Just Faith, Everyday

You know, as I sit and grade at a Barnes and Noble and contemplate a mother-son discussion going on next to me over superheroes, I realized something powerful: that no guidebook or online resource or expert can teach the values of curiosity and patience. As adults we lose this grace so easily, and I think it has become a part of my prayers to relearn this. I want to see as a child sees, especially at this time of the year--but I also want to guide the child. Maybe this is the desire inherent to our relationship with God. As His children, we are called to share our curiosities with him, and maybe He will patiently answer. A thought as we meditate this third Sunday of Advent--Gaudete!

As the years go by, I think about all the ways life slips by. I see ads and TV shows geared toward me now, reminiscent of 1980s nostalgia; it reminds me that in the midst of watching the Brady Bunch as it began to rerun, and watching MTV become an obsession, and wanting to be fashionable as a pre-teen, and all the ways my mother chose counter to fashion that frustrated me. Looking back now, I can see she was thinking humbly for us, creating women of subdued taste. I think of the many ways the 1980s shaped my life--the many ways I learned about what it meant for my parents to live across an ocean from their own parents. For my mother it was the ultimate creativity: she not only had to deal with a stubborn husband and no mother to turn to, but create a home space familiar to her, as familiar as she could get it. In the stores, she did not find allspice or cumin seed or the sausages she craved, so they sent for spices and went out to a farm to kill a pig and create meals for a winter ...