Tag Archives: Faith

I’d Like To Take A Minute, Just Sit Right There…

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Spoiler Alert: this will not be a story about how I became the prince of BelAir, or have anything to to with that. So if you now have that song stuck into your head, I am not sorry, it’s a great jam. Go enjoy it here in its entirety.
Fresh Prince of Bel Air

Late in my high school career I was introduced to the band Nickel Creek. They are a wonderful folksy band with a banjo. I am such a sucker when it comes to banjos. Unfortunately not long after my introduction they decided to stop playing for a little while. I was bummed and consoled myself by listening to their songs on repeat. One song in particular I listened to constantly was Doubting Thomas. It was a smooth song that just seemed to strike a chord deep down in my soul. Eventually Nickel Creek and Doubting Thomas slipped away into the nebulous realm of nostalgia. Until a couple of weeks ago.

During the process of moving some music around from computer to external hard drive I stumbled upon a folder labeled “Summer 2004.” When opened I immediately fell into the world of that bygone summer and once again was captivated by this little song.

I don’t know if you know the story of Thomas, but I personally think he gets a bad rap. He will perpetually be known as “Doubting Thomas” for his lapse in faith, but I would like to call attention to some of his other deeds, the few that scripture give us.

In the narrative of the death of Lazarus in John 11, we hear about the death of Lazarus a friend of Christ whom he loved. In the naïveté or ignorance of the disciples they try to tell Jesus that he shouldn’t go back to Judea to see Lazarus. Once they learn that Lazarus is not asleep as Christ first said (a metaphor they didn’t get) but rather dead it is in that moment we see the courage and love of Thomas when he says in verse 16,

“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Now I am not sure about you but as previously stated. I think this show tremendous courage and trust in Christ’s plan. Which we later learn is to raise Lazarus from the dead, so that they might understand the true power of God, as well as to foreshadow Christ’s own resurrection.

When we again meet Thomas in scripture it is after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, and this is pivotal to his story and reputation. Remember what he said about Lazarus? He has seemingly lost that courage and confidence he previously held, and honestly wouldn’t you? If your dear friend and mentor had been brutally tortured and killed out of cowardice and fright, wouldn’t you be distraught?

When Christ appears to his disciples the first time post-resurrection Thomas isn’t there. And he doesn’t believe them when they tell him about it. In fact he says he needs to see the marks on his hands and wound in his side before he’ll believe it. Even after he had witnessed the miracles of Christ, there is only so much logic, reason, and faith the brain can sustain when one grieves for the loss of a loved one.

When Christ appears again he shows his wounds and scars to Thomas, it is in that moment that Thomas falls to his knees and gives us one of the greatest prayers when he says,

“My Lord, and my God.” Jn 20:28

Christ continues with a gentle chastisement about true faith, to believe without seeing, as a lesson for future generations.

All it takes is but a moment for Thomas to forever be remembered as a doubter. However when you look at the whole picture we see him as he truly is an example for us all to learn from, in his courage, his doubt, and his prayer.

I leave you with this verse from Nickel Creek, a good reminder of how small and human we all feel, and it is in those moments we need faith the most.

Please give me time to decipher the signs. Please forgive me for the time that I’ve wasted. I’m a Doubting Thomas, I’ll take your promise, though I know nothing’s safe. Oh my of little faith.

Give the whole song a listen here. Listen and love my friends, listen and love.

Landshark

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Growing up I had an overwhelmingly vivid and overactive imagination, the only time that this became a problem was when I was going to bed…or to a lake…or to the ocean. 

We’ll get to the lakes and ocean later, but when it came to bed time, there were a few bedtime rituals that had to be adhered to. 

1.) Closet doors completely shut…no cracks allowed.

2.) Everything cleared out from under my bed and a 5 foot radius around my bed.

3.) Night prayers…I couldn’t go to sleep until my mom or dad had come in to hear my night prayers. 

The reason for all of these rules, was fairly simple. Monsters. I don’t really know what they were supposed to look like, but I knew that they were up to no good, and they all but relished the thought of my paralyzing fear. I’m not entirely sure where they were coming from, but I also knew that they could get in through the closet, but they couldn’t enter the sanctity of my room if the doors were shut, they just had to stay in the closet all night. (Which now that I think about it, isn’t such a bad deal…I had all sorts of awesome in my closet, those monsters probably had a blast spending every night playing with my Disney Farm, and be-headed Barbies).  

The bed thing was different…I just didn’t like the idea of having anything around my bed, that I could step on in the middle of the night…and when I did wake up in the middle of the night I would stand on the end of my bed and then jump as far away from the bed as possible, you know just in case one of those closet monsters was sneakier than I knew. Finally the prayers were just a comfort to know that my parents were there for me, and would be all night, and so would Jesus. 

Now when it comes to bodies of water I was afraid of all sorts of things, but especially sharks. I mean seriously have you seen some of the marine life that exists? Terrifying. It didn’t help that my brothers thought it was funny to pull me under the water when we were swimming, or to yell “Shark!” just as I was jumping in. Fear of sharks is fairly rational, they’re scary. What’s irrational about this was I was afraid of sharks in all bodies of water…yes even swimming pools. 

My brother use to tell me that when he would yell, “shark!” I would immediately try to get out of the water, and I hadn’t even touched it yet, apparently it was the most cartoonish I’ve ever looked. 

Thankfully I’ve outgrown the closet thing, and the bed thing (under the bed is important storage space, especially in a college dorm room). I still have a fear of large bodies of water, I still freak out when someone swims up underneath me and pulls me under, which some of my former summer camp co-workers can attest to first hand. (I am not sorry for the bruised faces and bloody noses).

Talking with my roommate about these childhood fears, I had a realization, how did I ever become afraid of monsters in the closet? It’s not like my parents put me to bed as a child and told me to not open the closet or the monsters would suck me back into their circle of hell. So how is it that seemingly all children have some innate fear of the dark, and the monsters that lurk in the shadows?  Is it human nature to fear darkness and the things that can hide there? Is this fear something that is ingrained into our DNA? Can we escape it?

We seem to spend a lot of time fearing things that are inevitable, such as change, we cannot stop change from happening. Sorry team. It’s not possible. But the things we fear as children, like monsters and the dark, we tend to outgrow. Or maybe a better way to say it, is that our fears evolve to suit our maturity. 

Fear is a natural part of life. We should have a healthy fear of certain things. One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is Fear of the Lord, but not so much in a way that we may fear a spider, or for drastic measure, a serial killer, but more so to be in awe of God’s power. Because the things He can do, should illicit a reaction that is nothing short of jaw-dropping-loss-of-speech awe, and naturally that should also scare us a bit, simply because we cannot begin to wrap our heads around all of His power and mystery. And that is a beautiful thing.

Scripture is filled with different verses about darkness, and Christ being the light of the world (for example check our John 9:5), and most prominently the words “Do not be afraid” appear 365 times in the Bible (that’s basically one for every day of the year-I say basically because we all know that a year is technically 365.25 days) We’re not supposed to fear the monsters that lurk in our closets or in the shadows, because we know that Christ conquers all, but just because we’re not supposed to be afraid, doesn’t mean we aren’t and shouldn’t be wary of what is out there. We know the devil exists, we know he plays on our fears, we know that there is some force of evil in this world that seeks our destruction. AND we as Christians know that evil is fighting a battle that has already been lost. (Hello crucifixion and resurrection)

You might be reading this and thinking, we don’t KNOW any of those things you just stated about evil, but I would ask you to go to the nearest website that shows movie trailers and take a look at the most recent and popular trailers. I bet you see at least 5 trailers for horror movies that deal with the supernatural, and there are at least two of those that talk about some sort of demonic possession. We as a culture are fixated on evil, but that is a conversation for another time. But I do believe society as a whole embraces the idea of evil being present in our world in some way or other. 

As long as we face our fears, and do not let them control us, and we always remember the words of Christ. Our fears cannot conquer us, we will conquer them. 365 days a year, wake up and say it in the mirror and mean it, “Do not be afraid.”

But seriously this is a real thing…Who wouldn’t be afraid of this?

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This is not an April Fools joke…read about it here 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070124-sharks-photo.html

9 Innings of Bliss

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It’s the end of October and Postseason Baseball is in full swing, as an avid St. Louis Cardinals Fan and a lover of baseball since I was a kid, October is like the Superbowl to me.

Growing up and watching baseball in the 90s I saw some amazing things, I saw the Braves rise and fall, the Yankees dominate, Randy Johnson and the Diamondbacks come out of nowhere, and even the year without baseball.  All that time I loved to watch the game, but would become easily bored, leaving the living room if we were watching at home, and even wandering the stadium with my cousins when we were lucky enough to be at a game.

The 90s were also a tough time to be a Redbirds fan, I don’t know if you know this, but the team isn’t really listed much in the history of that decade, with the exception of Mark McGwire in ’98 and I don’t know if you follow baseball, but that didn’t end well. However the mid to late 2000s and now the 2010s have been very good to my team.

Seriously…have you been watching baseball the last three years.

The problem with my team’s sudden surge in popularity and wins, however means I am constantly having to defend myself against a large number of people who will classify me as a bandwagon fan. This irks me. While I may not be a numbers person, and I don’t memorize batting averages, ERAs, or RISP, I do know what’s going on with my team…all the time, I follow the trades in the off season, the recruits and draftees and their ascent through the farm and triple A system. I know what’s going on, on the field and if anyone were to sit down and actually talk with me about baseball they would know that I didn’t just “hop on the bandwagon.”

However, engaging people in that conversation can be difficult. Why? Because baseball is a slow sport, there is no time clock on a baseball game; it will go on as long as it takes for a team to win. While some people find this tedious and boring to watch, I revel in it. Over the years of watching and learning about the game I have found that baseball is a finesse sport, a unique chess match that happens on the field, and one that will be different every time.

The past couple of summers I have spent a lot of time watching baseball, mostly on TV, and when I watch I become very still and calm, you never know when someone will make an amazing catch or hit a grand slam. Patience is the name of the game, even when you get nervous and the team is losing. Patience and a cool head is what keeps pitchers’ in the game, what keeps the batters cool at the plate, and what keeps the fielders from making mistakes. Even in the most stressful situations patience and calm will keep things from getting out of hand. Long gone are the days of my fidgeting and leaving the couch, and when I’m lucky enough to get to see a game in person, there’s no aimless wandering around the stadium. That’s why you show up early.

Watching baseball, has given me a better prayer life. Seriously, it has taught me to be present in the moment but to keep a calm mind and heart. It use to take me a long time to sit down and calm my mind when it came to my personal prayer, and even then within 20 minutes I was fidgeting and putting myself on the clock. (You know like just 10 more minutes and you’ll be good). The problem with this is that I was never fully putting myself in the presence of God. I would spend 10 minutes calming my thoughts, 10 minutes whining to God and asking for advice, and then another 20 minutes thinking about how much longer I needed to sit and “listen” before my prayer time would be considered adequate.

This is not how you pray.

Prayer is a conversation with God, which means that it needs to be a two way street, if prayer was meant to be one way, it would simply be called a monologue, of the internal variety. There is no time constraint on prayer no minimums or maximums, prayer is about being open, calm, and peaceful, to communicate and converse with God. 

Listening is the hard part, to do that we have to learn how to calm our thoughts, to be okay with sitting in silence and waiting to receive him.

Baseball taught me how to wait, something we struggle with in our NOW society, people find baseball boring and outdated, I think this is because we’ve forgotten what it means to be patient, how to wait, and to be okay with waiting and not having the answer come right away.

They say the best baseball happens in October, and that may be, it certainly seems more exciting. However, astonishing and beautiful plays happen in baseball all season long, you just have to be willing to wait and see.  The Fall Classic may only come around once a year, but your relationship with Christ is there everyday, if only you choose to participate.

On that note…

Go Cards!

Miss Montana Had It Wrong…

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A couple of years ago I found myself watching the Miss America pageant. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. It was on and I was intrigued. At the very beginning of the televised part, all the girls are introduced and they get to have a clever little sentence they say about which state they are from.  I have never watched a Miss America pageant, so I became instantly curious about what Miss Montana would say about our beautiful Big Sky State. Perhaps something about the speed limit, or the fact that even the democrats own guns, but no, Miss Montana made a comment about our wonderful state only having two seasons, winter and pre-winter. What?! There are so many better things to say that would be funny and highlight where you come from…all she really did was repeat a poorly constructed joke and belittle the place she was supposed to be representing, after that I changed the channel.

Now some of you might be asking why I was so offended by a joke about the weather, yes Montana does have a long winter, and we never know when it will start or end, but we really do experience the other seasons, I promise. However short and fleeting our spring, summer, and autumn are. They sure do come with pizazz, and it is best to take advantage while you have the chance. This is why as soon as it hits 45 degrees in March (or April) we’re all wearing shorts and t-shirts, come visit us during the summer and the lakes are full of boaters and swimmers, the mountains full of hikers and the parks full of picnic baskets. And when the leaves of fall start to appear in September and October the sidewalks are full of people walking and kicking up the fallen leaves, enjoying the new crisp chill in the air and apple cider.

I know it is standard for us as a people and culture to see winter as the end of the year, however, I have always seen winter as the renewal and beginning. Maybe it’s my Catholic beliefs, and the fact that Advent is the beginning of the new liturgical year, or maybe it’s just that when everything is covered with a beautiful layer of cold snow. A snow that deadens all sound and yet reflects all light, and brightens even the darkest of nights. It’s clean, and when I look out at the streets, trees, houses, and mountains. I see a fresh start, a new beginning.  Its calm and its peaceful, a deep breath before everything picks back up again.

Spring is that renewal realized, everything is cleaned up and nature is prepared to make way for all the coming regrowth. We as humans do that too, after winter we seem to have more energy, hello spring-cleaning! Spring gives us hope. Again, this might have something to do with the fact that in the liturgical year Spring is a new beginning with Lent and Easter…I know it doesn’t seem that way, but as a Christian Catholic there is a beauty in the waiting of Lent, just like we wait and hold our breaths for new flowers and the leaves to appear green on the trees.  Then with the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Easter there is new life and we can rejoice in that, just as we do when we can play outside again, and yes, even mow the lawn.  Spring is rejuvenating.

With summer we are at our peak, we’ve settled into the re-creation of nature and life, as we know it continues on. This really won’t settle in until after the school thing, when you’re working full time. Because hey, when you’re an adult, you don’t get 3 months off for a summer vacation, for most people they maybe get a week or two. Unless you’re a teacher, or a youth minister…I still work, it’s just more fun during the summer, hence the reason I took the job, duh. Just kidding. Summer really is easy going because we’re all settle into our routine of work and recreation.

Then comes autumn, which is one of my favorite seasons, don’t get me wrong I love them all, but there’s just something about the color change and the temperature drop, and postseason baseball. Okay, a lot of that has to do with postseason baseball, but more on that later. 

I think there is something so beautiful and sad about fall. In my mind it really is the end of the year, a time for me to reflect on the past 10 months, and to make a change, if there is something that has been bothering me that whole time, I either choose to actively change it immediately, or I let it go. I do a lot of letting go. I think that’s really what fall is all about. Prepping you for the new things to come, to make room for renewal.  

Just like you have to make room on your hard drive for more music, photos, videos, etc. It’s so easy to hold onto things, and to let them define us for the next however many days, months, or years, but just like the trees have to shed their leaves for the winter, to prepare for the new buds in the spring, we humans need to shed all that hold us back. And what better time than fall? It’s almost as if God devised the seasons as a guide for us to follow, a cycle for us to use to our advantage. 

If you’ve ever listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, this makes perfect sense. Seriously it’s beautiful listen to it.

I have visited New York in the fall, Washington and Oregon in the spring and have spent a fair share of my summer weeks in the hot and humid mid-West and Southern U.S. I have even been to a few of those places during the winter, and as beautiful as all those seasons are in their own right, given the choice I will always choose my long Montana winters and my wonderful, albeit short, spring, summer, and autumn days.

Remember that as the leaves change and fall, it might be worth your time to take a look back and re-evaluated what’s important to hold on to, and what is worth letting go.

…and to answer that question you’ve been asking in your head. No I did not know Miss Montana in the pageant. Though last year’s Miss Montana and I went to high school and did theatre together and the new Miss Montana grew up down the street from me…so yeah, maybe Montana is just one big, small town.

A Joke Only I Could Get Away With…

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This isn’t my first take at writing a blog. When I was a junior in college I was a student blogger for our small liberal arts college, it was a pilot program and was supposed to show both parents and prospective freshman that we had normal lives. Apparently we were successful, because they have kept the student bloggers as a part of their online presence ever since. Score! However, we need to rewind all the way back to the beginning.

My junior year of college was actually quite unique, I had just transferred into a small college of about 1300 students from a state university of about 14,000 students…needless to say it was a bit of an adjustment. Let’s just say there is a reason we referred to Carroll College as Carroll High School.

As I was new to the school, I was really just trying to find my footing and was truly trying to keep my head down. In a school that small if you sneeze, give it a minute, and the entire campus knows you have a cold. Get my drift.  About mid-September Carroll started to advertise that it was looking for student bloggers. To apply you just had to submit a blog and email it to the admissions office. Suffice it to say, my roommate and I thought this was the funniest thing and continually joked about submitting a blog. However in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about how unique to the school my perspective was, and perhaps it could be useful to someone who was thinking about transferring. *Damn me and my need to serve other people!*

One evening, after finishing my homework and messing around on Facebook, I found myself writing a blog submission and before I knew it I had emailed it to the admissions office. It was at that moment after I hit send that my roommate walked in. She looked at me sitting at my desk, took in the look of shock and disbelief on my face and said, “What did you do?”  Turning towards her with wide eyes, and moth ajar I responded, “I think I just applied to be a student blogger.”

Within two days I was meeting with the admissions staff and 3 other student bloggers and was set up and ready to go. And within two hours of that meeting the entire student body knew that I was a student blogger for Carroll. Happy Thursday!

The next day my parents were in town, for my younger brother’s soccer game. After the game they took my roommate and I to dinner. It was at dinner that I decided I should tell them that I was the new internet celebrity at school.

As we sat enjoying our appetizer I looked across the table at my parents and said, in a serious tone, “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.” They immediately looked up from their chips and salsa and I continued, “I’m pregnant.”

Let me digress for just a moment, this was not what I intended to say. I was simply going to tell them that I was a blogger, but in that brief moment my brain decided that this would be the perfect time for a joke.

I only let that settle in for maybe 2 seconds before I followed up with, “just kidding.” But those two seconds were all it took, my roommate, having no idea that I was going to say that, just burst out laughing, while my parents stuttered into recovery. My mom shook her head, a slow smile beginning to spread, while my father muttered, “two years at a public university and nothing, then a month at a Catholic college and you’re joking about being pregnant.”  Then as if it was planned, my parents both looked at each other and said simultaneously, “She’s your daughter!”  Then burst into loud raucous laughter. I told them about being a blogger and we continued dinner without any more surprises.

After that, I wanted nothing more than to write a blog about that moment. However, I realized that people would have to know my parents and understand our family dynamic for that to resonate, and perhaps, since I still wanted to keep a low profile, that this was something that I didn’t need to share with the whole world.

Sometimes there are moments that we experience and we cannot wait to share them with our social world. And in the days of Facebook, Twitter, and smart phones, it is easy to immediately share them. However, sometimes it would be in our best interest to hold back, to keep those things in the personal moment file for a while before making a world-wide announcement. Remember that moment when Jesus took Peter, John, and James onto the mountaintop and you know, was transfigured in front of them? Yeah kind of a big deal, and the disciples were excited and wanted to stay there and set up tents, but then they were scolded (gently) about trying to keep Christ from the rest of the world. But in a twist, Jesus asked them to keep this particular happening to themselves for a while, to not rush right back to the masses and tell them all about this amazing thing. Remember that moment? Do you know why he did that? I mean it does seem a smidge hypocritical, doesn’t it? In reality Christ was protecting his disciples as well as the timeline of how things were going to happen. If Peter, James, and John, had run into town screaming about Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, people would have thought they were crazy, which would have been to the detriment of all they had accomplished already, and also it would have led to a very angry Jewish community, and then Jesus never would have gotten back to Jerusalem…you see what I’m saying?

In our culture of over-sharing, it takes a wise and patient person to keep things under their hat. It also takes some contemplation, something that I think we could use more of in our status updates. I cannot imagine what the next two years would have been like at Carroll if I had told everyone about my “pregnant” joke. People were still getting to know me and I could have hindered that, by simply choosing to act without thinking (which is exactly what lead to me blurting out the pregnant thing to begin with).  We could all use a little more contemplation and discernment in our lives, because who knows if you don’t, you might just write a blog connecting an inappropriate joke to the Transfiguration.  Happy Thursday.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

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Back in the fall of 2008 during my senior year of college, before “selfies” and “duckface” were a part of our urban dictionary, I spent a week in NYC visiting my friend Eric. The trip was great and the week was amazing and ever since I left, I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about how to get back to the city and spend my life watching Broadway shows. I came back from that trip with a few gifts for family and friends, excellent memories, and one pair of sunglasses.

The interesting thing about these sunglasses, were they were just another pair of cheap $5 glasses. Honestly the only distinguishing feature was that they were yellow. I bought them on the street, from a guy who had hundreds of these yellow glasses and was just trying to get rid of his inventory, hence the price. I liked them, I thought they would be fun, and I have stupidly sensitive eyes so I collect cheap sunglasses so as to always have a pair on hand. These would be no exception, they would be worn until they broke or I found a new pair.

Fast forward about a year. I graduated from college, and after much deliberation, stress, fear, and yes, even tears, I was now working with a young adult traveling ministry called Reach Youth Ministry. I spent about 10 months traveling from Washington to Ohio and everything in between, putting on retreats for grade school through high school students. It was a wonderful and fulfilling experience and all along the way, those yellow sunglasses could be spotted atop my head or on my face.

After my year with Reach I was again blessed with a dream job, becoming a multi-parish youth minister in my home diocese. This was a new adventure for me and from the very first night of youth group, my trusty sunglasses were always by my side.

Somewhere along the way these yellow sunglasses became my trademark. Kelly and yellow sunglasses had become synonymous with each other, I almost couldn’t go anywhere without them. Who knew a small accessory made of plastic with a splash of color could become such a defining piece of who I am? As a youth minister and someone who is actively involved in my faith and church, did I really want to be so defined by an accessory? I felt as if I was being reduced to something so small, literally a pair of sunglasses. I didn’t want to be the minister with the gimmick; I wanted my faith to shine through my life and the way I live it.

So I changed it up, stopped wearing them all the time, I would leave them in my car or on my desk. I just squinted a lot when I was outside. Whenever I was asked about the sunglasses I just brushed the question aside in a false sense of aloofness. Finally a good friend of mine asked me about the sunglasses and when I brushed him off, he got in my face (in a non-confrontational way). I finally admitted my fears of being associated with a pair of sunglasses and how I didn’t want them to define me as a person or my ministry, and he laughed at me. (See! This is why I didn’t want to tell anyone, because I knew it was ridiculous). However, he explained to me that those sunglasses didn’t define me as a person or a minister, because who I am and what I was doing with my life was set about long before those sunglasses came into it, and it was only if I let them define me that they would.  Damn him, he was right. No more! I was going to define those sunglasses. I would own them, and not let them own me. So I set about to change my attitude about myself and those sunglasses.

I stopped being concerned about the sunglasses. Hell, I liked them, and I didn’t want to be caught up in a petty insecurity. It became my goal to share the Gospel message as often and as best as I could. If someone happened to associate yellow sunglasses with me, so be it. Maybe they would remember what I taught them about the love and sacrifice of the cross, because all they could focus on at youth group that night was the bright yellow sunglasses that were on my head, when it was the middle of December and dark outside and I had no business having them on. In ministry we are lucky if we get to see the fruits of the seeds we hope to sow, but that doesn’t stop us from sowing them, and I was going to use every tool I had.

There are times in our lives in which we need to make a sacrifice of self, to let something else define us, and yet we sometimes allow ourselves fall victim to our own insecurities. I let my Catholic beliefs and traditions define me, because it is so intricately woven into my being. I stopped giving in to my insecurities about an accessory and chose to let those sunglasses be a trademark of the message I was and am trying to spread about faith and the Church.

I am re-defining those yellow sunglasses, they still provide much needed eye protection, but I hope and work toward the goal that someday some kid will see a pair of yellow sunglasses and be reminded of the love of Christ and the sacrifice he made.

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