God's Quirky Sense of Things, See you in 2013

Back before college at the beach, my favorite place in the world, sitting on the deck, patting my dog and talking with my dad, I prayed a big prayer, though I didn't know it at the time. College felt alien and I worried I would be as lonely there as I had been in high school and middle. The lurking...what if it's me? doubt wouldn't let me go. I asked for someone to love me...just for me.

I met the man I would marry three days into school.  I'd also prayed to have lots of people who would always love me.  I would argue ten kids equals a lot.   Now God knows I got the joke long before even kid five, but rest were His equivalent of a rim shot. 

The scripture "Ask and you shall receive" direct from Christ has always held great comfort to me.  I've also always known when a prayer has been answered, because it is accompanied by "laughter."
So when prayer is hard for me, usually, my sense of humor is off as well.   It is a good gut check for me.

There was a series of weeks when our family was running perpetually late...to everything. 

Frustrated after multiple missings of good things, I prayed to God to help me find a way to get us where we needed to go before we were expected. 

God knows I'm a writer. I'm always hoping/pitching/writing stories to get published.    God's not subtle with me, but then He knows absent blunt instruction, I'm clueless. So the week after my prayer, I got asked to write a humor piece on getting to mass on time.

I could hear God laughing as I typed.   We'll be there I promised.  And things got better.  You could say we paid more attention to the clock or I implemented the tips I'd written, but the reality is things got easier, and it wasn't fully us that made it so. 

This past two years, I've said a rosary, faithfully, every day.  Then, after Christmas, it became very difficult.  I'd get through a decade, two, forget which decade I was on, fall asleep during, start over, it has been a stumbling bumpy path of trying to will through the prayer. It wasn't because I was sad or angry or scared or frustrated or even busy.  It was simply the prayer muscles seemed to have become gimpy, distractable, undisciplined.  

Around the same point, writing became excruciating as well, a laborious task that lacked humor.  I thought it was merely the many tasks of Christmas and the fact that my laptop fried.  But all the stories seem dried up.  I know they are there, locked in a well of my brain somewhere and I can think of 16 different cute/amusing/sweet/crafty/clever type events that came from having all ten home over the holidays, but they don't coalesce into a coherent whole.  All the half and third and fifth decades don't equal a rosary and all the little quirks and cute moments don't equal a story.  Both the prayerful and the creative parts of my brain feel locked.  

I have two paths.  Beat my head against this wall. (It has always worked before, I'm remarkably oblivious to the pain when I set my self up this way but I've been doing that for about a month).   Stop and listen to what it is that God wants.  Since the prayer theme this year was "Be Still and Know I am Here" I'm guessing I should probably go with the later. I'm counting on God to be rather direct about this, big Neon sign can't miss it if you tried kind of notice. 

Immediately the panic bird of my brain says, "But Sherry, if you stop writing, you're not a writer. You've worked hard to craft a following of 133 people (Hi 133 followers), and have a modestly successful blog.  You've even got Google ads up to $40.00 --they don't pay until you get to $100.00, but last year you were at $14.75!  You have close to 200 hits a day.  If you don't put things up, that will stop! 

But I'm going to trust on this one. 

God gave me the talent, God gives me the will.  God will give me the words, or not.  It's that simple.  So I'm taking a two week break from the blog, I'm disciplining myself that it will be two weeks, which doesn't seem like a lot, but to a blogger, it is an eternity.  I'm also going to allow myself to try a simpler prayer like the Chaplet in the meantime, and hope the Rosary comes easier.