Category: vocation postcards

Prayer, Fasting, Birthday Parties

Dear Pope Francis,

You have vastly simplified the menu for my birthday party.  Thanks!

Jennifer.

PS: I suppose you will not be amused if I get medieval, and suggest a beer fast? To combine both events into one?

PPS: Another possibility: Since I invited everyone I know, most of whom are not Catholic . . . Maybe I’ll put out food, and put a sign up that it’s for non-Catholics only?

PPPS: Or we could get canon-lawish, and excuse ourselves. But then what would that say about us?  Other than, “sent out invitations before day was announced”?

PPPPS: How about if I quick invite some people I *don’t* like, and thus convert it into a penitential event that way?

PPPPPS: Having a hard time thinking of many.  Plus, would they even come? Or would dread alone make it penitential enough?

PPPPPPS: Or what if I plan to host a children’s birthday party in the morning, prior to my party in the evening?  For two children?  Yes?  How would that be?  The parents coming are all Catholic, so we’d be set, then?  A morning of penance about the time you’re busy praying in Rome?  Yes?

PPPPPPPS: Yes, you caught me.  We’re cheating by hosting the kids’ party off-site, so someone else has to sweep after.  Plus, tiny event, just a few friends.   It would have been commendable to host both parties at my house on the same day, with the usual massive number of guests, instead of just a couple.  I’m not so commendable.  Hence my note.

PPPPPPPPS: It not necessary to call and chat about this.  I’ll figure it out.

How I Fell Off The Internet

Mid-May update:

Latin Happiness.  At CatholicMom.com: In which I explain how I went over to the dark side and paid for flashcards, AND monkey-themed Latin-Lite videos. Also found some other digital person to teach grown-up Latin to the boy and I, and no surprise, all are happier for it.

Shiny happy feeling inside this author: The reprint is at Catholic Lane.  (Yay!)

A well-licked baby rat is a happy baby rat.  SuperHusband & I have been taking Family Honor’s summer course on Catholic Sex-Ed.  (It’s not called that.  “Cultural Implications” or something like that.)  Astute observers would have predicted: I’m really enjoying the class, whenever I set aside my natural dread of deadlines and obligations, and sit down to do the work.

Double-enjoying it once I realized I didn’t have to sit still and listen to the lectures, because hey, long stretchy headphone cords . . . I can workout while I listen.  Score one for online courses.

Right now I’m reading this, of which you can download the executive summary at no charge:

Hardwired to Connect

Encouragement for those of us who sometimes doubt whether all this parenting effort is going to have any effect in the long run.

Forming Intentional Questions. The other reason I’m hiding from the internet is to churn out a set of discussion questions for Sherry Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples.  Because I’m going to be part of a book club.  And so are you. Bwahahaha . . . more news soon.   Questions are written, and now need to be purged of typos.

Have a great week.

7 Takes: Other Than Bacon

If you’d gotten the impression I’ve spent the last two weeks with no other thoughts than bacon . . . that would be a reasonable guess.  Since it’s Friday, I’ll be sociable and make a list of seven.

1. At AmazingCatechists.com, I wrote yesterday about how to evaluate your Christian Formation situation using the Great Commandment.  It’s a fleshing-out of this comment I left at William O’Leary‘s combox:

Couldn’t agree more. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your *mind*, and all your strength.

Which means the more your mind is capable of, the more it needs to study the faith. If you don’t love Jesus, you’ll love something else. If you don’t worship Him, you’ll worship something else. If you don’t work for Him, you’ll work for something else. –> And if you don’t use your powers of reason to know and understand Him . . . that blank space in your brain will be filled with something else.

We’re made to know God, and know Him fully. No other way to be happy.

-me.

2. At CWG today, I tossed up a couple links on writing competence and the new evangelization.  Something we struggle with at the writer’s guild is that fine line between “encouragement” and “enabling”.  If we had a narrower focus, like “only literary fiction”, or “only professional authors with trade-published credentials”, it wouldn’t be so difficult.  But since we represent all faithful-to-the-Magesterium Catholic writers, from aspiring amateurs on up, every genre . . . it’s a bumbly boat.

I like the bumbly boat, of course, since it’s the only one that’ll let me in.

3. Is it a cult, or just weird and stupid? Fr. L. posted an excellent article on the traits that characterize cult-like behaviors.

Readers here will be assured, having reviewed the criteria, that I am in no danger of becoming a cult leader.  Whew.

4. Sometimes I wonder whether what I wrote somewhere else is really of interest to readers here, and whether I should post a link. The other month when some people were freaking out because Pope Francis Is Not Pope Benedict, I posted some thought at AC.  Naturally I linked it all back to catechesis, since I didn’t want Lisa M. kicking me off her blog.  And because it was relevant.

I re-read my post and thought it wasn’t that bad.  So you could go look, if you wanted.

5.  A non-bacon recipe: Venison stroganoff. So good you can eat the leftovers cold for breakfast. What to do:

  1. Use the recipe for beef stroganoff from the Joy of Cooking.
  2. Skip the beef step.  Toss your hunk of venison roast in the crockpot with a little liquid (water is a liquid), cook on low all day.  Take it out and chop it up.
  3. Start up the Joy recipe.
  4. Crazy Innovation: Add parsnips — yes parsnips!  Peel and shred them (you have to shred the onion anyway), and toss them in after the onion but before the mushrooms, and let them saute a bit before you put in the mushrooms.
  5. When the mushroom mixture is all cooked up, toss in your diced venison, then the white whine wine, and then the sour cream.  I’m sure it’s possible to use too much sour cream, but I don’t have any proof.
  6. You’ll be serving this over rice — oh wait, most people do noodles, but actually rice tastes better. Yes, I said that.
  7. Regardless of what you put your stroganoff over — or nothing at all, if you’re having it cold in the morning for breakfast — you’ll want to make gravy with the venison drippings.  Chunk of butter in the bottom of saucepan, melt it, dump in a bit of flour and mix like a crazy person, and when it’s a nice pasty-paste, pour in the cooking liquid from the venison, mix it up.  (Immersion blender is your friend.)  That’s it. Best gravy in the world, easy-peasy.

6. I know.  It’s not deer season.  Too bad.  Ask your friends to open up their freezer to you.

7.  I had a long train of thought (hanging out laundry), and ended up with this thought: If there one thing — and only one thing — I could ask bishops and priests to do over the next year towards the reform of the Church, it would be this:

Make the Catholic Faith the Non-Negotiable Minimum Standard for Those in Ministry

People freak out when you do this.

So I completely get that it’s an unpleasant task, and clergy want to be all pastoral, and all that.  And to be clear: I want the pews packed — packed — with tax-collectors and other sinners.  That’s what not what I’m talking about.  I’m speaking only to those in ministry.  The DRE who tells the confirmandi that gay marriage is AOK.  (Didn’t happen at my parish, whew.) That kind of stuff.

And that’s something only those in authority can actually enforce. We lay folk can do all kinds of helpful things to make up for a pastor who can’t read a contract, or doesn’t know how to hire a good plumber, or whose fingers freeze when it comes to dialing 9-1-1 . . . but we the laity can’t really do a whole lot when the hierarchy decides to be indifferent to the practice and teaching of the faith.

So that’s my new one thing.  I figured out it’s the source of my chronic grumpiness about these or those other little hot-button topics.  So I’m resolving to at least keep my temper-tantrums focused on the real issue.

Meanwhile, since what comes around goes around . . .  What do you think is the one thing clergy wish laypeople would do?

Not a cooking blog, but . . .

. . . Nothing says “solemnity” like bacon on a Friday.

To my complete astonishment, SuperHusband liked this recipe so much he suggested I write it down for posterity.  Here’re the notes from the spreadsheet where I store such inventions:

Bacon Parsnip Topping
Makes a savory-sweet bruschetta-style topping for salad or toast.
Ingredients I used:
Bacon – fresh from package in deli section, thick-cut
Parnsips – whole
Radishes
(Sample portions: 1/2 package bacon, two parsnips, six small radishes.)
Heat pan on high / medium high
Dice bacon, into pan, cook while prepping parsnips
peel and dice parsnips, into pan, toss.
clean & dice radishes, into pan, toss.  (radishes may be optional.)
Toss ingredients, cook uncovered.  Lower heat so that it cooks steadily, but doesn’t splatter or burn.
Cook until parsnips are soft and carmelizing to the point of sweetness.
Can keep warm on very low heat until ready serve, only gets better.  At our house: 6pm dinner time delayed until 8pm because certain children were still finishing homework.  Perfect.
Prep green salad, fresh vinagrette.
Suggested toppings for salad: carrot slivers, optional cheese or nuts, other vegetables / fruits to taste.  SuperHusband had his plain green with the tiniest bit of gorgonzola, I added a fistful of carrot slivers to mine.  Romaine tonight, but any decent green would do.
Salad into bowl, then bacon-topping, then small amount of dressing (recall: Vinaigrette. Ours is real vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, miscellaneous other.)
Serve with fresh buns / bread / toast, warmed.  We had ancient Aldi-brand ciabbatta buns salvaged from the back of the garage refrigerator, not far from where the dissected frog awaits further inspection on the shelf below.  Revives well — yay Aldi. Can use topping on toast, bruschetta-style.

Why I’m Catholic, abridged version

Over at the borg, we’ve been instructed to explain why the borg is best why we believe as we do. After much deleting to get it nearly inside the 200-word limit, I posted mine at the Happy Catholic Bookshelf.

We’ll do the even more abridged version here: Because it’s true. 

And with that, I wish you a lovely Triduum, and I’m going to slowly unplug and start getting ready for a few days of peaceful silence family time observing the holy days.

Monday Thoughts: The Good Life

1. Study Shows Catechesis Helps, But Not Quite Enough

Here’s a nice article from the National Catholic Register about the differences of opinion on Church doctrine and social issues among Catholic who attend Mass, and those who don’t. That’s not how they describe the article, but it is one thing the study demonstrates. The good news:  Catholics who say they go to Mass every Sunday are also much more likely to say they agree with the Church on counter-cultural issues.  The bad news: Depending on the hot-button topic, between 1/3 and 1/2 of Catholics attending Mass weekly dissent from Church teaching.

(In contrast, this isn’t, say, the good-natured non-Catholic spouse who comes to Mass as a kindness to the Catholic spouse.  These adults who both claim to be Catholic, AND claim to attend Mass every Sunday.)

So.  In the pews next to you on Sunday, think of the three people you shake hands with during the Sign of Peace.  If yours is a typical parish described by this study, you can assume you’ve shaken hands with at least one person who does not in fact believe and accept the Catholic faith.

Thinking of traveling to the far corners of the earth to evangelize?  Your parish pews are mission territory.

2.

In choosing best friends, if you can find one whose besetting sins are utterly different from your own . . . golden.  Just golden.

3.

A Sunday well-spent is truly a foretaste of Heaven.  More coming later. Partly in response to this post.

4.

I read and thoroughly enjoyed The King’s Gambit by John McNichol.  My Amazon review is up, and when I get around to it, I’ll post something longer here at the blog. As always on my Catholic-genre youth fiction reviews, let us remember to ask ourselves: Do my tastes run to Thomas Hardy, or Hardy Boys?  I’m firmly in the latter camp.  I like my adult beverages some combination of bitter, dry, and rarefied; I like my fiction just the opposite.

5.

I can’t remember what else.  Have a great week.  Happy Conclave-Watching!

Things I’d Rather Not Think About

1. My CatholicMom.com article for March is up.  It’s on homeschooling when you struggle with self-discipline. It’s one of those topics where I wish I could be showing off my tremendous compassion for those poor people who just can’t seem to get it together.

I drew the line at posting a snapshot of my kitchen for the photo.  Instead, you get a picture of men hitting each other with sticks.  Same concept, seemlier illustration.

2. Have I mentioned how much it irritates me to have to follow the entirety of the Catholic faith, and not just bits and pieces? I assume others hate it just as much as I do, because so far no one has commented on my post this month at New Evangelizers. In which I take up the topic of whether Cardinal Mahoney ought to attend the conclave, and how that question fits in to a wider question of mercy and evangelization*.  And good administration.  You knew that was going to be fit in somehow.

3. I set the kitchen timer to tell me when to pull SuperHusband’s dress shirt out of the dryer. (Yes.  Dryer.  I know.)  It worked.  I just went and pulled it out and hung it up right away.  I can be very diligent about laundry, IF I’m supposed to be doing the taxes.

4. Taxes, episode 2.  That’s today.  Backside of the 1040, and yeah, it’s the Schedule A I don’t feel like dealing with.  Tired of being responsible.  I get tired of that very quickly.  But I’ll do it, of course. There’s nothing like, “We will seize your house if you don’t mail in this worksheet” to really motivate a lady.  UPDATE: DONE. WOOHOO!

5.  About that NE post.  Whenever I think “conclave”, the plot for a murder mystery pops into my head.  It’s a good thing other people volunteered to answer questions at Dorian Speed’s ElectingthePope.net.

6.  Please pray for the repose of the soul of Mr. W, our elderly farming neighbor who passed away peacefully in his sleep.  Funeral was packed, SuperHusband tells me, not a surprise.  Then pray for this family, who would be very grateful for any number of miracles.

7.  You can discourage the Friday meat demon by quick throwing all your meaty leftovers into the freezer Thursday night.  (Or give to dog if close to spoiling, but not quite inedible yet.)  Pull them out and return to fridge Saturday, when the coast is clear.

And something I’m happy think about:

Señora M., my catechist friend from down the road, reports a big milestone: She led her first English-language religious ed class the other night.  We first met in the Our Lady of Guadalupe room at the big Advent event in December, and since then she’s been helping out as a classroom assistant at her parish.  She phoned me this morning, and I made it through the greetings in Spanish, and then I had to plead, “No entiendo.” She gave me the big news in English.  But she isn’t giving up on me that easy, she’s determined to get my Spanish into working order.  I’m honored.

*Some people equate “mercy” with “giving them a pass.”  Those who have been privy to my ire know that the moment you start bungling on sexual abuse prevention and prosecution, is the moment I become a lady you do not like.  Do not confuse mercy with tolerance.  It’s not about overlooking the trivial flubs.  It’s not about saying, “Really it wasn’t so bad.”  Mercy only has meaning there where we want to give it least.

7 Takes: Some books you can have, and others you can only want with earnest.

1. My book as available for sale!  That is, you can’t actually *have* the book, but you can pay for it.  So I guess it’s not so much a sale, yet, as a series of financial transactions straight out of 2nd 3rd year financial accounting, which is the year when nothing is ever just bought and sold, but always, always, passes through a whole series of special accounts that make perfect sense, I promise, if you can just keep ’em lined up right.

I think sometime this summer it graduates to an Accounting 101 exercise, where you can just pay money and have a book, done.

2. My favorite review-book supplier, MTF, seems to feel I need to get into the Year of Faith thing in a serious way. I broke down when I realized that there was no way I could ever remember on page 962 of Introduction to Catholicism for Adults exactly how I’d felt about Chapter 1, no matter how many little notes I penciled into the back inside cover.  So I’m reviewing it a chapter (or so) at a time, over at the Happy Catholic Bookshelf.  Chapter 1 is up.  Hint: So far, so good.

3.  Also in my candy box, as I mentioned before, was the 7th Edition of their Daily Roman Missal.  I broke Lisa M.’s blog by posting about three-posts-in-one, but my review is up.  With some notes on how you actually use such a thing for teaching kids.  I don’t think the book fairy knew that I am the kind of catechist who reads from this exact book during class, but you had probably guessed that about me a while ago.

4. The post you really want to read at AC this week is this one.

5. I’m trying to improve my Spanish, which is more difficult if you don’t have cable TV.  So I’ve resorted to mining the Spanish-language section of my local Catholic bookstore.  I think you could make a sort of Catechist Spanish Language Evaluation test that grades you by which sections of El Youcat you can read, and which ones leave you absolutely puzzled.  To give you an idea of my junior-linguist credentials, the bold print on Youcat #374 is no trouble at all.  In contrast, that Blaise Pascal quote on the sidebar of p. 191? No comprendo. (I’m okay with that.  I don’t think I much understand Pascal in English, either.)

6. I wish all catechisms came with flip-book animation on the bottom right corner.  Sometimes I just watch the guy doing cartwheels in Spanish.

7.  What I want to do is phone my Spanish-speaking catechist friend and arrange a play date for tomorrow.  What I should do is start on my taxes.  I think?

Mid-Month Updates

No Children Left In Ditch.

We made it to Naples and back with exactly the same number and kind of children with which we set out.  Thank you St. John Bosco, whom I did ask for assistance from time to time.  St. Augustine, by the way, is completely awesome.

UPDATED to clarify: Both the saint and the city in Florida are awesome.  Where they each rank within the category of People, Places, and Things Called “St. Augustine” I leave to the reader’s discretion.

Bookstore Management Tip:  Consider not charging admission to your retail venue.

At Castillo de San Marcos, you have to buy admission before you get into the fort, where the bookstore is located.  (This did not stop me from buying books, but not everyone feels the same way about books as I do.  Also, we were going to see the fort anyway.)

In contrast, the Pirate Museum has its gift shop built into its entryway.  Which is handy for parents who do not want to pay admission to the museum, but feel pretty lucky to get off with just looking at the Pirate Merchandise and buying one small pirate book for the trip home.

On the other hand, if early-modern marauders attempt a raid on the seashell-identification books at San Marcos, there are three lines of defense to keep them at bay.

Digital Devices = Road Trip Fever

What with recorded books, DVD’s, and iPods, twenty hours in the car was really quite peaceful.  Causing me to come up with the ridiculous, husband-exasperating plan of going to the national March for Life next week.  Friends with ulterior motives are aiding and abetting.  So I think we’ll go.

And look at this:  Pro-Life Feminist Hot Chocolate. It’s a super-bonus . . . and I get a glimpse of the reportedly lovely and delightful Helen Alvaré, and the kids get hot chocolate?  See, if that doesn’t convince you of the worthiness of the pro-life cause, I don’t know what does.

A Missal.

I’m beside myself with excitement, because MTF slipped a shiny new super-gorgeous Daily Roman Missal in with the other review book I was expecting (Introduction to Catholicism).  You’ll recall I had to glue the old one’s cover back together.  But I’ve been virtuously resisting shelling out for a new edition, even though every time I hear the elegant, poetic lines of the new Mass translation, I’m dying to get my own copy.

The new book is about twenty-time awesomer than I had guessed, because the new edition is beefed up with a pile of handy tables and indexes and bits of mini-catechism. So soon very soon I’ll have a post up at AC reviewing the new Missal, and explaining why exactly my old one needed to be glued back together, because I always, always, shove it into my bag on the way to religious ed, because if you have that one book, you can teach the Catholic faith to anybody at all, ever, no matter what weird scheduling surprises come your way when you arrive at class.

Virtue.

I did not make a single pun on the word Missal in those previous paragraphs.  We’ll just mark that down on in the big white space where my virtues are tallied.  I am the picture of self-restraint.  The St. Therese of resisting bad puns.  Or something.

Science.

The irony is not lost on me. I wrote this great column on winter snow-n-ice appropriate science activities for CatholicMom.com, then promptly spent a week lounging on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.  And swimming.  Outdoors.

This photo taken a different, icier year. And yes, the power was out. For a week. I did not like it. I prefer the beach.

So here’s my experiment: I’m going to write a column for NE (due this week, runs next week), and I think the topic is “Things You Can Do To Evangelize When You Think You Can’t Evangelize”.  Will this cause me to suddenly have many opportunities to evangelize?

You Might Be An Accountant If . . .

You’re goofing off browsing the Mid-Atlantic Congress catechetical conference page (which you are not planning to attend), and you notice all these financial management sessions:

Are you not dying to attend?  I am.  Seriously.  Has anyone sat in on any presentations from these speakers (John Eriksen, Peter Denio, or Dennis Corcoran), and have an opinion on how good the workshops will be?  For all Darwin doubts the use of an MBA, I begin to think that pastoral associates are the one class of people who might could benefit from such a course of study.  Some reputable seminary ought to make a joint MA/MBA program.

Oh That Homeschooling Book

I printed out the whole giant nasty sprawling draft, stuck it in a binder, and it’s waiting for me attack it with my tin of magic markers. So I’m making progress. Slowly.

 

Castello San Marcos:By National Park Service (http://www.nps.gov) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

New Year. Back to School. Writing Stuff. Abuse of Italics. Etc.

Since last I checked in:

Merry Christmas!  We’re still having Christmas, so I can say that.

Happy New Year.  You’ll be pleased to know I took someone’s advice here, and swore off making resolutions.  Which allowed me to limit it to just a couple.

Evangelizing in the Face of Dissent.  My December New Evangelizers column is up, in which I think about a question a friend posed in conversation a few weeks ago: What do you do when you really would evangelize, you really do want to, but your church stinks?  Which creates some awkward problems.

I would like to point out here that the two people I quote/mention in the column do not attend [_insert name of parish that jumped to mind because yes, you’re jumping to conclusions again__]. Anyhow, December’s post is sort of a theoretical framework for thinking about the problem.  I’m thinking maybe for January I’ll follow up with concrete things you can do to evangelize, regardless of the state of your parish / diocese / continent / etc.  Or not.  It’s an idea.

My January CatholicMom.com is going to be on cool science stuff.  It’s already written and just needs the links filled in before I submit it (today – runs Saturday, barring a switch-around), so you don’t get to suggest things for the post.  But you could suggest things in the CMom.com combox when the time comes.

I wrote something just for fun.  I used to write EVERYthing just for fun.  No, that’s not true.  I wrote things for school, and then later I wrote things for school and work, and later, things just for work.  But you know the curling up with a laptop, goofing off kind of writing, purely for my own entertainment?  That used to be 99% of what I wrote.  [Which gives you an idea the proportion of my writing that went into, say, my senior thesis, or my job writing a department newsletter, compared to the amount that went into pure leisure.  Can we say “introvert” much?]  I started blogging just for fun.  To practice writing for someone other than myself.

Anyway, I spent the Octave of Christmas writing a piece of fiction purely for my own pleasure.  Not gonna submit it.  Not gonna promote it.  Don’t want feedback on it. Don’t care that I abused adverbs.  Don’t care that the scenes don’t flow.  Don’t care that the setting is a tad nebulous. Look at me abusing all-caps and italics right here and now.  See, that fun-thing is rubbing off. Vacation is good.  Livens things up.

So that’s what I did for 8/12ths of Christmas.  Back to work now, fun fiction is put away, and I’m going to take stab #276 with renewed vigor on the homeschooling book, which was coming along pre-break, but started to languish right before Christmas.  I’m going to concede that I think the topic I’m biting off is hard to get my head all the way around — the organization for the book just isn’t popping out at me, like it did for the catechist book.  Only way out is through.  Sooner or later a structure will present itself.

Vocation trumps devotion.  Last September I wrote a post on getting the kids to daily mass, which I don’t think ever saw light of day.  But one of my points was that there’s no avoiding the Will of God. If God doesn’t have it on His agenda, it’s not on yours.  Hence, late in the day on the first Sunday of Advent, what I thought was a mild sore throat from teaching Our Lady of Guadalupe classes all day Saturday, turned into Plague Journal Episode #487.  I think we had one child who didn’t get sick all month.  Didn’t see light of day again until the 4th Sunday of Advent, we made it through Christmas Day, and by the weekend had a child sick and parents had to attend Mass in shifts this past weekend and holy day.

This creates an awkward social situation, in which I volunteered to teach at the parish we attend daily mass at, and happened to have just had one of the supply priests in for dinner that week, and then promptly dropped off the face of the earth.  So I would like to publicly assure everyone that:

  1. I do not hate the parish where we go the daily mass when the planets are properly aligned, as happened for months on end until the abrupt halt at Advent.
  2. I am not permanently scarred by the experience of supervising the creation of 80-some paper-bag tilmas.
  3. We’re still Catholic.  Really.  We’re just “contagious Catholics” of the wrong kind.  We love you, so we are avoiding you.

Hey, look, even Juan Diego missed an appointment with the Blessed Mother because he had a sick relative.  It happens.  Vocational hazard.

***

I’ll try to check in again at some point soonish.  Meanwhile, I’m leaving the SuperHusband to guard fort and farm while four kids and I take a joyful, peaceful, entirely uneventful 10-hours-each-way road trip next week.  For fun — going to see my grandmother, who turns 90 this year (but later this year ).  I am wildly excited though, because the way the hotels worked out, I’m obliged to drop in for a field trip in St. Augustine.  I’m so stoked it’s silly.  Love that town.

And see how I cleverly scheduled for St. A to be our last stop on the way home, so that I have a powerful incentive not to turn to a life of crime and abandon my four children in a ditch somewhere after breaking up the 57th argument about which DVD to watch next.  Smart, huh?  I am so completely planning to return to my beloved exactly the same number and kind of offspring as he entrusted to me five days earlier.  I’m the picture of virtue.

That would be why I groaned when I foolishly took up Jen Fulwiler’s recommendation and went to the Patron Saint Generator to see what saint popped up for me.  Yep.  St. John Bosco.  Try not to think about it.

But the holiness — John Bosco would never ever abandon children in a ditch on the side of I-95.  And neither will I. We’re like twins.

And no, I am not going to Disney world.  I’m not even driving near Disney world.  Nope nope nope.  Introvert + Doesn’t Stand In Long Lines = No Disney World.

Until next time, please pray for a reader who is having a difficult time with her faith.  That’s all you need to know, God’ll fill in the details.  And here’s the link to the patron-generator, if you’re up for adding a daily litany on behalf of this particular person, who does need your prayers tremendously.  Thanks.