Patience, Persistence, Love

I can tell mid-year has arrived in our home school. I feel some of the anxiety...have we done enough?...have they learned anything?...do they love or resent being here? So, I was grateful to be able to take a few hours out recently to attend a retreat at the local seminary.

It is amazing how the Holy Spirit can piece things together when you have time to sit down and listen.

Patience

One of my favorite parts of any retreat is going to Confession to someone other than my parish priests. I don't have anything against them,  there is one who really seems to understand me as much as I would expect any priest could. Today, though, I had one of the really nice "sit and chat with Jesus" Confessions. Usually, when I tell the priest I'm a unicorn (a really old woman with fairly young kids and a short temper) they smile or giggle or ignore...not this time. Christ was right there with me, walking and advising and speaking the words I needed to hear. Mainly, "Do you know how much patience the Father has for us? He gives us our entire lifetime to figure it out and then, if necessary, an extended stay in Purgatory." I have to say those words struck me...enough that, when my kids were less-than-great at Mass the next week, I still lobbied to eat out. Not to reward them but to have good, quality family time after a day apart. My patience doesn't come near that of my Heavenly Father, but it can be better than it has been.

Persistence
The priest also mentioned something that made me laugh through my tears, as I spoke of my burdens and my failings on so many days. He said I should take all of my worries and pleas to Our Lady. I know this and I told him so but he reminded me to remember this on my worst days. He said, "She's His mom, you know? He listens to her". It made me laugh because I think I do forget sometimes that Mary was human. The sheer number of things she endured; the frequency with which she followed the Father's plan...it seems super-human. Still, as father reminded me, there were probably days that she was cleaning up after Jesus and Joseph and felt less than appreciated. Still, she prayed and said "yes" and played a part in the greatest story of all time. Follow God, say "yes" to His plan for your life, beg assistance from the Blessed Mother. All of this will help you move through your life with the joy of knowing that you are a child of God.

Love

I then "came across" this reading:

Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.

So, when I have the days that I feel like a unicorn...like there is no reason to try to steep my kids in the faith because, in the end, they will make their own choices...like the pressure of society is too much to say "no" to, if I say "yes" to God...this is the passage I will pray over. Even if I am never a "happy-clappy" person (the speaker used that at retreat...I am so not that) I will have joy and I will feel loved. The only love that transcends the here and now and this world. That is the love for which I will strive, and that is the love that I will do my best to impart to my children (while teaching them what it means to be "perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect"). This is the lesson that I hope, above all, I can teach them while they are in my charge.

Time passes and school will end, and summer will go like a blink, and school will begin again. Everything of this world passes. God never changes. To this I must cling. While doing so, I will pray for those who are too turned around to even see what love the Father has bestowed. I will trust that His love can make all things good.