My Idea for this blog came as I was making my morning offering one day. It had been weighing on my mind that in recent years I had been asked to suffer very little. Sure, there had been difficult times in my life, but everything lately had been rainbows and lollipops. Whenever I would offer the Lord my prayers, works, joys and sufferings I would think how little my sufferings are and how poorly sometimes I bear them, until it occurred to me that I am also offering him my joys. Recently I have had no shortage of them.
I have been blessed with the four most wonderful children in the world, a husband whom I know loves me and every grace I had prayed for to bring more peace to our marriage. My husband works from home and I home-school our children. We live in a beautiful part of the country surrounded by the most amazing friends and close to our families. Our Priest and parish are like an extension of our family. Some of our best friends live one door to the north of us and my sister-in-law and her lovely family live one door to our south. There is always someone stopping by to share a meal or just to visit. Life at our house is like a never-ending BBQ in the greatest neighborhood in America. What a wonderful, beautiful thought; that I could offer up to God these very joys he lavishes on me each day and that they could work toward the sanctification of my soul. It is in this light that I also realized that offering our sufferings is no different. We are only offering back to him what he has seen fit to bless us with. Joy or suffering, they are blessings, and they are meant to serve His greater glory and the sanctification of our souls. If we neglect to receive either with a grateful heart and to offer them to him to be transformed into miracles for our salvation, we may fail to reap their full benefits in our souls. We have no control over when or how the Lord chooses to send us joy or suffering. We have only to receive it and glorify him by it.
Family life lends itself readily to both joy and suffering. The very entrance of a new member of the family into this world is bursting with both. It is in the very nature of relationship to share them. Sometimes a moment of suffering becomes many moments of joy as we share the memory fondly over and over. One example of this phenomenon is a story about our children which at the moment of its occurrence feels like chaos, but later serves as a hilarious story we share a hundred times over.
It is in this spirit that I would like to share the story of our family life. The story of a family who rarely eats a meal apart from one another or a dinner without a guest. Rarely is there a weekend when one or both of our extra beds is not filled with a friend or family member from out of town. Indeed many weekends our sofa and floor are employed as well. Life here is full of the unexpected and the wonderful. I hope that sharing the many joys and maybe even some sufferings will lift your spirits and Glorify God in the telling.
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