Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago tomorrow was one of the best and most important days of my life. I had no idea. It was the day my future husband would come into the Catholic Church.

Ever since I had entered high school and started going to Life Teen at my parish in Connecticut I had been praying for him, praying for his faith and his relationship with God and just wondering where he was.

He was in Texas searching. Searching for answers that he finally found in the Catholic Church. It was a long journey for him but with the sometimes not-so-gentle prodding of his friends he started attending Life Teen events during his senior year of high school. He went on a retreat, went to adoration, and was taught all about the Eucharist and Mary and the saints and the pope. These were beliefs that had seemed strange to him even in the theology classrooms of his Catholic all guy's high school. Still, God was working in him and on New Year's eve 2001 he came to believe in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as he knelt in adoration. He decided there and then that he was going to become Catholic.

It wasn't until Easter vigil 2002, over a full year later, that he became part of the Church. He said he wanted that whole year to prepare himself. He was a freshman at the time at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and as he tells me, basically taught the RCIA classes himself. He realized then that he wanted to transfer to a Catholic University and therefore applied and got accepted to the Franciscan University of Steubenville. It was in the first month of his freshman year that a bright eyed, blond haired high school senior arrived on campus for her college visit and met this neophyte. We were married a little less than five years later.

Our shared faith is the foundation of our marriage. It has been essential to every aspect of our marriage and has kept us strong in the hardest times. We each call each other on to holiness because we know that this world is not what we are made for. It is by being married to each other that we will be purified for heaven. Our faith is not only our foundation it is our path and our destination. It is the whole of who we are and what we want to be. Even being married young we can be assured that our marriage will last because in our weakness God is strong and we center our life on God.

That day 10 years ago God was shaping my life and I didn't know it. Without becoming a Catholic, we would have never met and he will readily admit that he would not have been the man I fell in love with. And he is an amazing man. I am so thankful to all of the people who helped him along this journey. David and Katie Garcia, Joe Florez, Edward Houser, Father Michael Earthman, and many, many others. You are a blessing in our life and I thank you.

Sometimes God is doing huge things on what seems like an ordinary day. I was just sitting in my church in Connecticut on a normal Easter Sunday and God was still transforming my life. I had been praying for my spouse for years at that point and it wouldn't be until years later that I would be able to see exactly what God had been up to.

Kyle, I love you. Happy 10 years as a Catholic. Don't be afraid to tell me that our wedding was the second best day of your life because I know that this was the best. It was the best day of my life too.

9/11- 10 years later

I don't want to write about where I was or what I remember. That day is still far too painful. Today is the ten year anniversary of the terrorist attacks to September 11th, 2001. It was a day that changed me and changed my world forever. I've tried watching the footage but I have to turn it off. I don't need it anyway to remember. The images of that day are burned into my brain. Ten years later I remember every detail.

Today I am remembering the the victims, their families, the heros of the FDNY and NYPD, the military, the survivors, the flight crews and passengers, the politicians like George W Bush who encouraged us to stay strong and united as a country, and all the people who lost their sense of security that day. My husband works at Boston Logan where two of the flights departed from and I had a hard time letting him go to work today.

Life is fragile and I can't spend too much time today dwelling on that day because I have two beautiful daughters and a wonderful husband that need me to live in the present. Their innocence hasn't yet been tarnished and for them I need to focus on celebrating life and enjoying each moment I have with them. If that day proved anything to me it was that life is unpredictable. It also proved that people are capable of great evil and great good. The greatest good I can do today is to love my husband and children for all the people who lost their family and wish that they could be loving them right now as well.

The images above are from the gate that American Airlines flight 11 took off from. The flag is flown at half mast every year in tribute to those people who lost their lives. The flag remains there all year as a reminder as well.

The other image is of a memorial near the Catholic church in our town. There is a flag for each person who lost their life that day. It's overwhelming to behold.

Eternal rest grant unto them o Lord and may the souls of the faithfully departed by the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

The REAL Incredibles

Not sure if anyone besides me can follow my logic but here it goes.

Theoretically, receiving the Eucharist just once should be enough to take us to sainthood. Yet somehow, after countless Sundays of receiving the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity to Christ I am no where near there.

I was watching The Incredibles the other week and the daughter Violet had this latent power of being able to make a force field around herself. It was in her, lying almost dormant, but that power was there. When they were in a plane about to be hit by a missile she tried to use that power but since she hadn't exercised it and tested it enough in the past, she was unable to make a force field strong enough to stop the missile so they had to jump out of the plane. Eventually, after trying, she was able to shield her entire family from harm's way when it really counted.

I feel like that is symbolic of God's grace inside of us. When we receive the Eucharist, or even Baptism or Confirmation, inside of us is the power to do anything spiritually because of that grace. But why aren't we all saints? I feel like it is our lack of practice that keeps us from being able to achieve holiness along with a severe mental block. We doubt that God's grace is sufficient and assume we will fall. We doubt our worthiness and therefore, turn our backs on God's Mercy, ashamed.

If we practiced working with that spiritual power a little more, pushed ourselves spiritually, then when it really mattered, when we were really tempted, we would be able to protect ourselves from sin by that grace of God inside us, just like Violet protected her family in the Incredibles by the power inside of her. The greatest power in the world is inside of us, the power of God, and with great power comes great responsibility. We need to tap into the power God has given us and use it to become Super Saints.