back of my mind was a vague feeling that it wasn't necessary.

Though I never articulated it, the thought process went something like this: God changed the world through people like St. Therese, St. Juan Diego and St. Francis. Obviously, he's not going to change the world through me, so there's no need for me to aspire to quite that level of dedication to living the Gospel. What I'm doing right now has really improved my little corner of the world by bringing me and my family closer to God, and God knows my heart so therefore he's aware that I'm a basically good person (at least I try to be), and that's what matters. For me, I would think, there's really no need to even try to do all that radical abandonment stuff the Christians you read about in history books have done.

Lately, as soon as I start slipping into this mentality, that idea of the 12th Man comes to mind.

The Aggies ended up winning that game back in 1922, yet E. King Gill never actually played. When asked about his role in the game, he once replied, "I wish I could say that I went in and ran for the winning touchdown, but I did not. I simply stood by in case my team needed me." When it became clear that he wouldn't be called onto the field, that there would be no use for him as a big player in the game, he could have taken a seat -- as so many Aggies since then have undoubtedly been tempted to do during games in the sweltering Texas heat -- yet he didn't, and they still don't. What motivates the Aggies to remain standing through the games is not a realistic possibility of being called onto the playing field; it's not about feeling like it's necessary in order to be a good fan, since simply showing up and wearing team colors would be sufficient; and it's definitely not a certainty that they could even contribute much to the game if they were called. It is an act of love: they love their school, love their football team, and they stand because each one of them really would be willing to go out onto the field and give it their all on the off chance that the coach asked them to (anyone who knows many Aggies knows that that's not an exaggeration!)

Like all bold acts of hope and optimism and love, the enthusiasm is contagious. The standing fans impact the game, even though they're never called out onto the field. To be in the stands and see every single person around you on their feet -- even though you're in the terrible freshman seats at the top of the stadium, even though it's late in the third quarter and the temperature is dizzyingly close to 100 degrees -- will inspire even the most grouchy cynic (ahem) to rise to her feet as well.


I realize that if I were to be spiritually mature enough to grasp even a fraction of God's perfect love, I wouldn't need any kind of rationalization for wanting to reach a saint-like level of abandonment to his will. But until then, when I fall into that apathetic mindset of aiming for something less than great holiness, I like the thought of just trying to be God's "12th Man."

Even when in my short-sightedness I don't understand why I should seriously aim for the humility of St. Therese, the dedication of St. Juan Diego, or the detachment from worldly comforts of St. Francis; even when I feel like I couldn't get there anyway; even when I feel certain that God has no plans to "put me in the game," to work through me to do good on a large scale as he did with those people...what an act of love it would be to get ready anyway, to put forth the extra effort and discomfort to get to my feet and remain standing as God's 12th Man.

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AREWP Day 4: Focus and procrastination

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


Until I started this experiment of drastically restructuring my life around prayer, I didn't realize how unfocused I tend to be, and just how much I use the word "later."

Because of the extreme extent to which I am not a morning person, I have Lauds (Morning Prayer) scheduled to begin after breakfast time, at 9:30. An interesting thing has happened: because I know that I'll need to stop all work to pray, I naturally tend to focus more on one task at a time, getting to a clear stopping point before prayer begins.

In the past, breakfast and kitchen cleanup were jumbled together with to-do list items for the day, meaning that rather than having, say, a clear breakfast time that ended when the kitchen was restored to order, followed by folding clothes, followed by adding some pictures to a photo album, it would all be one jumbled project that extended throughout the morning: I would start folding clothes as the oatmeal cooked, then drift off to eat breakfast, fold a few more clothes, set out the pictures to add to the album, put some dishes in the dishwasher, remember that I was folding clothes...and so on and so on. At the end of the morning I'd often survey the house to see a bunch of unfinished projects, feeling like I'd accomplished nothing even though I'd been working all morning.

This week (and last week when I did the trial run), it's been different. Having to stop everything to pray snaps me out of the scattered, unfocused daze. I've naturally fallen into the habit of only dealing with breakfast and cleanup before Lauds, waiting until after prayer to start any to-do list tasks. Having a clear time at which I must stop to pray also motivates me to pick up the pace a bit, moving purposefully instead of shuffling my feet as I did when I felt like I had a daunting amount of unstructured time stretching before me.


Probably the biggest difference I've seen in this area, however, is at Vespers (Evening Prayer). I will be shocked if I don't keep up with commitment #2 for the long haul, because it has already brought more peace to my life than any habit I've ever adopted.

The commitment I made was that every evening at Vespers I will keep the ancient tradition of that being the prayer said at the lighting of the lamps: I will light candles, and though I will continue to keep the lights on as needed, I will use the lit candles as a symbolic gesture that the day has ended, that all work from the day must wait until tomorrow. Though dinner, post-dinner cleanup and bathtime happen after Vespers, all projects and tasks from the day are off-limits until the next morning (creating the rhythm and hard stops I talked about here).

Every evening, as the sun is setting and I see that the time for Vespers is approaching, I glance around the house to see if there's anything I need to do before I light the candles. And I see tons of stuff, every time. My knee-jerk reaction is to fall back on my normal mantra: "Later." All the kids toys I hadn't yet had them put away? "Later." That data entry I need to do at the computer? "Later." The sheets that needed to be changed that I hadn't gotten to yet? "Later." I did not realize how much I say this until I tried to stop.

Having the workday cease at Vespers has drastically reduced my use of the word "later."

What used to happen was that I would keep saying "later" until I finally had to give up and go to bed in defeat when it got ridiculously late. Now, every day around sunset, a few minutes before I light the Vespers candles, I make a conscious decision about what will and will not get done. I finish the tasks I'm able to, and get the others to a stopping point for tomorrow. As usual, I often find that I don't have time to accomplish all that I wanted to do. But here's the difference: now it is an active choice, whereas before the decision would be made for me when I ran out of time and it was way past my bedtime. Now I feel in control, whereas before I often felt defeated and overwhelmed at the end of the day.

This rule also helps reinforce the realization that I can't do it all: when I felt like I had an indefinite amount of time in which to work, I tended to pile more on my plate. This week of forcing myself to make time for prayer, to observe the natural cycles of work and rest that my body so deeply craves, has meant that I haven't gotten everything done that I wanted to do...but it's also meant that I've actively decided what won't make the cut rather than simply running out of fuel at the end of the day. It's meant that the work I did was done with a peaceful sense of purpose, energized by the knowledge that I only have a very finite amount of time to work until a period of prayer and rest begins.


I don't mean to give the impression that I've been gliding through my days on Cloud 9 since I've been praying so much more often. I've experienced plenty of the usual ups and downs of daily life. What I can say, however, is that in terms of bringing a sense of order to my life, in terms of establishing a sense of control over my to-do list and peace at what I can and cannot do, in terms of finally living in a way that reflects the priorities I'm always talking about, putting prayer first has worked better than I ever thought it would. Obviously, it remains to be seen if I'll keep up with it for the long haul. Let's just say that my hopes are high in that department.

AREWP Day 2: The real to-do list

[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]

[NOTE: I updated yesterday's Day 1 to share how it all played out.]


I am exhausted.

For the past two nights the baby hasn't slept well because of a cold and general gassiness, each night leaving me with about four or five (nonconsecutive) hours of sleep. My husband has some serious things going on at work so that he can't help me at night right now, and I can't nap during the day since the baby rarely sleeps when the older kids sleep.

As often happens when you're extremely tired, everything has seemed more difficult these past two days. Even the smallest tasks are thwarted, like when I was trying to put some pots back in the cabinets only to see that my one-year-old had decided that her spoon would make a good scepter and was flinging applesauce all over the kitchen; or when in the short time it took me to pour food into the cat's bowl the kids had discovered the laundry basket full of folded clothes and had a quarter of its contents scattered across the floor. Even more than usual, I feel like I cannot turn my back for two seconds without chaos breaking out.

I've had days like this before, and it almost always plays out the same way: my frustration level builds and builds as the day wears on, my mantra alternating between "Why is everything so difficu