Welcome, new readers!
Quite a few people have mentioned via email and comments recently that they’re new readers, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a moment to introduce myself and welcome you to my blog.
First of all, thank you for reading. I would be delighted if you’d take a moment to introduce yourself over at this post — it makes my day when I see a new comment there, and I hang on every word of all of them.
ABOUT ME
I’m 31, married, and have three children ages three and under. I have a background as a web designer/developer but am now Director of Chaos Management for my household.
I was an atheist my entire life until around age 26 — I never once considered the possibility that God might exist, not even as a child. I saw no absolutely no proof for God’s existence and couldn’t imagine how a person could believe in an unseen deity.
Around the time my first child was born I started to think that maybe I should take another look at the question of God. Upon investigation I was shocked — really, really shocked — to find that Christianity had some compelling data points in its favor. I came to a dry intellectual belief in God but didn’t know what to do from there. To make a long story short, my husband and I both converted to Catholicism in 2007 and today I am thrilled beyond words to be a Christian.
ABOUT THIS SITE
I started blogging about religion shortly after I became interested in Christianity. I had a lot of questions but didn’t know many Christians, so I did what web developers do when they’re seeking answers to life’s biggest questions: I started a blog. I’ve been blogging about it ever since, so most of my conversion is chronicled in the archives (on the bottom left sidebar).
Though the main purpose of this blog is to simply share my experiences with religion after a life of atheism, there are certain topics that I’ve been particularly interested in lately. Here’s what’s been going on so far in 2008:
Bringing peace to daily life
Shortly after the new year, I got to the point of “being sick and tired of being sick and tired” — I was tired of feeling overwhelmed and behind, living life a day late and a dollar short, and was desperate for change. I began to see that modern technology tempts me to overspend my time just like credit cards tempt me to overspend my money, and realized that I need some “hard stops” in my life. I decided to do something radical and structure my days around regular prayer times. I called it a “reckless experiment with prayer,” the “reckless” part because I supposedly didn’t have one extra minute to spare for prayer. It worked better than I ever thought it could and I’ve been doing it ever since. You can read all the posts on the subject here.
Lent and spiritual growth
This was my first Lent as a Catholic. When Ash Wednesday rolled around I realized that I love times of sacrifice and penance. When the half-way point rolled around I realized that I love times of sacrifice and penance for a few weeks, and then I’m over it. Some untimely temper tantrums and cat vomit made me realize what it means to “die to self,” I ruminated on my future as a Christian, and thought up an analogy for faith. Then, some technical problems made me realize just what is involved in truly trusting God. It all culminated in a joyous Easter which marked my one year anniversary of becoming Catholic.
Motherhood, community and isolation
A big topic of interest for me is the isolation that those of us who are outside of the workforce experience. I recently wrote about an average day in my life, with an emphasis on the lack of casual social interaction with other adults. I followed that up with some thoughts on how the internet can provide a much-needed outlet for social interaction, and asked for tips about how we can get more real-life social activity as part of the natural course of daily life (don’t miss the comments on those last two!)
Scorpions
The first time I saw a scorpion in my house, I could have never imagined that there would be any kind of upside to that situation. As it turns out, however, blogging about scorpions brings a lot of traffic to your site. My posts about scorpions in my bedroom, scorpions in my baby’s room, scorpions in cups in my kitchen THAT WERE PUT THERE BY MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, and angry, undead scorpions have been some of my most popular posts. The entire saga can be found here. Though I haven’t talked about it yet this year, scorpion season starts soon so I expect to be talking about it again any day now.
In general, though, I mostly write musings about what it’s like to be a passionate Christian after a life of atheism. (You can find a sampling of these types of posts in the “Most Popular Posts” section on the left sidebar.) This is the diary of my ongoing conversion. I’ve often thought that a good tagline would be: Selfish, lazy, hard-headed atheist converts to Christianity and tries to be a good Christian. Hilarity ensues.
The readers of this site include atheists and agnostics and people of all faiths, and I appreciate every one of you. Welcome to my blog, and thanks for reading!
The Adoration List
One of the things I’ve realized in my ongoing quest for peace in daily life is that I tend to worry and second-guess myself a lot, especially when things are overwhelming. I frequently have all sorts of “am I doing this wrong?” or “would it be better for the kids if I did XYZ like my supermom friend does?” type dialogues running through my head. None of it causes huge amounts of stress, but there is a sort of low-grade angst that’s frequently haunting the back of my mind, especially on tough days when I’m mentally maxed out anyway.
I’ve been trying to address all these little worries individually in prayer, but realized that I stress about so many random things that it’s hard to remember to properly consider each one when prayer time rolls around — especially here at Casa Chaos. A few weeks ago I started to feel like all these little straws on the proverbial camel’s back were starting to get awfully heavy, and an idea occurred to me: start an Adoration List. I don’t know whether it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit or just some crazy idea I pulled out of my hat, but here’s what it involves:
- Keep a sheet of paper in the kitchen where I can jot down a quick note any time I find myself worrying.
- After making the note, resolve to let go of my anxiety about the issue for the time being.
- Plan to have my husband watch the kids so that I can go to Adoration the first Friday of each month (the two nearest churches only have Adoration once a month — which is perfect for me because then I can’t procrastinate).
- Take this list with me. After spending some time in silence and prayer, consider all of these issues both individually and as a whole: what are the genuine problems that deserve my attention? What are the things that aren’t really problems and I need to stop agonizing about? And so on.
- Leave the Adoration chapel with a written list of the few issues that are significant enough to warrant further action or consideration; resolve to let go of anything that is not on that list.
Having this Adoration List on my kitchen clipboard has already been a help to free my mind from all the little distracting thoughts I have throughout the day. Some of the items that are scribbled on this month’s list in various colored pens and with stains from various types of toddler-friendly food next to them:
- Kids watching too much TV?
- Not getting enough exercise?
- Necessary to force the issue of potty training? If so, when? This can’t go on until he’s 20…right?
- Parish Mother’s Day Out program — good idea? Bad idea? Too expensive?
- Have been trying to get to household projects like pantry reorganization, garage cleanout, etc. for more than a year, really bugs me that it never gets done
- Spending too much on groceries?
- Not looking at spending vs. budget each month — are we over budget? How to get more time to focus on this?
- Kids eating too much processed food?
To give you an example, last week I got home from the grocery store and all the kids were tired, hungry and fussy. Standing in a sea of grocery bags and listening to a symphony of shrieking I thought about how our grocery spending has been increasing lately, and wondered how far over budget we were. Not able to listen to much more noise without losing my mind, I brought out my secret weapon: the bag of Goldfish. As the toddlers sat happily munching on the little orange crackers, I wondered if perhaps my pediatrician was right that Goldfish are not actually the fifth food group, and wondered if I resort to feeding the kids processed foods too often. Then I remembered that I was worrying about our grocery spending, so I got back to that. But while I was putting away the groceries a bunch of cans fell off the shelf and I was reminded once again the our pantry is a disaster area and I’ve really wanted to sort through it for more than a year yet it’s never happened. I was trying to focus on the “my life is out of control because my closets, pantry and garage are overflowing and trashed and I never have time/energy to do anything about it” stress when I saw the kids eating Goldfish and remembered that I was supposed to be stressing about that, and then I saw the grocery receipt and…well, you get the idea.
In that moment, it was a great relief to simply get out my Adoration List and start writing. Though there was that control-freak voice in the back of my mind that said “YOU MUST FIND THE PERFECT SOLUTION TO EVERY ONE OF THESE ISSUES NOW! NOW! NOW!”, I was actually able to make a conscious choice to just let go and revisit it at Adoration.
Today is the first Friday of the month, so as soon as my husband gets home in a couple of hours I’m going to take my little list and head out. I’ve never tried this before — heck, I’ve never even been to Adoration before — so we’ll see how it goes.
P.S. If anyone has any thoughts / experiences / stories about Adoration, I’d love to hear it. I know a lot of people find it very spiritually fulfilling but, like I said, I have no direct experience with it.
UPDATE: Click here for the update.
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
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.
AREWP Day 44: Balance requires sacrifice
[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).]
Last night my husband and I were sitting in the living room after the kids went to bed, chatting about our days over little bowls of chocolate ice cream, and I caught a glimpse of the half-folded basket of laundry I’d set aside in the laundry room. Then I thought of those last three bills I needed to pay, and remembered that I never did get around to replying to that one email. My instinct was to get up and meander over to my desk or to the laundry basket, but I sunk back into the couch and kept chatting with my husband instead. And I thought, “So this is what balance is like.”
When I used to make my semi-monthly proclamations that I desperately needed balance in my life, what I was really saying was, “I want to do all the same stuff I’m doing now, but just not be stressed about it!” Yet another huge lesson I’ve learned from this experiment of scheduling life around prayer (instead of vice versa) is this:
Balance requires sacrifice.
I know, to a lot of people that’s as insightful as saying breathing requires inhaling, but it was actually a revelation to me. Before my commitment to make the workday end with Vespers, I would have spent that time after the kids went to bed shuffling around to try to finish the laundry, pay those last few bills, reply to that email, and undoubtedly get sidetracked with all sorts of other things along the way. It would have felt too indulgent or wasteful to just put my feet up and spend a whole hour chatting with my husband! Especially because of my tendency to procrastinate, I would have felt like I “had to” forgo relaxation time in the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day. But the realization that a natural life is a life with hard stops, that it is only in recent years through modern technology that we have even been able to throw our lives so far out of balance by extending our working hours at will, changed everything.
These days, leisurely breakfast time ends and high-energy activity time begins with Lauds (Morning Prayer) at 9:30; high-energy activity time ends and naptime/desk work begins with the Office of Readings at 2:00; and I do one final sweep to get any lingering projects to a stopping point before the whole workday comes to a close with Vespers (Evening Prayer) at 6:00. Do I always have everything done by the time prayer time rolls around? Nope. Am I often tempted to keep working into the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day? Absolutely. But, I have realized, such is a life of balance.
Back in this post I speculated that the reason that pre-electricity generations spoke of a life of peaceful rhythm and natural balance is because, for example, a housewife living in 1890 couldn’t do laundry at 10:00 at night if she didn’t get to it during the day; that by virtue of having built-in hard stops like sunset and community-centered activities, they were forced to sacrifice a lot of the things they wanted to get done and simply rest. Mimicking this life as best I can, by allowing my day to be broken into times of work and times of rest by forces larger than myself, has indeed forced me to sacrifice a lot of the things I’d like to get done. And it has given me a life of balance.
I suppose it might technically be possible to achieve such a nice rhythm by using something other than prayer to provide hard stops; but, for me, I doubt that anything else would work. Here in our 24/7 world, there’s so much pressure let your life slide out of balance, to sign up for “just one more” activity, to get “just one more” thing done each day, that with my notorious lack of willpower I’m sure I would have backslid into my old ways long before now with any other type of routine. But by anchoring my days around God by joining in with the universal prayer of the Church, by letting the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours be the guiding rhythm of my life, three times a day I am reminded that I only have one real to-do list, and it is short; that the little sacrifices I make to achieve balance are minuscule in the grand scheme of things; that my time is not my own anyway.
To be sure, I don’t mean to imply that my life is now stress-free or that I don’t ever struggle with challenging days anymore (anyone who read this post or this post knows that that’s certainly not the case). But I will say that it all feels more “natural” than before. Letting go of the temptation to make every hour a working hour, structuring my days around prayer instead of around the frantic pace of the world, might not have made all the stress in my life go away, but it has brought me times of guilt-free rest to act as a counterweight to the challenging times. Life has a gentle rhythm that wasn’t there before. Even though there are days when it’s painful to sacrifice a couple items from my to-do list that I wanted to get done, even though I have more responsibilities now than ever before in my life, I feel that after all these years, I have finally found balance.