I've been thinking a lot lately about little moments. I heard this quote from Saint Gianna sometime in my junior year of college and it has stuck with me ever since: The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for all the He, in His goodness, sends us day after day." I really think there's something to that. Moment to moment. Thanking God for all that He chooses to send our way: beautiful things, scary things, unexpected things, unwanted things, wanted things, the things that we're indifferent to. Lately, it seems that many of the conversations I have are centered on the things that are hard in life. I ask how are you doing? and inevitably get the answer: I'm busy. I'm stressed. I'm tired. I'm realizing what a big fat lie the world is feeding me, and feeding the college students on this campus, and feeding young adults and everyone: If you're not busy, if you don't have a lot going on, if you don't have anything to complain about, then you are doing something wrong. What a BIG, FAT LIE. Don't be thankful, don't see the positive, don't see the things that you have, and are being given, see the things that are being taken away, see the negative, complain. Gratefulness....breeds gratefulness. I think what the world needs is a grace. I think it's what I need. Grace to let the scales fall from our eyes, to ask in every trial, every hard thing: how am I being asked to grow here? in Faith? in Hope? in Love?
The past few weeks, I've been waking up at 5.45 every morning to have breakfast and pray morning prayer with my roommates. When you do something like that, it can be easy to be grouchy. When you get into the routine of meals together, work, life, relationships, it can be easy to be blind to the gift. It can be easy to choose, complacency and indifference and even negativity. But I think that God wants to give us all the grace to not just find ourselves in our lives, but to embrace the situations we find ourselves in, the easy things, the trials, the duties as well as the spontaneity. How can we do this? I'm still learning for sure, but I think one way is to choose to engage: do something goofy, do something unexpected, write down the good things, talk about the good things, smell the roses, watch the birds! This all started because this morning, as I sat at the dinner table with my 6 roommates for breakfast at 6.10 am, I found myself faced with a choice... sit in silence or make a memory. Our conversation soon turned from "what was that noise?" to "The Coffee Maker is a Monster"! We wrote a poem. Thank you God for early mornings, thank you God for routines, thank you God for roommates, thank you God for noisy coffee makers, thank you God for laughter, thank you God for morning brains, thank you God for rainy days, thank you for fall, thank you for cozy sweaters, thank you for coffee shops, thank you for work, thank you for teammates, thank you for choices and desires and friends and family and good conversations, and thank you for your love. Thank you for silly poems.....
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This Blog...I'm Emily: a mission leader with Saint Paul's Outreach. This is blog is here to keep you up to date with what is happening in the mission field at Ohio State! Archives
October 2016
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