Faith Over Fear

It’s mid-August and the back corner of Target smells like Office Depot. The aroma of notebook paper mingles with that of waxy crayons, with just a hint of ink smell making things interesting. But mostly, it’s the paper I smell. Brightly colored lunchboxes are stacked too high, teetering toward the rainbow of vinyl binders. It’s back-to-school shopping time.

Here in the back corner, children jostle and beg, hoping to capture the goodies they are sure will make the year a happy one. Wonder Woman lunchbox? Sure, if that’s what it takes to get you to eat a packed lunch. Several aisles over, in the bedding department, there is a different milieu altogether. Mothers bite their lower lips while checking through the “dorm essentials” list and avoiding the eyes of their daughters lest they both cry.

It’s August and there are so many new beginnings slated for later this month. In our family, where grown children are no longer bound to school calendars and younger children have been homeschooling year-round, August is still (and always has been) that start of something new.

My eldest child has moved his young family from the West Coast to the East, is about to buy his first house, and just learned he and his wife are expecting twins. My second child is off to the big city to begin a brand-new grown-up adventure. The next one in line just called to let me know he no longer needs to be on our cell phone plan. He’s got a new job, a new apartment and a new phone. It’s August. Time for all things new. 

It’s August and we’re all a little terrified if we’re honest. I meet the eyes of my friend who is sending her firstborn to college and fear pools in the depth of her usually sparking blue eyes. I take a friend’s baby on my hip while she tells me about her 5-year-old’s kindergarten teacher. Her hand shakes just a little as she pushes her bangs out of her eyes. How can we possibly send them off into the unknown? For their part, the ones who are leaving ask, “Can I do this? Can I really, really do this? Or will I mess it up? Disappoint? Fail?” New beginnings are never easy. Fear smells as strongly as a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. 

Faith speaks words of truth to fear. Wherever you’re going this August, God goes with you. Tell your fear there is no where He can’t and won’t reach. When we’re sure we cannot do the task that lies before us, when we’re afraid our hearts will break or we will fail or we will disappoint, we have to cling to the truth. God knows we’re not enough and He will fill in the gaps. When we step out in faith, we do it knowing that we are not enough. That’s where the faith comes in. If we were everything we needed and wanted, what use would we have for God? 

Fear is insidious, paralyzing us if we let it. It doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. It doesn’t make anything more secure. All fear really does is keep us from living the life that God intends for us. That life — the one for which we were created — requires that we do the thing we couldn’t possibly do if not for knowing that Jesus is there, ready and waiting to give us grace and strength sufficient for both the good moments and the ones that feel like utter failures. 

If everything always stayed as fresh and pretty as a brand-new notebook, where’s the living? The notebook has value when we take up the pen and bravely write our hearts in its pages. It has worth when the corners begin to separate and the cover gets scuffed. If we tuck it safely away and never make our mark on it, there’s no purpose and no real beauty. Life has purpose when we stop protecting the pretty veneer and use all 64 crayons to play with color on its pages. Life is beautiful — even on the hard days — when we let faith triumph over fear.

Painful Grace

We close the covers of the beautiful book, and sit and look at each other. She sighs contentedly, the deep and satisfied sigh of a 10-year-old who has just heard the story of Beauty and the Beast translated from its original French. She sighs the fairytale sigh, the one that says, “They were good, but flawed. They hoped. They experienced hardship and suffering. Evil was defeated. Beautiful lessons were learned. They lived happily ever after.”

I close my eyes. Fairytales annoy me. When I was her age, I believed the plot lines. I wasn’t at all enamored of the magic, but I held steadfastly to the belief that the good girl heroine would triumph over trials and tribulations and, sometime in her late teens or early 20s, a prince on a white horse would whisk her to ever-after. And my life went according to script. After a not-all-that-happy childhood, I married my prince when I was 21. My father gave me a fine porcelain statue of Cinderella as a wedding gift. 

The following year, we welcomed a fair-haired, blue-eyed firstborn son. But of course. It’s in the script.

The year after that, I was diagnosed with cancer.

Did not see that sequel coming. Not at all. 

This time, I needed more than a fairytale horse to navigate the turbulence. I needed a lifeboat. I climbed aboard a giant one with “Religion” emblazoned on her bow. She carried me well through various storms of the cancer years and then the storms of the recovery years, the ones during which I was bearing children. I thought her a sturdy and dependable ship. 

The ship crashed headlong right around the time our ninth child was born. Like a young girl who learns that magic isn’t really a thing and that the horse will grow old and lame, I learned that even if the church is God’s perfect vehicle of grace, the people who comprise it are not. I can only compare this chapter in the story to the one where the heroine wanders in the woods at night and every familiar, comforting figure in the shadows shows itself to be something else entirely and hisses or bares fangs, or both. No one was to be trusted. 

The ship no longer seaworthy, the heroine is shipwrecked, and one after another, bottles wash up bearing bad news from home. And this time, the heroine is neither young, nor fair. She is neither idealistic, nor romantic. She is tired. She wonders if this is a trilogy.

Probably not. It’s unlikely that a tidy ending is in the script of the third installment. Instead it is an intermission marked with an asterisk, most certainly a point of reflection. This time, there is no white horse, no sturdy boat. This time, there is only faith in the grace of God. 

For so long, grace was a gentle word, the one that captured the nuanced breath of a nearly fairytale God. Now, I see that grace can be severe. I believed that the goal was to be transported from the suffering. Grace, I thought, was the intercession of a benevolent God who swept the heroine away from heartbreak. The whole point of the plot, I thought, was to get beyond the pain to the promised happiness. I learned that by the time one gets to the third episode, one is weary from the effort of pushing through to the happy ending.

Now, I see that grace is in the struggle itself. And I have been resisting grace in favor of fairytales. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

Vigorously resisting grace. Fighting against the suffering instead of leaning into it. Cursing the circumstances instead of confidently resting in the faith that God will use them to change me. Resisting grace. 

Even still, grace found me. It was there all along. In the fairytale moments, to be sure. But also in the dark woods moments. I see it now, in hindsight, because I recognize the moments of change.

Bible Catholics

“Mom,” my eight-year-old says as she come in the door, “Andrea says we’re not Bible Christians because we’re Catholic.”

I look up from my computer and smile at the irony. For the last nine months, I’ve been writing Scripture studies nearly fulltime. At least this matter will be easier to explain than when my little boy came in from the backyard and wanted to know why our neighbor child was insisting that there are seven gods and none of them was named Jesus.

I told Sarah that Catholics are Christians who definitely believe in the Bible. Her friend believes that the Bible is the only authority for a Christian. We differ there. I asked her to think about Jesus’ friends after He died, to imagine Saint Paul as he wrote his letters from prison. Way back before people identified themselves by the names of many different denominations. Were those people of the early Church Christians?

She agreed that of course they were. “But they didn’t even have a Bible,” I reminded her. “Those letters Saint Paul was writing became a part of the Bible.” Her eyes grew wide with understanding and then they twinkled a little mischievously. “I can tell Andrea that.” I nodded.

“Also, in the Bible it doesn’t say that we have to only believe in the Bible. Jesus gave us the Church, too. So, you could tell her that Christians didn’t always have a Bible, but still they were Christian, and you can tell her that we have the Bible and read the Bible and pray with the Bible at every Mass. You can tell her that you love the Bible and you are Christian and you belong to a Church teaches the truth of the Bible.”

Off she went to set the record straight.

The reality is that her friend’s perception of Catholics is not so different from many Catholics’ perception of Catholics. My cousin Ellie writes about her own childhood growing up in a big Italian family, “A bible the size of Utah sat upon a marble table in our living room but no one was allowed to touch it...There was an awareness of the existence of God—but not the experience of God. Religion came up from time to time—ours was right and everyone else’s was wrong.”  It is not unusual to find a Catholic who doesn’t read the Bible personally on a regular basis.

That never seemed quite right to me. I’ve always deeply believed that having a relationship with God that only exists in the physical—just showing up at Mass and consuming the Eucharist—is like being married and skipping conversation. Jesus wants to have words with us. He wants to engage in dialogue. He gave us this richness of conversation and if we never open the Book, it’s like ignoring our spouses when they try to talk to us. 

Catholic liturgy is steeped in scripture, but a lot of Catholics don’t really listen carefully to it when they hear it. 

And many Catholic women don’t know how to get started, and they don’t know where to find resources to keep them going. We need to change that scenario. We need for our children to be so familiar with the Bibles open in their homes that when someone tells them they aren’t Bible Christians they know that can’t possibly be right. We need to take to heart the story of St. Augustine, who was indisputably Catholic. In Confessions, he describes how powerfully he was impacted by the Word of God. He was sitting in the yard one day, totally at the end of himself, in utter despair. He flung himself to the ground and wept —he describes sobs in big, gushing wails— and he asked God how long he’d be alienated by His anger.

Suddenly, Augustine heard voices chanting “take up and read’ over and over again. So, he went to the Bible and read the first passage it fell open to. It was Romans 13:13—all about turning away from a life of sin. And His whole life changed in that moment.

Ours can, too. Today is a really good day for Catholics to take up and read.

Please join us at Take Up and Read to begin a beautiful new community for the purpose of reading the Bible. 

The Very Last First Communion

(Please bear with me as a I catch up our family journal with some older "news.")

My youngest daughter and I sat in the pew before confirmation, trying to spread ourselves out a bit in order to save seats for the rest of our family. It dawned on me that we needed far fewer seats than usual. Two of our children were sitting with the confirmandi, and two others were sitting with the sponsors. Our eldest lives in Los Angeles. So, we were down to four out of nine with us in the pew. No grandparents would be here this time. I briefly remembered the firstborn’s confirmation. I was beyond nauseated with all-day-morning-sickness. It was late and so hard to keep all those little ones awake and calm through the long liturgy. Now, the baby I was anticipating that time was being confirmed and everyone in the pew could be counted on to behave well. But there were far fewer of us there. Please read the rest here.  

Something New and Beautiful

All photos are the kindness of Allison McGinley.

Judging by the dates before this post, it looks like I've pretty much stopped blogging.

But if you asked my family, I'm sure they'd tell you I've been blogging 24/7 for about two months now. They'd tell you I've been obsessed with blogging. They'd tell you that I--who is nothing if not an inconsistent blogger--has 42 straight days of blogging all written and queued up. 

Just not here.

You see, the thing is, I wrote a book with some friends of mine, and then I had to give the book a home. So, I did a thing way outside my comfort zone: I created a website. I know, right? Me, the person who really detests the tech side of blogging. Me, the person who wants nothing more than less time in front of screen. Me, who was finally going to get around to achieving my sewing goals, set three summers ago. I began the summer completely invested in piecing together a website instead of a quilt. Then I strategically designed a plan for myself that required talking to a lot of people for a lot of time about the site and the book. How in the world did I wander so far outside my comfort zone? 

Honestly, the book came first. I’ve had it on my heart for probably a decade that I wanted to share with Catholic women the fruitful time that I’ve enjoyed every day in the word of God. I don’t even really remember where my habit of daily digging deep started, but it’s been the sustaining source of grace for my entire adulthood. I really do love to read the Bible. Maybe it’s because I’m a word person and I understand the world through language. I don’t know. 

I just know that I'm my best version of myself when I've spent a good chunk of time listening to God in scripture first thing in the morning. And I have enjoyed Protestant resources geared to making that happen for the last several years. But I've wished that I didn't have to read with a filter to be sure it was in accordance with my faith persuasion. And I've always felt a little like an outsider in every online scripture conversation.

At first, I wanted to write about Bible study—like why to have quiet time every morning and how much fruit it bears in my life. And I’ve done some of that. But then, I wanted to actually write the studies. I had a chance to do that with Blessed is She for Advent last year and Lent this year. Both times, the writing was a joy. I love this kind of writing. 

With Blessed is She, I discovered that having people read it was pretty cool too. And with a small group of women in the Restore group last Lent, I learned what a blessing community reading the same scripture together can be for me personally. They wanted more. I wanted more.

So, I wrote another book--this time with a small collective a other writers—and we needed a home for it. 

This is where I’d always gotten stuck in the past. Every time I've dreamed the dream of continuous Catholic scripture study journals, I'd stop when I got to the part where they'd need a website and a marketing plan and "network." I'm not tech savvy.  I didn’t want to create “a thing” on the web. I don’t enjoy web design or platform strategizing. But God truly propelled me out of that stuck place this time ,and we created Take Up and Read because the study needed a home.

Y'all, I sat at my dining room table for hours and hours and made a thing with links that work. I'd look up and say, "OK, God, here's this thing. But it really needs good pictures. What about that?"

Ginny.

Ginny is one of my best friends in the world and we've wanted to do something together for a long time. She'd already written essays for the book and the book is called Consider the Lilies. Ginny has flower pictures! Lots of them. And she has shared them with us.

I didn't want to ask people to read and promote the book. God gave me Mary. Mary has a gift for connecting. And boy has she worked to connect this book to the people God wants to have it!

Over the next few weeks, in different venues and at different times, I hope to tell you about all the other people who brought this grand experiment to life in a way I could have never imagined.

But right, in this space--which has always been all about them--let me tell you that there is no member of my family who hasn't touched this book in a really important way. Even the littlest, Sarah, contributed creative efforts. Turns out she's a really good photographer with a camera that weighs almost as much as she does. Sarah was also responsible for the first draft of the Take Up and Read logo, sketched out on scrap paper in a hotel bed and sent to Kristin. Karoline can edit (yes, she can), and she has drafted the first version of the children's companion to go with the next book. Katie created photo graphic of quotes from 42 different essays. They're beautiful and I can't wait for you to see them.

Stephen and Nick proofread every last comma and dot in all the scripture passages--3 times. And if my books intended for reviewers ever arrive from the printer, they will become my shipping department.

Mary Beth has talked through concepts, proofread copy, and proofread design. Her opinion has weighed heavily in nearly every decision from mugs to font colors. And she casted the video. She's also done an awful lot of driving people here and there so that I could sit at the dining room table and learn more than I ever wanted to know about code and servers.

Patrick is Patrick. He's been insisting I do this for well over a year. He's a big picture guy and he keeps on keeping the dream big. Patrick has a knack for making me think I can do things--whether it's running or writing. He also suggested Lexi to take over the social media component. Good call, dude. Very good call.

Christian has listened--he's good at that. Beside me every single step, he's heard about every hurdle, every disappointment, every small victory. And then, he shot and produced this amazing video. He understands the emotional toll this much extroversion takes on me, and he has insight for which I am very grateful.

Michael is a continent away, but Michael speaks into this project in two ways. He's here if I want to bounce a thought. And he's there (in California) making incredible sacrifices so that I can have Kristin as a partner in this venture. He's actually kind of between here and there because he's moving back east this week, but that crazy story is for a different time. (Watch for it. It's a good one.)

For now, though, when it became apparent that the books would need a home (and covers and designs and logos and pretty much everything except the words), the first thing my sweet husband did was make it so Kristin and her girls could come to Virginia for ten days to focus on launching this project. Kristin created a logo and painted the cover before she ever got on a plane. They have two toddlers y'all. I know that doesn't happen without my big boy, who understands the unique needs of creative mamas with babies better than anyone I know. He's lived this equation his entire life. I could not have made this happen without Kristin. And Kristin couldn't have done it well without Michael. 

So, that's my kids. 

There are a lot of ways God has surprised me with this project. I've never "felt" His guidance and provision the way I have in the last two months. At every turn, every time I have questioned or wondered or wavered, He's said, "No, not that way, this way." And I'm really good with that. But one thing in particular makes me know this is His: my husband has been 100% onboard and has been the answer to absolutely everything I've needed to fill in the gaps where I've come up short. He's the perfect provision. 

I have so much more to tell you. 

About the book.

About our plans.

But you all are my peeps. I know you. You've journeyed with me to here. I trust you'll click and read at the new site.

But this site isn't going away. Heck, I got so carried away with web design that I started de-cluttering and re-painting around here. I've learned a thing or two, and I hope to polish and shine some more. Also, I have a renewed energy for blogging. I suspect I'll be here more than recently, not less. 

Thanks for hanging with me during these hard seasons. Truly, they gave birth to a book. Go see what that's all about. 

The beautiful Bible pictured above was painted by Lindsay at Just Love Prints.