Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name:
You are mine.
You are precious in my eyes
And honored, and I love you.
I have called you by name:
You are mine.
You are precious in my eyes
And honored, and I love you.
1. Introduce yourself to people and actually remember their names.Besides being able to go stalk them on Twitter later, remembering the names of people you are bound to see a million more times around campus is so important. It means a lot to others when you call them by name. You may even end up becoming really good friends. Plus, it’s awkward if you have to ask their name later on after you’ve already had like five conversations with them.
2. Use your time wisely.This item of the list is specifically to reassure you that it is absolutely acceptable to take 10-minute naps. On the other hand it is probably not wise to watch Netflix for five hours at a time like you did all summer. Personally, I think it helps to plan my day in my phone calendar beforehand to make sure I set a time to accomplish everything I must get done. 3. When someone offers free food, eat it.Free food is the best food you’ll ever eat. Always be on the look out to save money by reading your university’s email, bulletins, or newspaper about events. It seems like there’s always some kind of event going on that offers free food. Plus, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you actually meet a few new people in your free food scavenging. 4. Call home.Do not forget where your bread has been buttered for the past 18 years. Your parents are probably at the stage where they try to play it cool by not calling every two seconds and aggravating you, but I promise they are just waiting to hear all about your college experience. 5. Get involved.You'd be surprised at how many clubs, groups and activities colleges have. The opportunities are endless. There’s literally something to be involved in for every single type of person out there. 6. Keep in touch with your best friends.While you’re calling your parents, don’t forget to call your best friends, who have inevitably gone to a different college than you. Yes, you will meet tons of new and awesome friends in college, but don’t forget about your roots. Don’t lose the people who know about your fourth grade buck teeth. You don’t have to talk every day, but let them know you love them and appreciate them as often as you can. Remember, you go home for Christmas break and summer, so there will be plenty of time to have fun again like old times. 7. Be a sponge.Absorb all possible information in the classroom as well as in the outside world. In college, it’s actually cool to be smart. It’s even cooler when you’ve gone to class and studied all semester so that during finals week, it’s not as dramatically bad as everyone says it is. Now in the outside world, you are on your own pretty much. Learn how to do adult things. Once you get a real job, you don’t magically understand how to adult in an instant. College is the time when you learn and do adult things on your own. Remember, you can call mom for her to explain how to do it, but you must do it yourself once you understand what needs to be done. 8. Thank God for opening new doors and closing old ones.While you’re at it, find your campus church and get acquainted. It’s really important to do this immediately when you get to college because chances are if you keep putting it off, you will never get around to do it. You may even lose your faith all together. Time spent with God will allow you to stay grounded, keep your priorities straight and release stress. Focus on Christ, and everything will fall into place. Marriage has such a beautiful fairytale ring to it. In reality, finding a good husband scares single girls like me to death. However, there are three men in my life that give me hope that one day I will find a good husband, who will love me and lead me to Christ.
The first man that gives me hope that I will find a good husband is my brother. I may be a little biased, but my brother is a pretty solid guy (and single too). I can't believe I'm admitting this, but he is smarter than me, he has an awesome sense of humor, and he actually owns a bible. Don't get me wrong, my brother definitely knows how to have a good time, but every Sunday you can find him at mass nurturing his relationship with Jesus. When I need him, he is always there. He may give me a hard time about it because I'm his little sister, but our late night heart to hearts prove that there is genuine substance under that receding hair line. He knows how to love and care for the women already in his life, so I am confident that when the right one comes along, he will grab her hand and never hinder in leading her and their future children to Christ. I know my brother will make the best husband one day, so it gives me hope that there must be another guy out there from our generation, who will do the same for me. The second man that gives me hope about finding a good husband is my daddy. I am so blessed to have a daddy that treats me like gold. He loves me more than life itself and never stops reminding me of this fact. When I ask him for something, he provides ten times more than what I asked for. My daddy cannot be outdone in generosity, except of course by God Himself. Out of all of the sporting events and academic banquets I've ever been involved with in my life, I can't think of time when my daddy hasn't been there bursting with pride supporting me. Just like my brother, you can always find my daddy in a pew on Sunday morning, and you can also find a rosary in his work pants pockets every weekday. My daddy gives me hope that if he can stay happily married to my mom for 29 years, then there must be another man among the 7 billion people in the world, who is willing to make that commitment to me. Even though my brother and my daddy make a pretty convincing argument that there is hope for me to find a good husband, without my third man of hope I would probably be a little more inclined to join eHarmony or Christian Mingle. The third man, even though He is much more than a man, is God. He is my ultimate source of hope. Without God's hand at work, how on earth could two people live together for more than 50 years without killing each other? I'm convinced that marriages are successful only by the grace of God. No force of humanity alone could pair up millions of couples from across the world and actually make it work out and even flourish into beautiful marriages. If God loved me enough to create me (even though He doesn't need me or anyone at all for that matter), to provide for me every single day, to forgive me when I inevitably fall, and to send His only Son to die for me then I think if it's in His will that my vocation is marriage, He already has the perfect man for me picked out. I trust that God is already molding my future husband's heart into a shape that perfectly complements mine. With all this talk about marriage and my future husband, I do have to throw out a small disclaimer that there is also a chance that my vocation is not marriage. In which case, I am also confident that God will completely satisfy my heart even if He calls me to the single life or religious life. Whatever You have planned for me God, I trust in You. Thank You for blessing me with hope from the two men closest to me. Thank You also for the hope I receive from You. Thank You for always coming through. Thank You for my future husband if He's part of Your plan. Thank You for Your perfect and holy will for my life. I love You Lord, and I trust You with all my heart. The night I wrote this article, I was supposed to go to sleep early, yet I found myself hours later wide awake with my fingers flying across my key board. Hopefully you can relate to one of those times when God puts something on your heart and you can’t even think about doing anything else until you accomplish what he has asked you to do. Sometimes God just lights this fire in our souls, and we can’t rest until we share that fire with others. This is one of those fires he lit inside my soul. I pray that this article can spark a little something inside of you too.
Today’s Gospel reading is one I’ve heard a million times. You are probably familiar with it as well. It’s the one where Jesus multiplies the fish and loaves to feed an enormous crowd. What I haven’t heard a million times from this reading is the part where Jesus says, “Bring them here to me.” Jesus asks the disciples to bring Him every last bit of food they could find. Only then did He work wonders and completely satisfy the hunger of the huge crowd. Boom! It hit me like a ton of bricks as I read this Gospel tonight. Only when I bring Jesus everything I have will He satisfy the spiritual hunger of my heart. I don’t know about you, but my heart aches often. My soul is constantly yearning for more. I am always searching for that full serving of bread and fish to satisfy my deepest hunger. Here in this Gospel, I am reminded of the truth that Jesus not only is able to feed me, but he also longs to feed me. He deeply desires to overflow 12 of my wicker baskets with more than enough fish and loaves to fill my aching soul. Jesus could have easily went along with the disciples’ suggestion to send the crowd away to buy their own food, but He didn’t. Mother Teresa so beautifully reminds us: “Jesus wants me to tell you again... how much is the love He has for each one of you -- beyond all what you can imagine... Not only He loves you, even more -- He longs for you. He misses you when you don't come close. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don't feel worthy...”Jesus longs to feed me just like he fed the large crowd. He misses me when I don’t come to him hungry. He wants me to run to him with an empty stomach. All I have to do for Jesus to satisfy every last bit of my hunger is bring him the little that I do have. So, here I am Lord. Here is the little that I do have. Here is my heart and soul. Here are all my talents and abilities. Here are my passions and desires. Here are my relationships. Here are my hopes and dreams. Here are the few fresh loaves that I have. Now I need your help, Jesus. This next part of my prayer is a little harder. You already know that though. Here, Lord, here are the fish that I would rather keep to myself. Here are the fish that sometimes don’t smell very pleasant. Here are the parts of my heart that I’m not using to nourish myself the way that you would nourish me. I am yours, Lord. Everything I am and every little piece of me, I turn back over to you. Your will be done. Thank You in advance for everything You are about to do in my life. Thank You in advance for the t12 wicker baskets full of blessings you will overflow my soul with. Now as a reader you have two options:
When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. The crowds heard of this and followed him on foot from their towns. When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples approached him and said, “This is a deserted place and it is already late; dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.” He said to them, “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” But they said to him, “Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.” Then he said, “Bring them here to me,” and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds. They all ate and were satisfied, and they picked up the fragments left over—twelve wicker baskets full. Those who ate were about five thousand men, not counting women and children. Have you brought everything to Jesus? What are the fresh loaves of your soul that you would love to bring to him? What are the smelly fish that sometimes you hesitate to bring to Jesus out of selfishness or fear or doubt? What is it that Jesus is asking you to bring to him? What fish and loaves in your life does Jesus desire to multiply and overflow your wicker baskets with? Today, I surrendered. I gave up. I stopped fighting the fear that God wouldn’t fulfill me when I let go of every earthly pleasure I was trying to fill my God-shaped heart with. I finally let God be God. I finally came to him with an empty heart and gave him permission to fill it. I finally let God love me. Let me tell you, He knows the way to a woman’s heart: it’s bacon.
If you’re like me, when someone offers you food after a long day, you usually politely turn it down and hurry to the next fast food place on your way home. Today for some reason, whether it’s because I was feeling a little extra hungry or a little extra empty from my talk with God, I took a kind woman up on her offer for a home-cooked meal. It turned out to be the best bacon-wrapped chicken and sausage I have ever eaten in my life, with my absolute favorite side dish of peas. As I drove home with a full heart and a full belly, I was reminded of a few words I try to live by from St. Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”Usually my take-away message is to be Christ’s hands and feet, but today I let someone else be Christ’s hands and feet. I let a very kind woman fill my plate and my soul. My heart is overflowing with gratitude knowing that I will probably never be able to return a favor like this to her, and that’s exactly how she intended it to be. This was God’s work. This was God loving me through this kind woman. This was God satisfying me not only with food to nourish my body, but also grace to nourish my soul. This was God, my ultimate lover, pursuing my heart and trying to woo me with a delicious home cooked-meal. By the way, God, it worked. God bless those who are your hands and feet on earth. God bless the beautiful eyes that saw a college kid’s hunger. God bless the feet that led me through the doorway of a beautiful faith-filled home. God bless the hands that set my place at the table and prepared a beautiful meal. God bless the soul that did much more than she could ever realize. While I’m at it God, thanks for getting through to hard-headed people like me that it’s a good thing to allow others to do something that we can’t repay them for. Thank you for allowing me to walk away even more full of grace by letting someone else be Christ’s hands and feet to me. |
Megan LandryJust thought I'd share a few of my thoughts... Archives
December 2018
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