A Shower of Roses...

To continue my theme from last Friday: After dating for three years, things began changing in my life. I completed an internship that I had picked up during college. I got a full time job and graduated from the University. I moved out of my college house and things were looking pretty good. God had blessed me yet again without me even knowing what to ask for and helped me to find a good apartment close to my good job and rooming with a good friend. The guy I lived with had been my roommate in my college house, but he was preparing to graduate as well and decided to separate from the college lifestyle. With the approach of summer, I knew something had to change. I gathered up my courage and went to a jewelry store. After hours of research I had the perfect diamond picked out, but I just couldn’t find the setting I liked. I finally just drew it out on a piece of paper and said, “Can you do this?” The lady at the jewelry store checked with their jeweler and told me it would be ready in two weeks.

TWO WEEKS!!! I had a lot of planning to do. I knew this had to be big, so I spent all of my free time over then next two weeks putting it together. Two weeks was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Caramel, so I knew that that was the day. I had been trying to find a unique way of asking and finally came up with the idea to create a little book that would do most of the work for me. I spent hours using Microsoft Paint and Word to put together a little cartoon book that told the story of a Koala from the city and a Rhino from the country who met and fell in love and got married. On the last two pages, it had spelled out in big letters “Will you marry me?” I took it to the local Kinko’s the night before July 16th. They said it wouldn’t be ready until 10AM. She worked that day until 1, so I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. I began the morning by sneaking over to her apartment after she had left for work and left a treasure hunt of notes. Then I went to pick up the ring. Next I went to ask her dad (I’ve always been bad about waiting until the last minute on things).

She thought I was heading out of town for the weekend, so it would be a complete surprise. The treasure hunt at her apartment led her to a rose with a clue attached. The final clue asked her to feed my fish for me. I had told her that my roommate would be home, but that I only trusted her to feed them (he knew what the plan was). So she arrived at my apartment to find another rose and a clue telling her that one rose was for her and one was for St. Therese. She called me as she was approaching the Parish to which we now belong, and I had to pretend to be driving without lying to her. In the front pew I left the book I had made and sat behind a pillar with a rose in my hand, the ring in my pocket, and a prayer in my heart. It seemed like forever before she arrived and placed the rose by the statue of St. Therese. This was nothing new for us as I often gave her 2 roses (one for her and one for St. Therese). However, when she knelt in the pew to pray, she noticed the book on the front pew with a little sticky note on it spelling out her name. She picked it up and began reading while I watched from around the corner. When I saw her get to then end and read the second to last page, I snuck up right beside her. She read the last page and looked around and saw me. Jumping out of the pew she gave me a huge hug and said in a hushed whisper, “YES! YES!”

I pushed back for a second got down on my knee and said, “Kati, you mean the world to me and I wanted to be right here in front of the Holy Family (their statues were right there) and ask you if you would like try to be a holy family with me?” I then told her to take a minute to think and pray and I would wait outside for the answer. She knelt down for just a minute and then joined me outside just glowing. We went to mass that evening, talked to the priest afterward, got a special engagement blessing, and then spent the rest of the evening telling our family and friends the news.

It was a great day and even though the “Yes” came from her, it was definitely another blessing from God.

And now I’m back to my mission…

A new perspective...

Another day of sickness in my house… My eldest has two ear infections and a fever. My youngest had a fever of almost 104 this morning and the doctor says she has influenza… Curse her cuddliness. My wife is still ok, but the doctor gave her no chance of making it through this ordeal healthy. I’m back to work, but I’m dragging and irritable. But the word of the day is “perspective”. Keep things in perspective.

While looking at my Face Book account, I noticed that one of my high school classmates had her status stating that she was still at Children’s Hospital with her little girl battling a disease that was yet undiagnosed. How truly blessed we are…

A few months ago, a family from my home town laid their still born son to rest without getting a chance to know him. How truly blessed we are…

I read a story in the paper last year about a guy who was let out of prison to see his little girl before she was taken by a brain tumor. How truly blessed we are…

I heard a couple tell their story on the radio today about never having kids because of fertility problems and not having the financial means to adopt. How truly blessed we are…

I complain far too often, but when you look at thinks in perspective, we are all truly blessed… Isn’t God amazing? Well, I'm back to my mission...

In Sickness and In Health

There is nothing like being sick to really make you appreciate your blessings. I woke up Saturday with a fever of 102.4. I ached all over and had a really bad cough. I was tired and my stomach felt queasy. However, Saturday was the Special Olympics Regional Basketball Tournament and I knew that I had 9 kids that would be depending on me to make it. Popping a couple of extra strength Tylenol and a couple of my wife’s peach muffins, I was able to make it through the day. I’ll write more about that later. Sunday at about 4 AM, I started vomiting. I spent most of the day in our basement watching movies with my daughter (who was also running a triple digit temperature). My wife checked on us more times than I could count in between running errands and going to Mass. She nursed us back to health. When I continued running a 102 degree fever into Monday, she convinced me to go to the doctor, who confirmed what I had feared. I had Influenza Type A and it was going to be about a week before I would be back to normal. Through Monday and then Tuesday, my wife continued to care for us and help us out when we needed it. My eldest finally broke her fever on Tuesday morning, but unfortunately, as it left her, it found her sister. Our little one has been running a strong fever for two days now, but it is improving with Motrin. I worked half a day today, so I’m nearly back to normal.

What does this have to do with blessings? Well, all through the weekend, whenever I would fall short on something, or have trouble, there was always someone there to pick up the slack. Someone was always doing the dirty work that I didn’t have the strength to do. And it is that someone with whom I share a bed at night that God gave to me in sickness and in health. I just pray that the sickness is behind us for this year and that she can avoid this junk. It is extremely unpleasant and I hate to see her suffer. She is such a tremendous blessing to me; I thank God for her every day. We are all praying that she doesn’t get sick for two reasons: because we don’t want to see her suffer and because we don’t know what we would do without her if she was out of commission.

And now, I'm back to my mission.

For best results, shower daily...

I shower every day. I should say I am showered ever day. God showers me with blessings that I can’t even begin to fathom. I am married to my best friend. Through her God has given me two beautiful little girls. She stays at home with them and she is an amazing mother to them.

God started leading me to her just over 7 years ago. I was a college student and was searching for where I belonged. A good friend of mine was just getting involved with the campus Parish. I thought this might be a good place for me to start. I started attending a Bible study and later daily Mass. I soon made a lot of friends there and was attending daily Mass. It was at 10 PM so it fit perfectly with a college schedule. I had found where I belonged, but now I wondered where God was leading me. It was the end of the spring semester and I returned to my hometown to work on my dad’s farm/ranch for the summer.

While I was home that summer, I missed my community at the Newman Center. My brothers were both dating girls and my sisters were a lot younger and busy with their lives. My parents have always been involved in just about everything, so they were busy with their involvements. I was alone in the middle of nowhere. That summer helped me grow a lot and though I struggled with missing my community, I was able to discern that God was calling me to the married life and I just had to wait until he showed me the girl.

Starting school the next fall, I was excited to get back to my friends and excited to see what God had in store for me. I immediately got more involved in the Newman Center. There was a lot to do and I really enjoyed it. However, waiting for God to show me the right girl was hard – I often wondered if he would just whisper it to me or if it would be like a 2x4 to the head. I was hoping for the later, but of course God likes to whisper, too. (see 1 Kings 19:11-13). One night at Mass, I noticed a very pious looking young lady. She was kneeling in the chapel praying next to her friend. After Mass, we just happened to be leaving at the same time. I held the door for her and her friend, and she smiled at me. She was very pretty, but not the type of girl that is too good to talk to an average guy like myself. She had a beautiful smile and her bluish-green eyes shined.

A week later, some of the people from the Newman Center decided to go dancing. I decided to ask if this girl, who had been coming to Mass each night, would like to go. Of course as things work, she said she had to go to a birthday party that night. I was ready to give up – and its times like that when God does bring out the 2x4. Over the next few weeks, I had opportunities to talk to this young lady and got to know her. Of course, as I got to know her, I found she grew even more beautiful as her inner beauty shined through.

Soon we were talking every night and even chatting online when she was at home and I was in the dorms. We joined a broomball team with some of our mutual friends. It came to be Thanksgiving, and I went back to my hometown for the holiday weekend. The weekend went well, but the whole time I was gone I was thinking about her. I decided that I couldn’t let her get away without another try. There was a concert coming up with the band Rascal Flatts as well as Brad Paisley. I bought a couple of tickets and then asked her to go with me. She agreed to go. The night before that concert, I asked her to be my girlfriend and she agreed!

We started dating in 2002 and dated for three and half years. Like any couple, we had a lot of ups and downs, but we stuck by each other and grew closer. It was great knowing that we were living our calling, but we knew that there was something bigger coming. It would be a life changing event, because once that occurred, there was no her and me – there was only Us.

That’s all for this shower, but there are many more to come. And now, back to my mission…

Vision Check...

I’ve always had perfect vision. Though my eyes were a little weak in muscles (I still can’t cross them), the seeing part was perfect. However, despite my best efforts at seeing, I still struggle to see as well looking forward as I can see looking back.

Hindsight is an interesting thing. I’ve made countless decisions in my life and I look back now on some of those and think, “Wow – that was dumb.” How much better off would I be had I done it this way or said that thing? I think back about mistakes I’ve made and wonder what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all. How can I be so absent-minded.

It is often said hindsight is 20/20, but I have come to the conclusion that this statement is false. Sure, looking back I can see the result of the choice I made clearly and what choice would have been better for me. But hindsight is not just perfect vision. It is often a magnified tunnel vision of the incident in question. For example, I recently made the decision to take a different route to work. It was a bad decision in hindsight because it ended up taking almost 10 minutes longer than going my regular route would have. But that hindsight does not consider the factors that could have been altered by my going another way. Had I gone the other way, would there be someone that didn’t make it through a light on time because they were one car further back? What about the lady that I let turn on to the street? Would she have made it on time? Was there a speed trap on that road? Did anyone have an accident? I don’t know any of these things and without researching every detail (which is impossible to do) its hard to look at the whole picture. So maybe hindsight is 20/20, but it is a very small scope you are looking through when you see that 20/20.

James Mapes once said “Assumptions are the death of possibilities.” If this is true, then assuming that hindsight is accurate causes the loss of all the possibilities that might have happened. Maybe by going that other way I let someone else get through the light and make it to work on time. Maybe I ruined someone’s day by slowing down traffic on the other route. Assuming that I should have gone the other way kills the possibility of me helping that lady and the possibility of that car that took my place in the traffic queue making it there faster. This is just a tiny example of how our hindsight doesn’t take the whole picture into account.

What gets really crazy is when you can use hindsight without the binoculars. What I mean is what if you look at events that happened and the effects that they have caused. While we can’t do this with decisions we didn’t make (like I can’t determine what would have happened had I gone the other way to work), we can see the ripples from our choice. Take for example my decision of where to go to college. Had I gone to UNK – there is no telling who I would have met, where I would have worked, if I would have ever met my wife, would I have embraced my faith the way I have, or countless other things. But my decision was to go to UNL and some of the ripples from this have been meeting my wife, embracing my faith, finding the kind of work I love, finding a good job, meeting a lot of my friends, becoming a member of my Parish, etc. I could go on all day with stuff that wouldn’t have happened if I had gone somewhere else. But if I look in hindsight, I might see that I would have saved some money and travel time visiting my parents and not see the ripples.

Those ripples are amazing, but what is even more amazing is looking at how it’s really God’s hand causing those ripples. He knew how the ripples would affect me and therefore he tried to lead me to the best ripples. Had I not made the right choice, He still would have led me with those ripples. So much like the pictures they used have in the Weekly Reader papers we got in grade school where the picture was blown up 100 times and only a small section was shown, I can’t use my ULTRA HINDSIGHT VISION to look at events and what I should have done differently. Sometimes the best vision is looking at the whole picture and appreciating what the Artist created and not paying attention to minute details.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that this:

Is part of this:

So always look at the whole picture and try to avoid your hindsight, because in looking behind, we don't see what we have now or what lies ahead.

And now, I'm back to my mission.

My Juggling Act

Did you know that I am a semi-professional juggler? I juggle hats. I have a lot of hats that I juggle. It’s a lot of fun and makes life interesting, especially since I have so many hats and occasionally a couple will try to slide away from me. When they do try to get away, it makes the juggling tough as sometimes I can’t catch all. Then I have to decide which hats I want to keep juggling. I could go for the nicest looking hat… Maybe the one that fits me best… There’s the one that is the most profitable… But here is the one that makes me a better person… And that one is one that I like a lot, but it isn’t any of those other things…

In the end, I have a system for choosing which hat to catch for those times when I can only choose one. The first hat I catch is my Catholic hat. It is the one that really defines me as a person. It guides all my actions and without it, none of the other hats would matter – or at least they would probably be in a much different order. Next is my Husband hat. This one is very important as well. I am married to a wonderful woman who is happy to help me pick up some of the hats I drop, as long as I don’t drop the top two. After my Husband hat comes my Father hat. This hat is the one that allows me to be a good dad to my little girls. It helps me to remember that it is my charge on earth to carry these top three hats at all times. The Husband and Father hats are intertwined with the Provider and Protector hats that I juggle. These come pretty easy and they are fairly aerodynamic so they don’t flail around a lot.

The next few hats are a bit lower than the first three, but they are still pretty important. These include my Son and Brother hats, which are about the same. Seldom do they go astray and hardly ever at the same time. These hats help me to be a good member of my family. There is also my In-Law hat which helps me to get along with my wife’s family. The final hat in this group is my Friend hat. This one I struggle with a lot because there are only so many hats that I can juggle and I drop this one a lot. I have some really good friends, but I seldom get a chance to see them because of all the other hats. I try my best to make sure that I keep in touch with this hat, but more often than I would like, it falls to the ground.

The next group of hats is a mixture of things I enjoy and things that I do for the betterment of my family or me. I love my coaching hat. I have been a Special Olympics Coach for 2 years now and love doing that. I’ve also got my Youth Group Leader hat. This one is a little more work than the others, but I feel like God keeps telling me to hold on to this one. Two other hats that belong in this group are my Acolyte hat and my Usher hat. The Usher hat is nice because it allows me to meet a lot of the wonderful people that are in our Parish. The Acolyte hat is great because it lets me serve the Church and be close to the Consecration which is absolutely incredible, however it makes it hard to hold on to the Husband and Father hats because I have to leave my family in the pews to grab this one.

There is another hat that is really complicated. This hat actually has a series of small hats that reside within it, but it gets tricky because I don’t want to drop these small hats out while I handle the main hat. This hat is my Employee hat. It contains the smaller hats of Programming, Estimating, Phone Answering, Planning, Project Management, and Client Management. These hats while smaller than the Employee hat make this one of the toughest hats to keep juggling, but it is also far better than other Employee hats and this is one that I have to keep juggling in some form or another, or I will drop the Provider and Protector hats.

The final tier of hats is comprised of things that I just enjoy keeping up with, but these are frequently dropped because of one thing or another. My Small Business hat is one that creeps up from time to time and that is why I have my little hobby Morning Star Memories. My Citizen hat keeps me interested in politics. My Football helmet keeps me interested in sports, particularly football.

There are many more hats in my life that I will pick up sometimes and juggle for a while, but 17 is usually about my limit. I wish I could do more and I hope that someday I’ll be able to go pro and handle all of my hats, but until then, my hat rack holds the rest. On my hat rack you will find my Knights of Columbus, Men’s Club, Athlete, Video Gaming, Craftsman, and Groundskeeper hats.

My hat juggling is a lot of fun, but sometimes its hard work. I wish I could juggle other things like I do my hats, but just ask my wife, I can’t. I’m not even that good with my hats sometimes – like when I have to stay late at work or when I put off preparing for our youth group until the last minute. With practice, someday I hope to become a professional hat juggler, but I may trim it down so I only have a few hats that I juggle and I will just be really good at it.

You are getting sleepy...

Holding your little one in the rocking chair, you rock back and forth. You hum a gentle tune. Your slow rhythmic breathing soothes her ears. She cuddles into you and closes her eyes. Soon, she is drifting off to dream land. As you listen to her little snores you decide it would be a good time to lay her down so you can get a little work done. And then you wake up and it is half an hour later.

How do they do it? It’s like someone hypnotized you.

Stronger than tryptophan.

More powerful than Dramamine.

It SLEEPY BABY!!

I can’t explain it. One minute I am sitting there rocking my daughter to sleep. The next minute, I’m waking up from a nap of my own. About a month ago my youngest woke up early (like 6 o’clock early). I was just getting ready for the day and so I got her up, changed her, and started to rock her back to sleep. She snuggled in and about an hour and a half later, my wife found me in the chair and asked, “Don’t you need to leave for work?”

I’ll sit down to watch the game. It will be the 4th quarter with my favorite team trailing by 3 with only 1:30 left and they are driving down the field. My little one gets cranky, so I pick her up and BANG I’m watching the amazing heroics of some player from a different team on the post game show! How does this happen?!?

Sometimes I will try to read while I’m rocking her… Oops!

It’s not like I take a lot of naps or like I’m very tired. I hardly ever nap – though I’m not opposed to the occasional snooze. I can have a whole pot of coffee and then sit down with one of my girls and before you know it, I’m gone. It’s a travesty.

IS THERE NO HOPE?

There is only a nap… a slowly rocking, rhythmic, warm, snuggly nap. But hey, there is no better kind.