Heavenly Helpers

Loss brings with it the unavoidable pain of grief…But is it inescapable? Post-holiday letdowns are not unusual and can be made worse during times of personal loss. Looming large may be the expected or unexpected passing of a loved one or a loyal pet, separation, divorce, chronic illness, assault, home or job loss…Each bringing its own level of grief. In such times, we should do our best to realize the interplay between our body, mind, and spirit, no matter our age. It is important we nurture each of those domains with respect, as how well we pay attention to one impacts the other two. Adequate rest, a healthy diet, and spiritual nourishment can be a far-reaching base in helping us through challenging situations. As mortals, we do our best to manage grief. Hiding from grief just doesn’t work. Acknowledging it is the first step in learning to live with loss and constructively moving on with our lives. Its shadow, though, is long and sweeping. Mastery comes with time and acceptance, but mostly from faith. Sudden and senseless loss, such as suicide, can be even more challenging as the circumstances can provoke enduring guilt. A proper perspective takes determination, time (perhaps even counseling), and a consuming belief in an all-knowing, all-loving God. Grieving is natural and helps us adjust to new realities. However, acquiring a focus on ‘the now’ is important during a time of burdensome grief. So many of us live in the past or anxiously fret over what the future holds. For those of us who truly believe in God’s understanding and mercy, we can continue to find purpose in our lives no matter the circumstances. Faith equips us to trust in Divine providence and be open to finding paths to reconstruct our lives with purpose. Nothing’s Forever Clouds do not last forever, neither does sunshine. It may be helpful to take the time to sit down and make two lists. On the first list, identify all for which you are thankful for. On the second, state personally rewarding actions that you feel can be reached within the next six months. Review the list, prioritize the most important, and set a date by which each item will be completed. Items may include something as simple as going to an entertainment event or visiting a friend or relative across the country. Make plans and just do it. Whatever you choose to do should bring you to a more joyful place. You will then slowly begin to take active control of your life. Guilt is an all-too-common driver of human behavior; while natural, it shouldn’t stand in the way of you doing something good for yourself. Your joy can become contagious to those who care for you, which is no less a reward for you. If you have real faith in the Lord as your Shepherd, you will persevere. Is there hope for the pain of loss to be managed? Yes, there is. The end of something can be the beginning of something else. With faith, we are never alone. We are never abandoned. We are all children of God. We have the choice to accept faith in God and have hope in receiving His healing. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it can and does happen. When tragedy or loss becomes personal, faith can help you accept what is difficult. God’s hand is there; it only takes us a moment to reach out beyond ourselves and believe in His Divine Mercy.

Is someone getting on your nerves and driving you nuts? Ellen has some stainless steel lessons to offer. Where I live in the southwest desert of the United States, we have an average rainfall of 7 inches a year, so we are dependent on getting our water from a deep well. The well diggers had to drill down 600 feet into the earth to find water on our property. It is safe to drink, and we are very grateful to have this source, but it is very hard water full of minerals. As a result, it leaves calcified residue in all our pipes, sink fixtures, and shower heads. Whenever one boils water, a white, chalky film is left that coats the pot. If it doesn’t get scrubbed off, that coating gets added to with each subsequent boiling until there is a thick layer of calcified minerals that would take a chisel and a lot of hard work to get off. We’ve learned over the years to have only stainless steel or cast-iron cookware so that we can scrub hard to get the mineral build-up off. At each kitchen sink, there is a stainless-steel scrubber that we use for this purpose because, as one of the community members here says: “You can only clean stainless steel with stainless steel.” Sometimes when I’m doing the pots and pans, I think of the proverb that says: “As iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another.” (Proverbs 27:17) I think of how God uses difficult people in our lives to clean us up and polish our rough edges. A priest once said: “If you want to be a Saint, you should expect somebody hard to live with. You should expect that kind of suffering and make every effort to love.” Hard-Earned Lessons I recall someone that I had to work with for an extended time. He took a dislike to me and spoke badly about me behind my back. He was gruff and cranky and hard for me to love. And I must confess, I didn’t do a very good job of being charitable to him either. His behavior brought some of the ugliness and sin in my heart to the surface, and I grumbled and complained about him to some of my closest friends. After quite a while of this, I started to take the situation to prayer. I felt the Lord telling me that He had some lessons to teach me through this difficult relationship if I was open to hearing them. As I tried to listen to God over the subsequent weeks, I was surprised to realize that the Lord was using this person to work on me! I had thought all along that this guy was the problem and needed serious work by God. But the Lord was telling me in my prayer: “Stop focusing on his faults. I’ll deal with him. Let’s, you and I, work on some of your shortcomings.” It was very humbling, to say the least. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” As I saw more clearly that the Lord was using this person to highlight some of my sinfulness so I could confess it and work on myself, it changed the way I interacted with the man. I slowly started to modify my behavior and my way of thinking, and looking back now, I can see that I became a better and kinder person because of that relationship. Think about a person that is hard for you to get along with now. Take it to prayer and ask the Lord for His perspective on it. He sees the whole situation and knows best what needs to happen. He will give you wisdom and show you the way forward. But you may just be surprised at the Lord’s answers.

For years, my mother kept me from experiencing my father’s love, but I found a road back to reconcile with both of them, and myself! No one wants to find out they have been lied to by someone they love and trust, but it happens. The first time this happened to me, I was a child growing up with my mother. I found a parcel of letters that I had written to my father spanning a considerable amount of time. They had never been sent. From the discarded bundle, I pulled a card I had made for him, which read ‘Happy Father’s Day, Dad, I love you,’ and felt a growing sense of anger and injustice rise above the confusion that touched me just moments after I found them. When I approached my mother about the unsent letters, she was unconcerned, casually stating that she had known all along that I would be disloyal to her, and the letters to my father were proof of her suspicions about me—I had called him ‘Dad’ which meant, in her mind at least, that I had betrayed her. The anguish I felt upon discovering the truth was unbearable, not for myself, but for my father. The pain he must have felt, knowing that I never responded to the letters he wrote to me...And yet, I wondered why–after not hearing from me after all this time–he continued to write to me, telling me of his adventures abroad, his daily life, interesting things he had seen, or people he’d met. I’ll never forget the guilt I felt, knowing that my love for him was never understood. I felt betrayed. Words that I had reserved just for my father were infiltrated by someone else. I felt robbed of the right to know my father, and for him to know me. Yet Another Lost-Love Story Some thirty years later, I’d discover another Father whom I had been kept from. After learning the truth about God and the Catholic Church, I felt that I had been robbed of a relationship with my Father in Heaven, which left me with a temporary feeling of loss and guilt, followed by an even larger sense of unworthiness of His love—that He should continue to seek me out despite my absence in the relationship. My life up to this point had prevented me from encountering and more importantly accepting God’s love and mercy. While I may have felt that I had been kept from knowing God, which in a way is true based on my upbringing, I now know that nothing has ever kept God from knowing me. The truth is, Our Father in Heaven wants all His children with Him, and He will stop at nothing to bring us home. All that is required from us is to surrender and give Him our yes. My personal ‘yes’ made me realize that when we sincerely know the love of God, we align our hearts with His Sacred Heart and then, we can only love with His love. This supernatural love helps us see the woundedness in the people who hurt us. His merciful love helps heal our deepest wounds, bringing them one by one to the surface with the utmost tenderness, respect, and care… His infinite love and mercy helped me to understand that forgiveness is not only about letting go of the hurt and anger, but also about releasing the burden of guilt and resentment that I had been carrying for so long. Through prayer and reflection, I began to see that just as my earthly father continued to reach out to me with love despite my silence, so too, my Heavenly Father continues to pursue me with unwavering love and compassion. Why? Because He loved us first, and He knows us in the most intimate way. Finding Forgiveness It was through His grace that I was able to forgive myself for the years of lost love with my father. This supernatural love also led me to forgive my mother for the pain she had caused. God's love showed me that I am worthy of forgiveness and redemption, regardless of past mistakes or hurts. And His love inspired in my heart that my mother too deserved the same forgiveness and redemption. His love transformed my pain into a source of compassion and empathy, allowing me to see the beauty and potential for healing in every broken situation. Through the healing power of God's love, I learned that forgiveness is not just a gift we give to others, but one that we give ourselves. It is a path to freedom and peace, a way to release the past and embrace the future with renewed faith and love. It is my prayer that we may all be inspired by the boundless love of our Heavenly Father, who offers us forgiveness, healing, and redemption in abundance. May we, in turn, extend that same love and forgiveness to ourselves and to all those around us, creating a world filled with grace, compassion, and reconciliation.

Christmas comes with the reminder of getting gifts for everyone, but is it really the gift that matters? Browsing in a local Christian bookstore many years ago with my boyfriend at the time, our eyes landed on a particular picture at exactly the same moment. It was a large, colorful depiction of Jesus, entitled The Laughing Christ; with His head tossed back slightly, somewhat disheveled, dark brown hair framed crinkled eyes, twinkling with delight! It was perfectly enchanting! We found ourselves staring at the slightly crooked smile beneath the subject of the portrait's engaging gaze. Oh, so inviting! So accepting! So attractive! Glancing up from this likeness toward each other, we shared the excitement the other felt at discovering this unique presentation of the person we had each come to know and trust in the last few years. We were both raised with statues and pictures of Jesus in our respective homes, but He was always portrayed as serious, somehow detached from life as we knew it. While we believed the person represented in these images had truly lived on this earth and even prayed to Him when we needed something, our faith individually had recently become something very real...alive, even. This artist’s impression reflected who we both discovered the Lord to be in our lives—someone with whom we could share life, someone who loved us in ways we had never known before, someone who revealed Himself to us when we prayed. As a result, our understanding of God was transformed from merely an intellectual assent of His existence to a new experience of a living, communicative, and wonderful friend; our very best friend. Even as we left the store a little while later, our animated conversation about this portrayal continued. It captured each of our hearts, yet neither of us had made a move to purchase it. As soon as I got home, I knew I had to go back and buy this picture. A few days later, I did just that, then carefully wrapped it, and waited excitedly for Christmas to arrive. Gift of Honor The days passed till finally, it was Christmas Eve. With carols playing in the background, we sat on the floor near the small straggly artificial tree given to me by my mother. Handing my gift to my beloved, I waited expectantly to hear his appreciation as he spied the new wristwatch I had placed on the paw of the little stuffed dog who would cleverly deliver the timepiece. A mumbled “thanks” was all the response I got. No worries, that wasn't the gift that I knew would be perfect. But first, I was to open his gift to me. Reaching to accept it, I felt a bit puzzled. It was large, rectangular, and flat. As I began to open it, pulling the wrapping paper away from the present, I suddenly saw...my picture?! The same one I secretively purchased for him? Yes, that was it! The Laughing Christ. The picture I loved so much but instead of being thrilled, I felt disappointed. This was supposed to be his present. The one I knew was exactly what he wanted. I tried to hide my disappointment, leaning over to give him a kiss while expressing my appreciation. Then pulling out the present I had carefully wrapped and hidden behind the tree, I gave it to the object of my love. He opened it, ripping the paper quickly, revealing the contents of the package. His face looked happy...didn't it? Or was it a bit crestfallen like I had felt mine would have looked if I hadn't worked so hard to hide my disappointment from him when it had been my turn to open a gift? Oh, we both said the all right words, of course, yet somehow we sensed the gift we received from each other was not nearly as meaningful to us as we had hoped. It was the giving of that present that we both looked forward to with such anticipation. It reflected the Christ we’d both experienced and our desire was to share who we each had come to know. That was where the joy was found, not in having our own desires met, but in fulfilling the desires of the other. In time, my relationship with that young man ended. While it was painful, the joyful image of Jesus continued to hold a place of honor on my wall. Now, it is so much more than just a depiction, and so much more than just a man. It stays as a reminder of the One who would never leave me, the One with whom I would always be in a relationship, the One who would dry my tears many times through the years. But more than that, the One who is always such a source of delight in my life. After all, He was my life. Those crinkling eyes met mine. Then, that engaging smile invited me to pull the corners of my own mouth upward. And just like that, I was laughing alongside my Best Friend.