Tag Archives: Life

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.

That Unholy Little Light

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When I first started driving my dad was very firm in the fact that if you take care of your car, your car will take care of you.  This is so true; in the last 11 years I have driven four cars, and all were/are very good to me.

In November of 2011 I started the process of buying my first new vehicle. So with my father’s guidance and a lot of research I decided upon a Subaru, they are affordable, continually perform well past 200,000 miles, have all wheel drive, which would be important during the winter months, and their Kelley Blue Book and Consumer Report ratings were off the charts.  So I worked out a loan and what I would pay out of pocket, filled out the paper work, shook the dealer’s hand and walked away feeling pretty good, minus the intense feeling that I needed to wash my hand.

A month later, just in time for Christmas I picked up my brand new 2012 Subaru Impreza. It had 8 miles on it. I had never had a car with less than 100,000 miles before. Needless to say everything was perfect. The one thing that took some getting use to however, was not jumping to conclusions every time I heard something a smidge out of the ordinary. I was so conditioned from my previous “rides,” that everything was going to cost me days in the shop and a couple hundred dollars. With my new car this was not the case as I was assured by my father…and the service department at the dealership…I trust my dad, I was just leaning towards being cautious.

Everything with the Subie has been great, I just had my 25,000 mile check up and all was well. 

Then last week happened. It got really, really, cold, and I mean it went from mid 60s to about 35 overnight. Even I have to admit that, that’s cold. I get in my car and this little orange light pops up on my dash. So I immediately pull out the owner’s manual and begin my search as to what the problem is, and I discover that this light’s purpose is to tell me that my tire pressure has dropped to an un-pleasurable level. I grab my pressure gauge and check the tires. They’re a little low, but not by much, maybe my car is just having one of those extra sensitive days.  So I head to the gas station and put a little love into my tires.  But that unholy orange light would not go off, I drove and drove and drove, and nothing. Normally I would schedule an appointment at the dealership to have this sorted out immediately, but last week was exceptionally busy. After about 5 days and 200 some miles that little light went off. Without warning. I don’t even know if I noticed it right away. This freaked me out more. I called the dealership immediately to find out if this meant that my car was going to explode and if I should bring it in. They told me it was nothing to worry about that sometimes when we have extreme weather change it can cause the sensor to trip, but I would only need to get the sensor changed if it became a continual issue.  I hung up the phone relieved. 

Though if the car were going to explode I would tell the driver to stay away too.

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After this roller-coaster of worry about my car, I remembered something my mom had told me about becoming a first time mom. She said that the first time my brother had gotten sick with a fever, she flipped out, she read all the books she had on hand (this was pre-WebMD, which is probably a good thing), called my grandmother, everything and everyone told her it would be okay, to just give him some baby Tylenol and wait. However, she went to the doctor anyway, he told her the same thing. This and only this assuaged her fears. Dr. Gould, a wonderful man, told her that it was okay for her to come in, she’s a first time mother, everything is a little more high alert, you care so much that you need to make absolutely sure that everything is fine, he then told her to wait until her second kid, she’d be an expert then. He sent her home and didn’t charge her for the visit.

Now it’s not to say that I’m comparing my car to a baby. But there are a few similarities.

1.) When you invest in something, be it your time, your life, your money, your body, your emotions, or a combination therein, you take special care of those things and you want to make sure that nothing is wrong. When it’s your first time around the block, you take extra special care of it. 

2.) The second time around will always be easier, but only in a certain respect. When it comes to children, you will be an old pro, it will become easier to judge when to take the child to the doctor, when to potty train them, or how to deal with tooth pain, but the person will always be different, you’re not creating exact little replicas (man that’s a terrifying thought).

3.) Observation is everything, it is this amazing gift that we all have, to observe and take in what we are seeing, and all of our senses lend themselves to this skill.  

It is worth your while to observe and make notes, especially when it comes to something that you are invested in. It’s how we grow. How we make things and ourselves better.

It’s okay to be overly cautious and a little nervous about something you care about, as long as you take the time to learn and grow from that experience. Otherwise you will just continue to exhaust yourself for no reason. It will never go the same way twice, but being prepared is never a bad thing.  

Here’s to continued hope that my car won’t explode.

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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