Category: Lessons

::Life Its Own Self::

I did not want to write this, but it won’t leave me alone. This is life its own self. 

Come March 21, 2026, I will have lived it seventy and nine. Looking back, the road I’ve traveled is so long I can’t see clear to the beginning anymore. Yet it’s puzzling. I’m still eager, and curious, and filled with ideas … and, generally speaking, I have the energy to accomplish tasks that come to me, through desire or necessity. For example, after Christmas I’m gutting the powder room for a redo. My Christmas wish list is power tools. 

How is that possible? There are moments when I find a thought chasing at the edge of my brain:

“Will the old woman slip in and take over today?” I like Clint Eastwood’s attitude. When asked how he stays so youthful and sharp, he said, “I don’t let the old man in.”

I don’t wish to be cruel to the old gal. But I have way too much road to travel, things to do, family and others to love and interact with. 

Yet I do wonder. I wonder about “next life.” In our song ‘Glorious’, we wrote that our dreams are just a whisper of what heaven’s gonna be. I’ve watched NDE accounts where people share what they’ve seen, and it’s generally that there’s no way to actually describe it … the beauty and the splendor is beyond our limited understanding.

I accept that. I believe it. I hope and I pray that when my time comes, I will be there, and see it.

But not yet. 
I thought, about thirty three years ago, that God was through with me. My children were grown, and my marriage had crashed. I was, I thought, done. But what came after that was a human and a spiritual growth that could only be described as driven by the Almighty. He took all my broken pieces and put me back together. An author said, and I sadly cannot remember who, but he said, “Until your heart has been broken to grains of sand, you will never really have loved at all.”

I know now what that author meant. And I see that God could only have His way with me once I was fully His. I’m not perfect. But He is.

And He’s let me know that my daily surrender is enough to keep the old woman out, if only for one more day

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::Big Brown Boots::

At Marquette School every day, Monday through Friday, started with Holy Mass.

Each class sat together with their Benedictine nun sitting proudly in charge of the group.

Once I received Holy Communion, I was able to partake every morning. This was back during the days when it was the rule to abstain from food after midnight in order to receive the Sacrament.

So I received it every morning. Recipients would file into the lunchroom to break their fast after Mass. My mother tied a dime and a nickel into the corner of a handkerchief. This bought me a cup of hot chocolate and one glazed donut. At that young age, this seemed the prize, and I confess to you now that – more often than not – it was that cocoa and that donut in my head when the priest placed the Host on my tongue.

At one point I needed rubber boots. I dreamt of getting a pair of white boots with a big tassel on the front. I’d seen the drum majorettes wear them and that was exactly what I wanted!

The next memory that comes to mind is me, late to Mass, shlepping down the aisle in big, brown rubber boots. Christ the King church was filled with every student in the school, and was dead silent except for me, age six, clod hopping my way down that center aisle to the front pews, where the first graders sat. I wished the marble floor would swallow me up.

When purchasing them my mother had pointed out, quite briskly, that my brother could wear them once I’d outgrown them which – give the size – would surely have taken several years.

I hated my mother, I hated my brother, I hated those big brown boots, and I hated myself for all that hatred. I knew, in my freshly ordained young heart, that hatred was a sin. So I hated, more than anything, the hatred that I had.

It seems like I wore those big brown boots for years. At first every time I pulled them on, I willed them to be white boots with a big tassel on the front.

They never were anything but brown rubber.

Such a big lesson in humility for a six year old.

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