The Inn Crowd

I just got off of an overnight retreat at the church. One other adult and I led a small retreat for 6 teens that lasted just under 24 hours and during that time, we were learning about, praying with and growing in our love and devotion to our Mother Mary.

It was a beautiful time and such an amazing way to end this final week of Advent - watching teenagers, who people far to often write off as self-centered, unfocused, or immature, dive into personal prayer, reflection, journaling, and Adoration - especially when they could chosen to hang out with their friends, go Christmas shopping, or do a million other things that most of their peers would consider WAY cooler than hanging out with Jesus for a day!

The could have followed the example of the "in crowd" and blown off this retreat for other pursuits. But they didn't - they chose a different path. And it was beautiful.

In my own time of prayer during this retreat, I was drawn to reflect on the innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away at the door and sent them to the stable. It was a fleeting thought, a brief moment in a long period of silence in the Blessed Sacrament chapel, and to be honest, I had half forgotten about it until I was scrolling through my Facebook page tonight and saw a post that said something like, "Are you part of the inn crowd or one of the stable few?" And it brought that reflection from the chapel back to my mind.

Now, before I go on, I want to make something clear...I am not knocking the innkeeper here. I mean, there was a census called - Bethlehem was a busy place when Mary and Joseph arrived there. And there is only so much room in an inn. And he did offer them the shelter of the stable. I actually don't think he was a bad guy. But he does give us a great image to reflect on.

Because the fact remains - he did not have room for the Holy Family. He turned them away at the door and relegated them to a smelly, dirty stable for shelter, and ultimately, to give birth to their child, who, albeit unbeknown to him, was the Savior of the World.

That is what my mind was led to during that prayer - the simple fact that he did not have room for them. Sure, I can lay out a bunch of really great reasons why he didn't have room, and had no obligation to make room for them - but, still, at the end of the day, he did not have room for them.

How often do we not have room for the Holy Family in our lives? Are we like the innkeeper, who greets them at the door, but sends them away? Or maybe we aren't even opening the door to begin with.

Maybe we filled the "inns" of our hearts and lives with so much other stuff that we don't even hear them knocking anymore. But they are there - and He is with them.

I am really good at rationalizing why I do or don't do things - so good, in fact, that my dad's running joke is that I should have been a lawyer - so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I can rationalize the heck out of the ups and downs of my personal prayer life and relationship with Christ. And I think that is what I was doing in the chapel when the innkeeper came into my mind - I was coming up with a great list of why it was ok that my prayer life had been a little lacking lately - that I was doing all these other things that "made up for it"....hmm, this is starting to sound familiar....

I didn't have room for them. Better said - I wasn't making room for them.

Because here is where we differ so strongly, and so importantly, from the innkeeper that night in Bethlehem. He had a fixed amount of space in which he could fit people. Our hearts do not.

We have an infinite capacity to love and to be loved by God. He created us so that no matter what life is throwing at us, no matter what we have filled our lives, our time, and even our hearts with - we always have room for His Family and for Him. If we choose to open the door and invite Him in.

Now, we may be really good at convincing ourselves that this is not true - that we simply cannot fit one more thing in our "busy" lives, even if that one thing is Jesus. But that's all we are doing - convincing ourselves. Because He made us for love, and love is boundless.

So as this Advent season draws to a close and we approach Christmas eve, remembering Mary and Joseph as they entered the city and sought shelter, maybe this is a good time to take an honest look at our own hearts and decide, when they come knocking, and they will, are we going to be part of the "inn crowd" and turn them away, or one of the "stable few" and invite them in?

Reflecting on Sandy Hook

I wanted to post on Friday - but I honestly didn't have the words.

I wanted to post on Saturday - but my arms and hands were busy holding my precious children as close to me as I could.

Now I feel compelled to say something, while knowing at the same time that no words are adequate to even begin to address, and certainly not to explain, the evil that was committed on the community of Newtown, Connecticut this week.

So where do we go from here? How do we wrap our minds, not to mention our hearts, around this? For me, that answer is through pure faith - faith in a God who loves bigger and deeper and more completely than anything of this world, good or bad.

People have asked, "Where was God when this was happening?" or have said He was "sleeping" when the gunman entered the school that morning. But the eyes of faith tell me something different.

As Mark Hart, also know as the Bible Geek, posted on his Facebook page yesterday, "God was not sleeping during the Newtown tragedy, He was weeping. Free will offers us the chance to love or to hate, to build or to destroy."

That reminder has given me a surprising amount of comfort in the past day. I say it all the time, I talk to teens about it all the time - God does not force Himself on us, but He does desperately love us, and want us to choose Him. In that love, He gave us free will - because a love that is coerced is not love, it is control and He desires relationship with us, not blind obedience.

And that is a beautiful gift of unselfish love.

On Friday, we were all confronted with the downside of His unselfishness, as a young man named Adam Lanza, for whatever reason, chose to do the unspeakable to our most innocent.

But thankfully, our world is filled with people who take another road - who show us what it means to love like God loves us, and on Saturday, we began to learn about those stories in Newtown.

We learned about the teacher who hid her children and told Adam they were in the gym before he shot her. All her children walked out of that building, unharmed.

Or the principal and counselor who cared more about the kids in the building than their own safety and gave their lives trying to wrestle the Lanza to the ground.

And there are many, many more.

These are the stories to cling to in these days - this is where we know, beyond the pain and seemingly senselessness of this tragedy, that God was there. And is there now. Because what He promises is what we is now being revealed - that even out of great sadness can come hope, joy, love, and salvation.

He proved it on the Cross almost 2000 years ago, and He continues to prove it in the everyday little tragedies of our lives as well as in times of great loss like this.

I do not have all the answers, heck, I don't really have any at all. And I don't know why this young man did what he did, or why God chose to call home the souls that He did that day.

But I do know one thing with absolute certainty -

God walked each person out of that building on Friday- either into the arms of their families or into the arms of His angels.

He wasn't sleeping. He was weeping. Right along with all His children, just like always.

Winter Snow

So clearly I am less than great at keeping up my weekly blog posts - but I promise, I am trying! =) As I did not get one up last Thursday, I decided to go for 2 this week...so here is installment 1!

I love Christmas music - it is one of my favorite things about the holidays! Besides being fun and festive and putting me in the holiday spirit, I think it is wonderful that for one month out of the year, you can walk into pretty much any major retailer and hear songs blaring on the speakers about our Lord and Savior! And nobody is throwing up picket signs or protesting or screaming at management to change the station! Its a beautiful thing, and I suspect that some hearts have been turned to Christ simply through hearing His message in the mall while doing holiday shopping!

In that, I think, we can find a powerful example of the power of Christ - when we let Him in, He changes us, sometimes without us even meaning for it to happen. That is especially true this time of year, as we prepare and anticipate the arrival of the babe in a manger who, when Mary let Him into the world, changed it forever.

I love the simplicity and subtly with which Christ came. Now, having had 2 babies of my own, I am in no way saying that pregnancy and giving birth are simple or subtle - far from it! But here's the thing - by coming as a baby, Jesus kind of "snuck in" without us even realizing it. Think about it - only a few people were in on it from the beginning - Mary, Joseph, likely Elizabeth and Zachariah, eventually the wise men and the shepherds, but outside of that, for all anyone could see, His birth was just that - the birth of a baby boy, by no means an unusual event.

And that is part of the power of how He came - and how He calls us to bring Him to the world today. Christ was revolutionary because of who He was and how He lived - and when you look at it, who He was, as a human, was a simple rabbi who loved unconditionally, reached out to all people, especially the poor and marginalized, spoke the Truth with confidence, and lived what He preached, and gave His entire life to following the Father's call for Him. But he did it through love, compassion, justice, and radical peace. He did not yell, scream, tear down walls, condemn or threaten.

The way He came modeled the way He lived, and the way He gathered people to Himself.

One of my favorite Christmas songs is called "Winter Snow" and is sung by Audrey Assad. I love it because it speaks of exactly this - that Jesus could have come with power, force, terror, and destruction, but He didn't. He came, instead, like a winter snow - quiet, soft and slow.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!