Hello to Y'all Across the Pond

Hello to bloggers from England.

Like this gentleman.

And this gentleman.

I like reading blogs that are homemade, and strive to do the same on this blog.

I played the 'pick up and read' game with the Breviary a couple of nights ago, and read the following for the Antiphon for the Canticle of Mary, Evening Prayer II for Religious:

"You have left everything to follow me;
you will have it all returned a hundredfold
and will inherit eternal life"

All well and good. But leaving everything can be a painful process, and if it were not for the remainder of the verse, it would be impossible to consider leaving everything.

A little history will make my thoughts even more confusing. Right now we are in the middle of the Novena for St. Therese of Liseaux, and She has been very generous in interceding for us in the past. So two years ago we were praying the novena asking for another baby, or at least to get an answer for why two years had passed since the arrival of the latest noisykid.

For us, a two year gap between children was a new and unwelcome event. I had joked in the past that one day my wife would be getting a workup for infertility, despite having a large number of children. It wasn't funny once it happened.

Anyway, on the last day of the novena, my oldest daughter came to me while I was working in the garage making a doghouse for Lassie. She said mom was lying on the floor in our bedroom, crying. This was not normal behavior. When I asked her what was wrong, she said her belly hurt, worse than the pain of labor. She had acute cholecystitis, inflammation of the gall bladder, and had it taken out a day later.

Within a few months, she was pregnant with out latest girl noisykid!

So now on this day which commemorates St. Faustina, of Divine Mercy fame, we are again praying for another noisykid. St. Therese has always been a great help to us, and I am certain that anything we have to give up will be rewarded more than a hundredfold.

I volunteer 25 pounds of extra weight for removal. My appendix lies ready to be liberated.

Touching on St. Faustina: We have recently added this to our prayers at 3 p.m. If I am at work, at least my PDA will alarm and let me know that it is time to pray(I do this for the Angelus also). It makes me wonder, though, why we are called to pray for Divine Mercy in particular, instead of for something else. I wonder if God is calling us to pray for mercy because the deadline for other petitions is past. Why else would St. Faustina record it, Pope John Paul II promulgate it, and people all over the world start praying it earnestly?

It is kind of like in C. S. Lewis' book, The Silver Chair, where a character mentions to Aslan that they were calling to him. Aslan points out that they would never have called for him unless he were calling for them.

Off to the store, to pick up the components of the Armageddon 4-pack: Toilet paper, bottled water, peanut butter, and cans of soup. The last time I did this(1999) our stockpile came in handy when the whole family came down with a nasty flu bug in early 2000.