Regaining Rhythm

So, thus begins a new chapter in my life: Monday of this week I cleaned out my office and turned in my keys at my old job.

Which means I am now self-employed through Mary Kay! And I will be doing whatever I can to fill in the the income gaps until I reach the position of Sales Director!

There are so many changes I need to make to my life:

- become debt-free
- lose 60+ lbs.
- pursue healing and discipline in my spiritual life

This blog will now serve to track my efforts!

During my freshmany year of college, each girl in our dorm was given a complimentary copy of Matthew Kelly's book The Rhythm of Life. I LOVED it. I started rereading it and realized how much I need the wisdom of that book in my life right now, especially as I exit the chaotic merry-go-round that fulltime ministry became for me.

Matthew presents three instruments for helping with this are.
a) Going to bed/rising at the same time every day. This is an EXCELLENT resolution for me. I've also read an article that says exposure to sunlight between 6-8:30 am helps to regulate sleeping patterns and to wake you up more for the day. So, for now, I am resolving to rise at 8:00 am. There, I am publishing it!

b) The second instrument is to have a consistent "Seventh Day" - a sabbath, or day of rest every week. That has DEFINITELY not happened in my life, but I am now resolving to take back Sunday!

c) The third is to have a regular time for prayer and reflection in one's life. I am SO inconsistent with this, but now that I'm in totaly control of my schedule, I am resolving to start going to daily Mass. There's an 8:30 am Mass at the Catholic Church near my residence, so I am going to start walking/riding a bike over there!


I was afraid to try to do this without knowing what my work routine is going to look like, but until something changes, I'm going to go for it anyway! In addition to implementing the three instruments, my goals to be completed by the end of August are as follows:

a) to find enough steady income to cover my necessities (nannying is what I'm shooting for).

b) To go on-target to drive free with Mary Kay! That means I really need to step it up, both with sales and with team-building. This is the car I am going to earn:



They say it takes 28 days to solidify habits - let's see how it goes for me!

Ever Up in the Air

I cannot believe how easily life gobbles away our intentions - like mine to write in this blog at least once a week. Then - snap! more than 6 months pass and suddenly I realize I abandoned this project. Well, no more!

Inspiration: this week I accepted a post as the "Catholicism Examiner" for Examiner.com's Lansing site! I'll be writing a few blurbs each week about Catholic life. The kick to start writing again made me realize how much of a good thing I meant to do with my own blog, so I'm coming back to it.

Now, I could write about how living with my parents didn't work out, how my best friend left his path toward seminary and how we fell in love and are now dating, or about how I resigned from my youth ministry job and am living in my grandmother's attic while leaping in faith toward a full-time Mary Kay business. I hope to get around to all three of those subjects, but for now it is enough to say that God has been taking me on a crazy journey lately and there will be a lot to talk about!

The Spirit is Moving, and apparently so am I

When I took this job almost a year ago, a huge delight was that I secured the MOST incredible studio loft apartment in the downtown area. I LOVED this place. Of course, as the months went by, I came to realize that I loved it mostly because I imagined entertaining large crowds of people in it, and visitors were much more rare than I had originally hoped.

I actually came to struggle with not liking the apartment, of finding it a rather lonely little space. It was then I got the idea from Elisabeth Elliot's book The Path of Loneliness that I needed to make the apartment a place I shared with Christ. So I converted my closet into a prayer room, which I fell in love with all over again even more than the apartment itself.

Now, it looks like I might be getting a new place to share with my parents. The thought of moving a 5th time in less than 4 years is a little teensy bit grating on the nerves, but I also have peace about this because: a) family helping each other is never a bad idea, b) it will be nice to have human beings to come home to (they don't shed feathers and poop all over the place like my stupid parakeets do), c) my parents will keep enough of an eye on me that I'll have some accountability for taking better care of myself. In other words, if I don't sleep and eat and care for my health regularly, someone will notice and give me a hard time, which I need so much!

I was on the phone briefly today with my eighteen year old cousin who, when I broke the news to her, reacted in such a way that I might as well have told her I was going to live in a tree with a family of rabid squirrels. "Oh Guiney, I would NOT want to move back in with my parents, why are you doing that?" I had to bite my lip, because my first impulse was to get defensive: "Well at least I DID get out on my own", but I took a deep breath, reminding myself that freshman in college know more about life than me (wink, wink). and didn't bother trying to explain it. Being out on your own is nice, but so is having money in savings. Independence is fine and dandy, but I also happen to believe that God "depends" on us to take care of each other, and I want to. (I'd be lying if I didn't also admit that having a dishwasher MASSIVELY appeals to me).

Parting thought: The words of Christ I find most precious are when after healing a man who attempts to then follow him, Jesus turns to him and says, "Go home to your family and tell them what God in his mercy has done for you."

I Believe You're My Healer

While at the youth ministry conference in Boston, I was privileged to finally see and hear Matt Maher in person. I’ve never been a huge fan of the recordings he makes - I really prefer acoustic sounds over the electrics rifs and “produced sound” you often get on CDs. Nonetheless, I’ve always been incredibly touched by his very soulful and (in my opinion) catechetical lyrics, and his vocal quality lifts my heart to prayer so much and reduced me to tears more than once this past week.
The other side of how wonderful it was to have him at the conference was because I’ve been involved in some level of music ministry for several years now, and when I’m not doing the music I often find myself distracted by the critique that happens in my head (it happens as I’m playing music, too). I’m so busy critiquing musicians in my mind that it’s difficult to enter into prayer. When I found out Matt was going to be at the conference, and that he was helping to lead music for our liturgies, I almost laughed! ‘Thanks, God. You knew I wouldn’t pray unless someone like Matt Maher was leading the music, so you sent him‘.
Anyway, Matt spoke to a group of teens at a Eucharistic time of Praise and Worship they call LIFT out in Boston. I just wanted to relay a part of what he said because it affected me so much. He was talking about a controversy not-too-long ago in the contemporary Christian music world. Hillsong, one of the biggest churches in the world and a major outlet of praise and worship music, released a song called “Healer” in Australia during World Youth Day in Sydney, where Matt heard it for the first time and was deeply touched. He learned that the story behind it was the songwriter had contracted cancer and penned the song as a result. It moved people really deeply to think that a person with such a devastating sickness could pray a song like:
“You hold my every moment, you calm my raging seas,
you walk with me through fire and heal all my disease
I trust in You, I trust in You
And I believe you’re my Healer, I believe you are all I need
And I believe you’re my portion, I believe you’re more than enough for me
Jesus, You’re all I need
For nothing is Impossible for You, You Hold my world in your hands”
About the same time that the song was released in the United States, the man who wrote this song called a press conference and announced something shocking: He didn’t have cancer! No, I don’t mean was healed miraculously, I mean he never had cancer in the first place. People were scandalized, shocked, and disheartened about this, and a lot of churches pulled the song.
But here’s what wrecks me: what the man REALLY wrote the song about was a crippling addiction to pornography he struggled with. He was so ill with himself over it that he actually demonstrated the physical symptoms of cancer - losing his hair, the whole nine yards. And what Matt shared, which strikes me as a bold proclamation of the Gospel, was this: the song takes on even MORE meaning because of what it’s really about. That the deepest disease we have is our sin, and it is here that we need healing more than physical ailment. Some people struggle with physical illnesses and the Lord doesn’t heal them - but He always heals the worst disease, our sin. So, go back and read those lyrics again… don’t they take on a whole new meaning?
This parallels my Confession this past week, which was arguably one of the (if not THE) most amazing Confession I’ve ever experienced. It was the first time in a long while I’ve been so moved to contrition that I wept openly as I told the priest my sins… and when I finished, he said something that penetrated to the depths of me so that I realized I had been thirsting for Christ to speak these words to me. He said: “Guinevere, I understand that your penitence is real and that the things you’re confessing are still sins, but I honestly sense that underneath all these symptoms is a wound in your heart that is NOT your fault.” The priest continued with words of tremendous comfort, reassuring me that I do indeed love Jesus in spite of what a screw-up I have felt like, and that Jesus wanted to HEAL the root of what ailed me. After giving me absolution, he said an extra prayer asking for healing in my heart. What a breakthrough.
My Savior can move mountains. What joy is mine, that I am able to say I am SO in love with Him!

Something New

This past week I've spent in Boston at a youth ministry training conference. I had the chance to take a step back from my day-to-day grind, from the demands of leadership, and relax while networking, pooling resources, and gaining some new insights for the youth ministry at my parish. More than any of those things, the past few days have been a radical experience for me on a personal level, and I want to share some of that.

I had what you might call my 'conversion' at a Steubenville Youth Conference in 2000 the summer before starting high school. Something really radical happened in my heart that night. Not only did I have a crazy-intense experience of Jesus for what seemed like the first time in my life (at least the first time I was aware of it), but I truly believe that I received an infusion of the theological virtue of faith. From that night forward, my heart resonated with everything about the Catholic Faith. Reading the Catechism, learning about what our Church teaches, was like having my soul struck like a tuning fork, resounding. There has never been a single iota of doctrine that my heart has struggled at all to believe is true. I can attest to this from my years at Franciscan University studying theology and catechetics - when I passed the Catechism Exam without studying, another friend in the program rolled his eyes and said, "Of course you did, you ARE the Catechism!". Ha ha.

So the last nine years of my life have been diving about into that, learning as much as I can about how to articulate the Catholic faith and explore its infinite caverns. I came to know the love of Christ and believe it, following Him even to Franciscan University and (now) into the field of youth ministry. But I have a confession to make: it has not been enough. In spite of that gift, I have been really struggling the past few years with expecting too little from God. In the depths of my heart, at a level that I'm not sure I've ever been able to translate into words, I had accepted the idea that although Jesus forgave me and loved me, that the things I struggled with, my past hurts, were just my burden to bear and suffer with forever. I was living like God wasn't going to do anything new for me, that although this vision of life's meaning was the most beautiful truth I'd ever encountered, that it's promises just weren't going to be true for me.

Maybe some of your can relate to this: having gone to so many conferences, retreats, classes, on top of a lifetime of Mass attendance, it can start to feel like you've heard it all, like there's nothing new? What I've experienced in the past few days I really believe is an entirely new phase of my life beginning, a deeper conversion to the Lord than I've ever known before (I cannot even begin to convey how much joy it brings to my heart to be able to say that!) Even when the content is great, so often I have gotten to the end of a homily, a talk, a healing service, and been disapointed because it seemed like none of it had been for me. In the past couple of days though, there's been a crazy outpouring of messages and moments where I've just been wrecked with the knowledge that it was a gift just for me, words meant for me! Jesus broke dramatically into me saying, "Behold, I am doing something new!" and really transforming, changing, HEALING me. The closest way I can come to capturing it is that I now have a radical infusion of the theological virtue of hope, to such a degree that I think it may even take another decade to unpack all of it.

Praise the One who makes all things new!