Everyday is an opportunity: an opportunity to try again, an opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life, an opportunity to make an improvement in your life. Seize those opportunities every chance you can. It is so easy to live in the pain of yesterday, or be overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the future, that you can […]
I thought that once my divorce was final, life would get back to some sense of normal and most of my divorce-related struggles would disappear. Yeah, right. I quickly discovered that the primary change was the types of struggles I faced, not struggles themselves. My main struggle initially was committing to a chaste lifestyle. That one […]
I remember when I was in the throes of my divorce, one of my co-workers said, “I know this is difficult. You deserve to be happy.” I thought, “Yea, she’s right. I do deserve to be happy!” I approached happiness like some kind of life achievement, like graduating from high school. I wanted to graduate from […]
“This is the third time this month you have been late picking up the kids. You are going to have to figure out a way to be more on time,” I said coldly. My former spouse just looked at me with a mixture of embarrassment and exhaustion. After the kids were gone and the house […]
I was standing in the kitchen when all of a sudden the house was flooded with the sound of contemporary music, rudely interrupting my peaceful morning. I knew who the culprit was: my five-year-old son, as this was his usual morning routine. I called out to him to “please turn that down” and went back […]
“Why are you taking pictures of a church that doesn’t care about its people?!” were the words that rudely broke the silence as I was trying to inconspicuously take a few pictures of a magnificent old church near where I was visiting. I turned around to see a disheveled older man who clearly hadn’t had […]
Did you ever find it odd that so many of the Gospel stories have Jesus interacting with the outcasts of society? It seems that for most of his public life, Jesus went out of his way to interact with the lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes and social misfits of his day. These outcasts were his people […]
Going through my divorce was so painful. The life that I had built, the dreams I had, were now crumbling around my feet. The pain was overwhelming. I developed different ways to cope with this pain. Some of them were good, and some not. To find peace, I dove back into my long abandoned hobbies. That […]
“I hope he rots in Hell!” the woman (let’s call her Marge) sitting in front of me said, her voice filled with bitterness. I sat and listened attentively for the next fifteen minutes as she described in vivid detail all the nasty things her ex did and all the pain he brought into her life. Listening […]
“I can’t take it anymore!” were the words that tumbled out of my mouth as I sat defeated in front of a very young-looking priest. I had really been suffering from the new reality of my divorce. Well, what I heard next shocked me. He said, “Your suffering is actually helping you heal from your […]