Embrace the Ordinary, 2019 vol. 3

October 28, 2019

Monday morning, beginning another week. Finishing the first quarter of the school year, for the first time with all the school-age kids in public school.

Mornings are a flurry of activity. Nudging teens awake. Brewing coffee for Fence. Pouring cereal and milk for Small Fry while reminding the big boys to eat and do their chores before playing with Legos and Pokémon. Kissing Fence goodbye, then waving goodbye to the girls on their way to the bus.

Once the girls are off, we have a pause. The boys have time to listen to a podcast with me (I highly recommend the Catholic Sprouts podcast. It’s short and solid information for kids.), play, or read. Some mornings I read to them from “The Joyful Mysteries of Life”, which I find to be a great tool to introduce the topics of “where do babies come from” and vocations.

The big boys walk to school, and then in the last 10-15 minutes with the youngest two at home, Firecracker likes to play. This morning he made up a new game with the Blokus board. It was a battle game, which I didn’t quite figure out but we all took turns and somehow our game characters didn’t all die.

And that’s that. I’m sipping coffee that has gone lukewarm because I’m trying to give my attention more fully. My prayer journaling time usually waits for later in the day now, because my attention rests with my family’s needs before work and school. Maybe one day I’ll wake at 5am for those precious dark and silent moments when to ponder and pray, but not this year. This year my prayers are offered most often while I wash dishes, scrub counters, and drive around town running errands. That’s where God is anyway; with me in every single mundane moment as well as the joyful and stressful (when I’m most likely to call out to Him).

“God walks among the pots and pans.” Saint Teresa of Avila

“Let us try, therefore, never to lose our supernatural outlook. Let us see the hand of God in everything that happens to us: both in pleasant and unpleasant things, in times of consolation and in times of sorrow, as in the death of someone we love. Your first instinct always should be to talk to your Father God, whom we should seek in the depths of our souls. And we cannot consider this a trivial or unimportant matter. On the contrary, it is a clear sign of a deep interior life, of a true dialogue of love. Far from being psychologically deforming, constant prayer should be for a Christian as natural as the beating of his heart.” Saint Josemaria Escriva (Friends of God, 247)