Lent – Thankful Runner Girl

It’s raining today…quite steady right now actually. I’m waiting for my husband to get off work and our daughter to finish up with her lab so we can all head home. The 99 can be a wicked drive in the rain and I want our daughter to have a little more practice driving around just in town before she tackles that drive. I’m at my favorite little cafe staring out the window watching the rain fall in sheets from a broken gutter onto the outside patio furniture. There’s a little older couple who is looking over at me now and again, can’t tell if they think I’m transcribing their conversation or just looking out the window behind me. It doesn’t really matter.

We were back to school today after a long three day weekend. We have two three day weekends in February back to back, Lincoln’s birthday and Presidents Day. Our daughter’s old elementary school only got one of the two Mondays off so my husband and I used to use whichever Monday she didn’t get off as a fun date day, usually a hike up at the lake where I spent a lot of time as a kid. She gets both Mondays off these days, mostly because she’s in college now and doesn’t have class on Mondays. It didn’t matter this year though because, it’s raining, so we couldn’t go on our hike yesterday, which was a bummer. The Monday before we also had off and the weather was also not great but we were able to go for a run and see a sweet movie called Solo Mio.

It’s been a strange year so far. Many people to pray for who are having health struggles. My sister and other family and friends. I try to be grateful to wake up every morning able to move and take care of myself. I’m still trying to lose some weight to help my A1C and overall health. It would be nice to spend my 50’s active and healthy as I head into the second half of them in about half a year. I’m thankful to be able to pray for my friends and family to a God who is always listening, even when I might not think He hears. Feelings aren’t always a great thing to go by, they have a tendency to ebb and flow, we must trust in God’s word always and Jesus promised us that we are never alone, even on days when that’s exactly how we feel. Alone, concerned about the future, the state of a world where old women are kidnapped from their homes, or teens looking for an easy way to steal someone else’s belongings all die in a horrific car wreck and then there’s wars and the general state of the world. My hope remains in Jesus even when the plan remains elusive.

In addition to a three day weekend, Valentine’s Day was Saturday. I am thankful we got to spend time with the kids so their parents could have a Valentine date. We watched K-Pop Demon Hunters! Lol, it was an interesting movie and we talked about things that were good messages and things that were just weird. In general, the idea of “the accuser” and having to guard your mind from negative thoughts was a good idea. We all seem to struggle with negative, self-defeating thoughts somedays and sometimes those thoughts win and people we love end up places we would never want them to be. Some days we are able to win, push the thoughts away and continue our day. Thank goodness for those days.

On Valentine’s Day we picked up my mom and after our daughter’s practice we headed over to a little beach town called Cayucos. The beach isn’t very big, and neither is the town but they have some cute antique shops and at least two places we like to eat, Duckies and now Schooners. I think my Mom had a nice time and so did my daughter and man it was a beautiful drive!

Sunday we finally had our own Valentine Date, but I picked a bad movie, Crime 101, the plot was crazy, didn’t really make any sense but we stayed through the whole movie. It was nice to have a Valentine Date and for the 32nd year in a row my See’s candy heart made a return. This year it had chocolates, some years it has other gifts but this year mostly chocolate and I also got some flowers and cards 🙂 I have the best Valentine. We went running in the morning and the sky was so pretty, a really nice pink, purple, orange color. I love a colored sky.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Lent. Some years I look forward to Lent, other years, like this year, I wonder why it’s a thing. I’m probably not supposed to write that out loud. It’s not that I don’t think the purpose of Lent is a good one. I do. It’s just that our particular church changes things to Latin and reduces the amount of instruments that can be played and wants the Psalms sung a certain way and they just try to make Sunday’s a lot more somber than it should be. Jesus wasn’t even Roman and He didn’t teach in Latin! Jesus was Jewish and spoke and taught in Aramaic, so the argument that it’s the language of Jesus isn’t valid. Sundays, in my opinion, should always be a joyful day. We commemorate the great sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and hopefully we leave Mass with a renewed sense of gratefulness and thankfulness for the gift of Jesus. Jesus took on all sin on the cross, not some sin, not most sin, all sin. Jesus died so we could enter heaven, including the thief who was crucified with him. A time of contemplating to remember this gift, a time of sacrifice to acknowledge the suffering and our redemption is good and useful but Sundays are special so I don’t totally understand the reasoning behind it all, but maybe it’s one of those things that I don’t totally need to understand. Maybe I should just follow the shepherds God has given us. Our Oblates of St. Joseph are good and holy men who love God’s people, maybe there’s something there that I don’t see?

Well I guess that’s it for now. No running news, trying out some once a week intervals, which are actually kinda hard, not as many miles lately because the weather has not been cooperating. Doing more weightlifting, following a Bill Philips 5X5 plan. We have a treadmill and it’s a new one, but so far I don’t much care for it, might try walking on it tonight if this rain doesn’t calm down, after my weight workout.

So today for pink Valentine skies, time spent with people we love, the gifts of sacrifice, clergy who care enough to try to help us contemplate that sacrifice(even if I don’t like Latin), beautiful skies, days off, and a little time to sit and think in a favorite cafe…I give thanks!

KOR-not sure when we’ll be able to sign up for another race, lots of track meets coming up but hopefully we’ll be able to up our mileage as the weather improves and get a little faster. A plan is in the works!

Green hills and beautiful sky on our drive to the coast…

Today at mass our pastor Father John gave his homily, if I’m honest I don’t really remember most of the homily, probably because I thought it would be about the transfiguration, which was the Gospel today, but that wasn’t his focus. I thought we’d get a homily about how we can all change. Instead, as part of his homily, I heard, “Everything is a Gift from God. Everything.” That phrase caught my attention because just the other day I was listening to Alistar Begg, he’s a pastor whose sermons we listen to, almost daily. He’s not Catholic, in fact, I’m pretty sure he thinks Catholicism is bunk but you know it’s fine by me, we all have our flaws, Ha!

Seriously, Alistar was giving a sermon this week where he was talking about just being grateful for waking up in the morning and looking out the window and seeing a blue sky. It was the same message I heard today from Father John.

When bad things happen its hard to see things as gifts. We had a sad accident happen this weekend. As we were returning home from work Friday we drove into our garage like we always do but we didn’t see our neighbors cat. Sadly, after all was said and done, it didn’t turn out well. Laina and I cried ourselves to sleep. I encouraged her to paint a picture of him the next day so she could have a memory and we printed out a nice picture we had taken of him a few months earlier. We wrote a card asking for forgiveness from our neighbor and took it over the next day. The wife is very sweet and very forgiving. I don’t know that I would be that forgiving but it wasn’t her cat. It was the childhood cat of her husband, who we actually haven’t seen since Friday night so I’m not real sure he’s quite ready to forgive us and I can’t say I blame him.

I was so upset at one point I told my husband he had ruined our entire weekend. Totally unfair and untrue. I prayed that morning that our neighbors would forgive us and then I called my mom, who else would I call? I cried and told her what happened and as moms often do she helped put it all in perspective for me and I felt better after I talked to her. Funny how at 47 years old I still want to have my mom make it all ok.

Anyway, such a sad start to our weekend but when I heard Father John this morning it forced me to look at the weekend as a whole and realize that lots of good things happened too. The weather was amazing, beautiful blue sky for miles, warm, not too hot. I went to a bridal shower for my cousin. Very happy for him. I guess I went to the bridal shower of his fiance but I’ve considered her my cousin for a long time already, such as it is. We had a fun St. Patrick’s Day breakfast with our family and friends. We ate corned beef and cabbage or tri-tip and potatoes, if you preferred, with Irish Soda Bread and other yummy side dishes here and there. We ended our weekend by taking a drive down Sky Harbor Road. If you live in our valley then you know that one of the very best things is our foothills in the spring. Absolutely incredible any spring but with so much rain this year it is a total feast for the eyes! Sky Harbor Road winds around one of our local lakes and leads up to a hiking trail. It was just spectacular, so beautiful, I didn’t want to leave. The amazing thing is it is only like 25 minutes from our house, if that, I love where we live in CA. We can be at any of a number of amazing places in less than an hour and if we want to see the ocean, its’ just a little over a two hour drive. If we want to be in a big city we are less than 3 or 4 hours away, depending on if we go south or north. We almost never want to be in a big city. I don’t think I will ever get my daughter to go back to San Francisco, she was not impressed when we went in January.

I’m off track. My point was behind all these wonderful things was an ache in my heart for the pain we caused our neighbor and it hasn’t gone away. I’m old enough to know it will lessen over time but I’m also old enough to know it will never go away. I hope they forgive us. They are nice people and it would be nice to get to know them better. It was a reminder that we should know them better, that whole Love Your Neighbors thing. It was a reminder that things aren’t permanent and in the matter of less than a second, everything can be changed.

Everything is a gift from God. Beautiful things are gifts from God and sad and painful things are gifts from God too. They both are designed to remind us that we are His. Forgiveness is His greatest gift. We can’t earn that, we can only accept that we have it. It’s called Grace. We can’t force others to forgive us when we’ve wronged them. We can only ask for it, the important part there is we need to ask. The second most important part is to forgive ourselves. We are useless when we wallow in self-pity. We can not “Glorify God by Our Life” when we wallow in self.

We are His creation and He calls out to us, sometimes the call is painful and heart crushing but sometimes, like this afternoon the call is beautiful and heart filling.

I’ve seen deep sadness and brokenness in my own life turned to joy immeasurable, you’d think I’d learned this lesson by now. Obviously not. God’s mercies are never ending and His faithfulness is always true. Our names are carved into the palm of His hands, carved. I am overwhelmed by this truth.

What a crazy weekend. Lows and highs.

For everything God sends to me good and bad…I Give Thanks!

KOR

Here’s a picture of our foothills. They are amazing.