A Different Tune

Hello! So this is all quite new and confusing for me, signing into Sadie's blog and trying to figure out how to work it and all, so please bear with me. That was quite an introduction she gave, wasn't it?! I hope I live up to your expectations. And hey if I don't, you can always just wait until next weekend to tune back in :D

With Spades in Peru (and yes, you should all call her that...or one of the many other nicknames we have for her, so just ask!), I got to thinking about my trip to the Dominican Republic this past May. About 20 of us went to a small town called Banica right next to the border with Haiti and did some work in very small neighboring villages. It was truly an amazing experience. One of the main things I enjoyed about the trip was the chance to work alongside people of such faith. Those people have next to nothing. We were building outhouses for them because they have no running water. They walk over 10 miles to school, and only then provided that their families don't need them to work on the family farm or hire themselves out to larger farms. They have no cars or scooters, and they more or less survive on the food they grow. Needless to say, these towns were quite different from Fredericksburg, VA. The thing that struck me, though, was the fact that in the midst of all this poverty, they had the richest faith of anyone I'd ever met. It seemed like every time we learned about different families' hardships, we talked about their challenges for 2 minutes but their faith that God would provide for 10. Dying relatives, inability to water their fields because they can't walk through the mountains to get to the river, going without so that their children could eat--these all paled in comparison to God's strength. It was an amazing reminder to unite all of our sufferings with the sufferings of Christ on the Cross.

So that's what I've been trying to remember since the trip. Going about my comparably cushier life, I remind myself of the words my mother relentlessly ingrained into my head every time I complained as a kid (and let's be honest, now too)..."offer it up." It was and still is a good way to stop my complaining in its tracks. Because when I think about the Passion, I can't help but swallow my grumbling about a rude customer or smile about cleaning the dishes even though I hadn't dirtied anything in the overflowing sink.

One of my favorite authors is St. Josemaria Escriva. Now if I were Sadie I could do all of that fancy hyperlinking business to wikipedia and you could read about him and his life, but hopefully you'll do that on your own since I'm more or less technologically challenged. He wrote The Way which is probably one of my favorite books of all time. Right now I'm meandering through Furrow and one of my favorite ones is
"When you started your ordinary work again something like a groan of complaint escaped you: 'It's always the same!' And I told you: 'Yes, it's always the same. But that ordinary job--which is the same one your fellow workers do--has to be a constant prayer for you. It has the same lovable words, but a different tune each day.'"
The nice thing about his books are that they're short thoughts like that which you can read for an hour or pick it up, read one, and continue about your day. Sometimes I sit and read many of them or I only get through a few and have to put the book down to think about them. Either way, I learn a lot from his writings as they challenge and teach me.

So, whether or not you're going to a far-away country to do missions work, enjoy the day and it's opportunities to offer up lovable words to a tune all your own.


I found the link button!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josemar%C3%ADa_Escriv%C3%A1
http://www.amazon.com/Way-Essential-Classic-Opus-Founder/dp/0385518293/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1