those little prisons

It has been a crazy, crazy week.  Monday, we got 15 inches of rain in about 12 hours.  Water just overflowed.  A friend had water in her house.  Another came very close.  I took off my shoes and socks at lunchtime to get down the sidewalk.

Tuesday, my children did not have school because of the flooding in that area, and I had a delayed start.  We started and ended an hour later...wasn't as bad as I thought...so that the buses wouldn't be on flooded roads in the pre-dawn darkness.  We had a bus load of kids who couldn't get to school, but it was pretty much business as usual.

Wednesday was a normal day.

Today many teachers went to the state capitol to protest changes to our educational system.  The superintendent did not cancel classes, but did mention that any absences would be excused.  So about half of our students showed up, maybe fewer.  It was a very peaceful day. 

In a post below, I mentioned my new favorite Matt Maher song..Every Little Prison.  Love it!

I have often thought that I would sooner die than make an appointment for confession.  But this week, I knew it was time to go, and I found myself looking at the calendar, knowing that it is impossible for me to make it before 6:30 Mass during the week, and knowing that I would be MIA the next two Saturday afternoons.  Soooo....rather than wait 2 weeks, I stared at the computer screen and wrote and rewrote an email, and asked my good priest if he had time after Mass.  And of course, he said, "Yes, catch me after Mass on Thursday."  And I didn't even die asking!

As I was preparing, I thought about the little prisons.  Surely sin is a prison, but sometimes we get sucked into the prisons of others, and that has been a issue for me, as of late.  And then...at Bible Study last night (we are studying Acts), Jeff Cavins talked about the prisons that we are in sometimes...and that sometimes instead of trying to get out, we need to do like Paul and his companion and praise God and try to find Jesus there.  I was kind of "wow"....the prison thing was surely coincidental.

This morning started out with a very "animated" conversation before I left the house.  By the time I got to Mass, I was just glad to be there.  A little nervous about confession.  Wondering exactly how the logistics of it all would work out.  Mass was over, and I just kind of hung out for a few minutes.  Then I went and popped my head in the back to let him know I was there.  He smiled and said he hadn't forgotten, so I went back out and sat and waited while he purified the vessels and what not.  Then we took a walk to the back of the church...he went in his door, and I went in mine. 

The morning 'conversation' was still fresh, and it fit nicely into "getting sucked into the prisons and anxieties of others."  "Are we supposed to stay in those prisons with them?" I asked.  He paused for a minute and said, "No, that would be slavery.  There needs to be a boundary."  We all have our own baggage, and that is where God works in our lives...he doesn't work on us in other people's baggage.... And setting a boundary will almost certainly be met with a hardened heart.  But that is OK.  So very helpful. 

It is confession, because I still have my list, and he listens to it all, but I very much appreciate the spiritual direction that sometimes - but not always - comes with it.  He is so wise. 

Can I encourage any one to go to confession during Lent?  Even if it's been 20 years or so?  Even if you have to make an appointment?  I am living proof that you do not die if you make an appointment.

The rest of the day - even with it's tumultous start - went on to be very peaceful...half of the normal students, spiritual wisdom, and the Lord's merciful love.  A great combo!

The dog had a peaceful day, too.  She took some time to smell the flowers.

have ark...will travel

Today the skies opened up where I live and just stayed open. 

Went to bed with thunder and lightening last night and woke up to it again about 4 a.m. this morning.  It continued.  I dropped the kids at the bus, went to Mass...it wasn't too bad.  Went to work out and watched the lightening strikes out the window.  Dashed to the car, and decided still to stop, as is my usual routine. at the church near my school for just a few minutes of quiet.  I parked in the fire lane, though...that much closer to the door.

With the time change, I am back to sitting in darkness, once the last people leave after Mass, and I like it that way.  Today was like night.  And then the heavens opened.  After a little while, I thought I saw a break in the rain, so I dashed towards my car.  And then dashed to my classroom a few minutes later.  I made my way to first hour, and the rains came down. 

All of our classrooms open to the great outdoors, and we watched as the water washed over the sidewalks and filled the pasture next door.  And still it came.  We carefully made our way to second hour...tiptoeing close to the walls.  And the rain continued to come and the water continued to rise.  Into the classrooms. 

A mouse ran across the floor in second hour, but fortunately only the teacher saw it.  Driven from its dry little nest somewhere.  Only a couple of the classrooms actually flooded to the point of not being able to hold class in them.

When it came time to leave second hour, we couldn't.  So we stayed put for another 45 minutes or so. The rain slowed and the water had subsided some.  So I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up pants and gingerly tiptoed through the water.  About ankle-deep at that point.

That was pretty much it for the day.  We fed them.  Which is more than I can say for my own children.  They were stuck in first hour for hours with no electricity.  When lunch time came, they got room service...3 snack-sized bags of Graham Teddies. 

My fifth hour class watched Sandlot, and after they finished part of a test, the teacher in my last hour class also put on a movie.  At about that time, my own offspring called to say their bus hadn't arrived at school, and for me to come and get them. 

And so I left, and did not return.   As of 6:30 tonight, there are still some schools with children remaining...whose parents can't get to them.  Last I heard they were transporting them to my school's gym. 

My own children are delighted that school at their facility was cancelled tomorrow.  The above picture is of our football field.  For some reason, when they built it, they put a levee around it.  I have seen it swampy, but I have never seen it completely full...like a tea cup.  From end zone to end zone.  15 inches of rain in 12 hours will do that, though.

Here's hoping for a drier tomorrow and a prayer for those whose homes were flooded today.

another week

Yep...nearly another week has passed!

Last year during Lent, I had so much to say that I felt like I was boring people by posting it all.  And this year...  Well, we appear to be about on the once-a-week plan!  And still I worry that I am boring people. Life has been very busy and somewhat aggravating. 

Monday?  Tuesday?  Too long ago to remember!

Wednesday, during my 7th grade math class, I heard sirens.  When class was over, I checked the parking lot.  There were not 1, not 2, not even 3 or 4...but FIVE police cars.  Parents behaving badly.  And we wonder why the kids act like they do?  Not really...it's not rocket science.  Perhaps it was the full moon...

Wednesday night my boys and I fashioned this stunning pool cover.  We survived a winter of leaves and acorns in the pool, but the infernal oak pollen will surely turn it into a icky yellowish tea.  You haven't really lived until you've fought oak pollen!

As we were putting the "cover" on it, we wondered aloud how the dog might react to it...she enjoys taking a dip in the pool in all sorts of weather.  She promptly answered our question by walking on it and nearly drowning in the process.  She hasn't walked on it since.This morning we pulled it off and tried to put it on a little better.  Hubby was home to help this time.  He belongs to the "if-duct-tape-can't-fix-it...then-it's-broke" club.  So yeah...he duct-taped it down in places... Cajun ingenuity?

And then there was one small part that the big tarp didn't cover - due to the pool's irregular shape.  So we tried to attach another one, but the holes didn't line up.  That's OK - string it together and duct tape it!  And the best part - this man is so creative - He wanted to keep this part out of the water so the tape might stick...so he got some empty containers that float, and put them underneath.  I knew we would do a better job with his help.  He is creative like that!

Wednesday was not great, but Thursday was just nuts.  My car made "that" sound when I started it in the morning.  There was nothing to do, but to go on.  Hubby was on a job, away from home, and there was no other vehicle at home for me to use.  I dropped the kids at the bus stop and went to Mass...where else are you going to go at 6:15 in the morning?.  I prayed the whole time that it would start again when I came out.  It did - barely.  So I drove to the auto parts store.  They didn't open for another 30 minutes, but I had no choice. 

I figured I'd buy a battery, they'd put it in for me, and I would be on my merry way.  Oh no, couldn't be that simple.  They tested the battery, and the result showed the battery was still good.  The man said it might be the starter??  Didn't really sound right to me, but he gave me a jump, and I went to get hubby's vehicle, which was parked at his brother's house. 

When I called my dear husband to update him on the situation, he said he couldn't talk right then, because HIS truck was breaking down.  Sigh.  Had to have his work truck towed back home from 30 or so miles away.

Meanwhile, we had left the dog in the house that morning, not wanting her to drown in our "pool cover". 

I had a 9:00 meeting that I hadn't finished the paperwork for, and my supervisor shows up at 8:30. 

It was just too much.  I was able to find a sub on the second phone call, and left at noon.  I was reminded at one point of the quote attributed to St. Teresa of Avila..."Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, its no wonder you have so few of them!"

We enjoyed a track meet that evening in gorgeous weather and had Chick-Fil-A for dinner, so the day ended pretty well.

One of my friends pointed out on Facebook that if we view trials and tribulations as gifts from the Father, then I had certainly had a very blessed couple of days!

Fast forward a day, a different battery test said it was the battery, and we are trying to decide whether it is even worth it to fix hubby's truck.  He has the sense that he will not be approved for his medical card in the coming months and is freely tossing the word "retirement" around. 

We spent a few hours outside today, trying to get the back "yard" cleaned up.  It looks a lot better, though there are still plenty of weeds to pull.  The citrus trees are on their second bloom.  We will have 10 zillion lemons...again.  The grapefruit tree has a lot of flowers, but it also seems to be "aborting" a lot of the baby grapefruits. 

These flowers are getting ready to bloom...

Lent it going well enough, I suppose.  No dramatic changes or revelations (although I have realized that I can focus much better on the Stations of the Cross if I close my eyes and listen rather than reading along in the booklet.  A nice quiet steady progress overall - at least here and there.  Compassionate Shepherd.  Bread of Life.  Giver of Hope. 

And finally - my favorite picture of the week....

Looking forward to losing an hour of sleep this weekend, anyone??  Have a good one!

bread of life

Reconciliation and laundry.  That could kind of sum up my weekend.  All in all, I think a lot was accomplished.

Got most of the laundry done!  Yay!  Got some paperwork from school taken care of.  Unnecessary, but required.  Special Ed progress reports are the most useless piece of paperwork that we do.  (Report cards should be enough of a progress report, in my humble opinion.)  You want to know how useless they are??  I didn't do them for years...and the world did not come to an end!  No child was harmed.  Education was not impeded.  But now with the computer age, Big Brother can check on us to make sure they were done.  So they were done.

You remember my penance from a couple of weeks ago....the one about asking God to show me how to be Compassionate Shepherd, Bread of Life, Giver of Hope in my life?  I had one long conversation with the Lord about that, and it left as many questions as answers.  The advice from my good priest was to "keep talking and keep listening."  So I have been listening with at least half an ear.  One thing that I found interesting was that nearly every day (this Sunday being an exception) I have come across at least one of those words in the Scripture readings of the day.  I was wondering if the string would continue throughout Lent.

But in the conversation, I had kind of skipped over the whole Bread of Life thing.  I figured that was the Good Lord's job.  How could I possibly be the Bread of Life??  But this weekend, I was reading Mother Teresa's Come Be My Light (excellent!!) and I came across an answer to just that!  She wondered at "the greatness of the humility of God? in making Himself the "Bread of Life", and believed that "our live must be woven with the Eucharist"...that we must give ourselves just as totally to others...especially since Christ makes Himself present in the poor.  We are to become "bread" to feed the "hungry Christ".

And really...that kind of makes sense.  Especially when we consume the Eucharist...the Eucharist doesn't become part of us...we become (or should become) the Gift that we receive - Jesus.  We are a Eucharistic people...blessed and broken for others.

One thing that I have been working on for a while is the Ad Altare Dei religious award with a small group of Boy Scouts.  We have 4 in the group - 2 of them mine.  We are working through the sacraments one at a time, and today we finished up with Reconciliation.  I don't think that I am wasting my time, but with 4 teenage boys, there is a good bit of goofing off, and  I sometimes wonder if we are accomplishing very much...if anything is sinking in.  It has a lot of book requirements and discussion questions, and sometimes the discussing is very limited.

Each sacrament (chapter) ends with some type of prayer service.  For Baptism, I think we washed each other's hands and re-lit our Baptismal candles.  For confirmation, we did something about recognizing each other's gifts.  For the others, I used the suggestions in the leader's guide, but this one I did myself.  I think it turned out nicely.  The two other moms had good things to say about it, and sometimes I do think they think we are wasting their time. 

We started off with a song courtesy of my iPad...Matt Maher's "Every Little Prison", because, you know, sin is like a prison.  This particular song was based on the Litany of Humility.



Then we lit candles off of the one representing Jesus in the middle and recalled how at Baptism, our candles were "lit".  After a prayer and a reading of the Prodigal Son with a little explanation thrown in about how it relates to confession, we blew out the candles and went through an examination of conscience for teens.  I modified it from this.  We took turns reading and commenting as we saw fit.  Then it was time to say an Act of Contrition and relight out candles (which is what happens in confession) to share our light with the world.  To finish up, I played "Only Grace" by Matthew West. 



Maybe some of them will be encouraged to go to confession during the Lenten season.  Maybe someone reading this will be...  GO!

Life is good and the weather is awesome!

another catch-all

I am still here...yes, I am.  I have not given up blogging for Lent.  Things have just been *that* busy.

Evening is my blogging time, and there has been something every evening this week.  Monday evening, I skipped out on the Rosary group I belong to because I had a birthday cake to bake.  I also received a message on Facebook from one of my former students.  I'm friends with a few of the "kids" I taught way back when.  K and C were two girls in my class about 15 years ago, and both have "friended" me on Facebook.  C was in a wheelchair and K had a mild case of cerebral palsy.  C has visited me a couple of times over the years, and in recent months, she has been one of my most faithful Words With Friends opponents.  K is married, has 2 kids with a third due to enter the world in the next few weeks.

The message was from K with a short message and her phone number.  C had been hospitalized for an infection that resulted from a pressure sore.  It had gone all the way to the bone, and even though they had done surgery to remove some of it, it was still an issue.  After the surgery she had gone into cardiac arrest.  Organ damage ensued and things took a turn for the worse from there.  She passed away the next evening.  She was 29.  It is hard to feel sad, because she is almost certainly in a better place.  But once again, I find myself stunned by the suddenness of death.  A week ago, she was posting on FB.  We have 2 unfinished Words With Friends games.  

While one family was dealing with death, we were celebrating life.  On Tuesday, my baby turned 15.  I had in mind to do one of those wonderful birthday posts with pictures to show how much things change and how much they remain the same.  But that has yet to happen.  We celebrated with pizza - a rare meal out - and cake.

Wednesday night was a Bible Study night, and Thursday night was a track meet.  I need some downtime.   A trip to the chapel is on the agenda for the near future.  A trip where I can spend an hour or more.  The weekend has a lot of things packed into it, too.  Things for Boy Scouts.  Paperwork for school. 

Lent is going relatively well, I think. I need some time to really assess and re-orient, but things are going well with my fifth graders.  One was sent to an alternative placement last week for the remainder of the year, and that has made a huge difference as we are able to focus on the others now.  And I am doing my best to smile and provide for their needs. 

Hopefully our weekend will provide a chance to literally and figuratively catch my breath!

blessed are they...

I arrived at Mass this morning and I noticed with an internal chuckle that the lady who occupied "my" seat for the past two Lents is back again...in the exact same seat.  Just for the record, I gave up fighting it last year and just changed seats.  I rather like the new spot better...it was there that I met Brother for the brief time last fall that he joined us.  It is always good to see all the new faces at Lent, but it is too bad that by the week after Easter, we are all back to the "regular" crowd.

As I prayed today, "Lord, show me how to be a giver of hope to these children,"  the answer spoke forth from the Responsorial Psalm.  Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.   If nothing else, it is a reminder to me to stay close to the source.  It is always kind of neat when you get an answer just like that.  Who says the Lord doesn't still speak?  But He could say a little more...a few more specifics would be helpful!  All in due time, I suppose.

I had a moment with one of my fifth graders today.  He is 13 and just totally disruptive in the school setting.  I do have some compassion for his circumstances, but I am totally at a loss as to how to deal with him and how to keep him from disrupting the classroom for others.  Today he was sitting in his desk in the way-back of the classroom, and I pulled up a chair next to him.  The teacher was giving the specifics of an assignment, so I went back to my room (2 doors down) to get my iPad, so I could could have the info to help my students.  By the time I got back, she had switched to a short lesson on using quotation marks and writing dialogue and was having the students copy what she was doing.

I thought for a second and put my iPad on his desk and told him to type in what she was writing.  The gasp from him was audible, since I rarely let the kids touch it.  (It is mine. It was expensive, and if it gets broken, I want it to be my fault.)  I showed him how to put in the quotation marks and commas.  It was just a moment, but sometimes you just have to savor those.

onward to Easter

Today was a holiday...the last day of our Mardi Gras break, and I slept late.

I had an much overdue hair appointment, and from there I stopped at the post office to mail a package and then drove to church.  I was there about a half hour before Mass started.  At some point, the lady behind me tapped me and pointed out that there appeared to be no Eucharistic Ministers, and asked if I would join her.  We were both dressed in jeans, but I suppose we were better than nothing.  We got instructions beforehand about distributing ashes.  I'm afraid some of my ash crosses were off-center, and quite possibly some got too much, some not enough.  Tricky business - the ashes.

Did you know that the purpose of Lent is not repentance?  In my mind, I heard a Scooby Doo "ehrr??" when the good Father said that.  He went on to explain that the purpose of Lent is to prepare to fruitfully recommit to our baptismal vows when Easter Sunday rolls around.  And part of that necessarily involves repentance. 

A trip to WalMart for a few necessities and then back home.

I accomplished most of the things on my "to do" list.

One thing that I wanted to do today was plant some Easter Lilies.  I had some in my garden at the old house.  They had been given to my by a priest friend after their usefulness as church decor had passed, and they were beautiful last year.

Last year, sometime in May, the lilies in our church made their way to the outside of the sacristy door.  I would pick up a couple every day on the way to the parking lot.  At that point, the new house was a thought, so I didn't plant them.  Last summer, they made the trip to the new house in their original pots, and for much of the last six months have been sitting in pots next to the garbage can.  In all fairness to my hubby who placed them there, they just looked like some pots with dead plants in them.  But recently they have started to resurrect.

I planted some in front of my Holy Family statue.  And lest you think that I should have weeded first, this is what it looked like yesterday.

I've still got some work to do, but it's way better than it was....  And I planted some along the front walk...

I probably should take a broom and sweep up my mess, yes?

We had Bible Study tonight, and sometimes our good Pastor gets started on a topic, and it's like a whole 'nother homily.  He is good, and hits the nail squarely on the head.  We are studying Acts, and with it, the persecution of the early church.  You would probably have to be under a rock someplace to think that the church today is not being persecuted.  He said, however, that the biggest concern is not what the government wants to do to us, but the persecution from within - from those who are not faithful to church teaching.  He compared them to a cancer - eating away at the Body (of Christ).  He said there are three remedies:  1) prayer (and prayer is not a last resort)  2) the Church and all of the spiritual treasures contained therein and 3) Fidelity to the truth.  The church is not just some rule-making body, he says, but holds the deposit of truth that Jesus left us. 

It was good to hear his take on the current state of things.

And so begins Lent....looking forward to Easter.  Planting lilies in place of the weeds...in our gardens and our lives.