The Lord has gifted me joy to accompany my grief, and has taught my young self that there is nothing I can do but give the joy the Lord gives me to others.
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Being honest and vulnerable with God showed me that His love is always greater than our failures.
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Depression came like a tsunami, I was completely submerged and there was no coming up for air. People who I called friends turned their backs on me. I was judged because of my nationality and skin color. My relationship with my parents was struggling. I didn’t know where I fit in or where I belonged.
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But many of us find that we don’t have clear models for what we’re supposed to do—what it would even look like to bring all our wild, weird, harrowing experiences to the altar. Especially if something in your life or your calling from God hasn’t been modeled for you by the Catholics around you, it can feel like you’re locked out of that small, perfect sphere of faith.
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Nothing about life is certain. No amount of planning, organizing, preparing or dreaming will guarantee our desired outcome. I’m constantly reminded to loosen my grip and, like the song says, “let Jesus take the wheel.”
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And yet, four years after my confirmation, I am still finding my way. I am still actualizing my identity as a beloved daughter of God and learning what it means to be a Catholic woman in this broken and beautiful world.
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You have the strength to question any relationship or situation that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable. In the words of Edith Stein, ‘Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.’ We are called to relationships built on truth in the same way that truth calls us to Him.
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The potential pain of disappointment should not smother the hope for those things that God places on our hearts.
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I learned that putting our trust in God is never a gamble. It is never too late. You are never too far gone that God can't reach you. ...God in his infinite kindness took pity on me, a teenage mother and allows me to live the fairy tale I thought was lost forever. Trust in him sisters. He is so worthy.
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Out of uncertainty, a Way unfolds. Jesus consistently receives my mysterious desires and prepares places carefully designed for me. Authentic friendships, joyful community, work that draws on my unique gifts. Glorifying God in my body means saying ‘yes’ to my life. It means throwing myself into the tasks and relationships I have been given instead of lamenting the ones I haven't.
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For every woman who is stuck between two worlds, two cultures, understand that the Catholic Church is universal. There should never be a division between your identities. We accept all, we love all, and we are all one body in Christ.
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(I) encourage you to not be so quick to categorize the crosses in your life as just suffering you’ll need to buckle up and deal with. Allow yourself the space in your spiritual imagination to envision how something really hard in your life could actually be a wildly massive gift.
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Like you, I was given a skin colour. But, unlike many of my sisters, or if you can relate, like many of my sisters, my skin colour either became a determinant for who I was perceived to be, or my skin colour was not considered valuable enough to even be acknowledged. My skin colour either gave people a right to accept their own preconceived ideas about me or it was just dismissed all together.
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The love I first felt pulling my son out of my womb, bringing him to my breast, singing him to sleep, it had been a mere taste of this heavenly love.
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Surrender trying to live up to everyone’s expectations of you as a woman, daughter, friend, co-worker, wife, mother and Christian. Ask God what He wants from you, what He expects of you in any given situation and that will be enough.
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I want to share a snippet of this journey of overcoming self-doubt and embracing my role as an artist with you. I also want to encourage other women to recognize in themselves their creative capacity, and explore how spiritual and physical motherhood reflect the role of the Creator in the deepest way.
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“I just don’t think I’ll ever be happy.” Saying these words out loud to my spiritual director changed my life, and I want to reach out to you with some hope if you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation.
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(Photo by Jennifer Burk) My eating disorder took hold of my life. I was so drained and numb, like a walking zombie. I was just trying to get by, and I only prayed when I was laying in bed with no energy to move. I had been to a few on-campus counselors while I was in college, who tried to tell me to “just eat” or just believe that my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit. That was the last thing I could believe.
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As I stared transfixed at what I instantly understood to be a symbol for the Holy Trinity, I realized that long before I had even been aware of Him, I had unwittingly branded myself as His; I belong to God and He calls me beautiful.
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I find myself overwhelmed by the many endeavors I want to pursue, the vastness of improvement that I can still make in so many areas of my life, and the restlessness of my longing in general to find lasting and satisfying happiness in my current walk of life.
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