Last time on the blog, I shared a story about a great joy in my life. Although the joys of my life are more abundant than I deserve, I cannot pretend that my life is without suffering. Suffering is often a great place to tell a story, because suffering brings people together in a very particular way. So today, I am going to shift gears, in honor of November being the month of prayer for the dead, and talk about my journey with grief. My summer started and ended with loss. At the beginning of the summer my great grandmother passed away. At the end of the summer I lost my grandmother. Even though these two losses were only a few months apart, I handled the grieving process for each of them differently. For starters, my public grieving had to be different for both of them. GG was buried in a Protestant service done by the funeral home, while Grandma Bixby had a Catholic funeral in her lifelong parish. I think this outward difference made a huge internal difference for me in the way that...
I've realized that some of the most effective tools for speaking about Christ are stories. I mean who doesn't love a good story? They're personal, emotional, sometimes funny, and they always touch our hearts in ineffable ways. It is easy to see God working in the lives of others when they openly speak about their lives, so I've decided that this blog is going to focus a lot more on storytelling. My story telling. And with all the big changes happening in my life, I figured it might be about time that I share one of the favorite stories of my life, my vocation story. First, I'm going to actually start with something very recent. This summer, on July 7, Patrick and I got betrothed. Betrothal is an old rite in the Catholic Church that basically makes our engagement official and binding. Binding in the sense that if we want to get out of it, we have to get it absolved by the Church. So basically, we are in this for the long run, and if we decide otherwise, we are goin...