Small Success Thursday

Today, it's Thursday and so it's time to stop and count blessings. 

I'm grateful for those in the writing/blogging community that have offered me their support, opened their forums/venues to review/promote my book, and who have provided advice and encouragement in this stage of a writer's life, after the book is published.   Special call out to Lisa Hendey over at http://www.Catholicmom.com, Adam Scull at http://www.Eatsleepwrite.net, the guys over at www.Creativeminorityreport.com, and all the folks at http://www.absolutewrite.com.  All of them helped push me to write and keep writing and to promote and keep working at offering Helen to the world and I am grateful for their help. 

I'm also very grateful for several of my daughters, who through their own struggles and frustrations, have lead me to recognize some areas of my own life that need addressing.  Becoming a more generous spirit is an act of the will.  I suffer from the flaw of feeling like "I've given" when I get to 4:30, about the time homework is started.  They've helped me to face this less than beautiful fact about myself with more grace than left alone I would.  Let's face it, absent having to address it, I wouldn't. 

We are repeating over and over again, Progress, not perfection.  It works for most everything.

It's rather like how as a young adult, I was a terrible sport in games. I hated not winning.  I hated playing poorly.  Rather than reveal this ugliness, I chose not to play cards or games.  However, that simply meant the flaw was hidden, not removed.  Thankfully, my husband and children love playing games so I get to work on this particular issue with great regularity.  I wish I could say 29 years of games/cards with my then boyfriend/fiancé, then husband cured this flaw, it's still a work in progress.  Less so than before, but certainly not yet gone.    

Holding onto being grateful for progress and not demanding perfection keeps me from despairing that we're not done yet. 

I'm also grateful for the immediate gift of answered prayers.  Most of you know I participated in the Lawn Chair Catechism. You finish a summer of reading and writing and thinking about intentional discipleship and it forces the question, "What do you want of me Lord?" I asked. 

But the pull had already been being placed in my heart and mind.  These past few months, I hear people speaking on Catholic radio, I listen to talks online and I think, "I could do that. I want to do that. Why aren't I doing that?"  Today, I saw a call out for speakers about writing and Catholicism and fiction and I threw my hat into the ring.  Yesterday, I ran into the former DRE of our Parish and told her about Sherry Wendell's book, Forming Intentional Disciples and she jumped at the idea.  She mentioned the New Evangelization and impulsively, I said, I want to be part of it.  The Holy Spirit always works impulsively with me, and I knew as soon as I'd said yes in both cases, this was what I should be doing next.  I still don't know what either will mean, but I mean to find out. 

And finally, today I'm grateful for my cousins and Aunts and Uncles and for my parents' friends who live near my mom and dad, and who come to visit him and eat lunch with my mom and give them the gift of being present.  It is a great corporeal act of mercy and it feeds not just them, but me because I am so grateful they are, so grateful they come, so grateful they give this gift of time.  It is very moving to me.