Pour yourself a cup of coffee and come sit with me a minute. I have a lot to tell you, and I would rather tell you here on the porch than anywhere else.

This week is a big one. In a couple of days I get on a plane to Grand Rapids, Michigan to speak at the national convention for the National Council of Catholic Women. Cannot wait to meet so many of you there. And on Wednesday, the order link for my brand new book goes live. My third book. My largest print run yet. A whole year of my life poured onto the page, and now it walks out the door into the world.

I am excited. I am nervous. I am basically every feeling at once, all of them fighting for the front seat.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about a season like this. The good does not arrive by itself. It shows up holding hands with the hard, and it asks you to carry both. I have not had to hold this much in each hand in a very long time.

Let me show you my two hands.

In one hand, so much good I can barely close my fingers around it. My friend Laura Ann flew in from Canada for work and stayed with us, and I got real time with her, the kind where you talk until the coffee goes cold. She took gorgeous pictures of Jerry and me that I cannot wait to see. I crossed a moment off my bucket list and went to see Josh Groban with my best friend. We saw Michael Bublé together for my fifty fifth birthday, and here we are a month out from fifty nine, singing our hearts out to Josh at full volume like a couple of teenagers. New friends showed up at my door with flowers and a card that said hip hip hooray, celebrating the book and the news that my breast biopsy came back clear. Not cancer. I get to type those two words, and I do not take them for granted.

And this book. Oh, this book. It is my love letter to the Holy Spirit, to the Advocate, the one who stayed, and to the gifts he keeps pouring out that we so often forget we are holding. I wrote it because I want to introduce you, or maybe reintroduce you, to the friend who has never once left my side. He has stood in the gap for me. He has cheered me on when I could not find one kind word for myself. Sometimes he is gentle and takes my hand and walks slow with me. Other times he rearranges all the furniture in the middle of the night and does not tell me until I stub my toe on it. What an adventure it is to walk with him.

Now the other hand.

Surgery is still sitting there waiting to be scheduled, because good news and hard news love to travel together. The car needed an unexpected repair on the worst possible payday. My stove is down to two working burners, so if you need me, I will be over here choreographing dinner like it is a competitive sport and praying hard for a decent Labor Day sale. House projects are stacking up. There is the question of whether I write a fourth book, which I am holding gently for now. There are people I want to take good care of, my Beneve customers and my Crunchi clients. Jerry is walking through his own hard things, and I want to be his soft place to land. There is extended family. There is the whole world, which you already know about, because you only have to open one app and it comes rushing in.

So there I am. Both hands full. Good in one. Hard in the other. And no way to set either one down.

Here is what I am holding on to. Gratitude. It’s what keeps me steady when both hands are full. Not pretending like the hard hand is empty. The kind that looks at everything I am carrying and still says thank you. Thank you for this. Thank you for that. Thank you even for the mess, because the mess means my life is full and my people are close.

When I lead with gratitude, I stay put. I stay right here in the moment the Lord actually gave me, instead of racing ahead to the one my fear keeps trying to write. And fear has been writing a lot of chapters lately. It whispers that the book will flop. That nobody will buy it. That a year of work will sit in a warehouse gathering dust. I know that voice by now. I am not handing it the pen.

Because here is the truth. The Holy Spirit and I did this. We did it together. And it is coming out into the world whether fear approves or not.

So this week I am choosing to celebrate. I am choosing to be present for the plane and the book signing and the flowers and the clear results and the friends and the songs we sang too loud. I am choosing to trust that the hand full of hard is being held by Someone far stronger than me.

Wednesday, I get to show you everything. The title. The cover. All of it. I cannot wait for you to hold this book in your hands. I cannot wait to tell you the stories tucked inside it. I have been sitting on this joy for a whole year, and I am about to let it loose.

Until then, pour one more cup, count one good thing, and hold it up to the light.

Then go love your people well.

Mary

Thirty-four. I have been sitting with that number all morning, coffee going cold in my hands, trying to make it fit. It will not fit. Courtney was 22 when she went home to the Lord, and somewhere in my mother heart she is still that age, still easy enough to gather up, still mine to hold. Time is a thief. I have known this for years. It does not make the arithmetic hurt any less.

Let me tell you about her, because you cannot understand a single lesson she taught me without first knowing her.

Courtney’s care was very complicated. Her days ran on schedules and vigilance most people will never have to imagine. And here is the paradox that shaped my whole life. Her care was the most complicated thing in our home. Loving her was the least complicated thing I have ever done.

Sit with that for a second. Everything else in my life came with a strategy. A to-do list. A way to fix it, improve it, force it into shape. Not Courtney. There was no fixing her situation. There was no five-point plan that would make her well. There was only presence. There was only riding it out with her and the Holy Spirit, one day at a time, one breath at a time.

I used to think that was the hard part. I was wrong. It was the gift.

When you cannot fix it, you finally learn to trust the One who holds it. Courtney taught me total dependence on God. Not the bumper-sticker kind. The kind you learn at 3am when you are exhausted and afraid and out of options and the only thing left to do is whisper, okay Lord, You have got her, You have got me. And He did. Every single time. That dependence took the worry right out of my hands. It still astonishes me that the most helpless season of my life was also one the most peaceful one.

She grounded me in a way nothing has since. People talk about finding their purpose like it is buried treasure. I found mine in a feeding schedule and the weight of a girl who could not speak but could stop a room with her eyes. And they did stop. Strangers would take her hand and just be. No agenda. No fixing. Just presence, the very thing she was teaching all of us without saying a word.

Now let me be honest with you, because you know I always am.

When Courtney went home to Heaven, I lost my rhythm. I went hunting for a new mission, something as worthy as loving and caring for her had been. I searched and I strived and I came up empty, over and over and over again. It took me an embarrassingly long time to accept the truth. There will never be a mission as noble as that one. Nothing will match it. So I stopped looking for a replacement and started following the Holy Spirit instead, wherever the great adventure leads. Turns out that is a far better way to live.

These past few weeks tested that lesson. I walked through a medical scare that could have gone very badly. By the grace of God, it will be okay. There are still hard and uncomfortable things ahead of me but I keep hearing my daughter in my bones, reminding me that I already know how to walk through hard things without flinching. She trained me for this. Twenty-two years of on-the-job training in courage and surrender.

Do I miss her? Friends, I miss everything about her, every single day.

I miss the snuggles and the belly laughs. I miss the afternoon she sneezed a full mouthful of spinach directly onto her Daddy, an act of such perfect comedic timing that I remain convinced it was a spiritual gift. I miss her big brother sprawled on the floor reading Fox in Socks for the hundredth time, tripping over the tongue twisters on purpose, doing anything to earn one more smile. I miss the weight of her in my arms. I miss singing her to sleep and feeling her finally go soft and heavy against me.

I miss her. And still, this morning, lightness. Because grief and gratitude are not enemies. They live in the same house. They share the same coffee. They sit on the same front porch and watch the sun come up together.

So happy birthday, Courtney Elizabeth. Thirty-four years old and more alive than any of us, seeing everything, missing nothing. Keep interceding for this family. Keep loving us from heaven. And keep those miracles coming, baby girl, because your Mama could use a few and you have never once let me down. You and Jesus got quite a thing going on.

I love you to the moon and back. One day, God willing, I will be right there beside you and we will never say goodbye again.

Until then, I will do the thing you taught me best, to go love our people well.

Mom

I have never been good at rest.

I move. All the time. If I sit down and stop, a small alarm goes off inside me that says you are wasting daylight, get up, there is work to do. I have carried that alarm my whole life, and I know exactly where I got it.

When Jerry and I first married, we would visit his parents. Those two never sat down. Not once during the day, unless it was to eat lunch. Everything they did had a purpose stitched into it. There was always a thing to fix, a thing to tend, a thing to finish. If they got sick, they worked through it. I never once saw them rest.

The only exception came after dinner. His dad would settle in with his National Geographic. His mom would pick up her crochet. The CBS Evening News would murmur in the background, and every so often one of them would look up and say, ah, yes. That was the reward. That was the whole ceremony of stopping.

My own mother was cut from the same cloth. She had eight children in ten years. Let that sit for a second. Eight babies. Ten years. She ran a whole household on one income while my father went out to work, and she did not have hobbies. She did not sew for fun or paint or take herself off to a book club. She cared for us. That was her life, start to finish.

I love them all for that work ethic. I really do. But I have gotten older, and I have learned something they never got the chance to learn. To be the very best version of myself, I have to rest.

Jerry and I started practicing about ten or twelve years ago. We began taking Sundays off. Off the internet. Off work. We go to Mass. We meet friends for coffee. We turn off the television. We set the phones down, face flat on the counter, and we actually rest. It felt strange at first, almost sinful, like I was skipping something important. Then it started to change me.

Here is what nobody told me. Rest is not the absence of productivity. Rest is creating capacity. It gives your nervous system room to settle. It lets your brain climb down off the ledge. It lets your body do the quiet repair work it can only do when you finally hold still. Rest is not the thing you earn after the work. Rest is the thing that makes the work possible.

I believed all of that. In theory. And then this week happened.

I had a biopsy yesterday. Which means I have been handed rest whether I wanted it or not. I am not allowed to lift anything over five pounds. For reference, a gallon of milk weighs a smidge more than that, so the milk is officially off limits, which feels personal. I cannot shower until tonight. No exercise for seven days. My body went through a small trauma, and all these rules exist for good reasons. To give my body its best shot to heal without infection or further harm.

So I am resting. And friends, I am struggling.

The book launches in two weeks. There are things I need to do for Beneve. Things I need to do for Crunchi. Emails sitting in my drafts about future talks and travel I have already committed to. My whole brain is a to-do list wearing a trench coat. And my doctor, bless her, looked me dead in the eye and said, for the next forty eight to seventy two hours you will do nothing. You will let your body rest.

Nothing. On purpose. For three days.

So here I sit, doing nothing, writing to you about how I am doing nothing, and feeling guilty about the nothing, even though I know in my bones the nothing is exactly what I need.

Tell me I am not the only one. How do you rest? How do you actually stop? Is it even possible? I know it is, because I have done it. I am just not happy about it.

I have spent the last twenty four hours doing the one thing my body will allow without pain, which is watching period dramas. And something struck me. When someone dies in those shows, the widow takes an entire year. A full year. She wears black. She skips the parties. She stops the social calendar cold. She mourns. She rests. Then, when the year is done, she steps back out into the world.

A whole year of permission to be still.

And here I am wrestling with three days. Three. Days. Suddenly my forced weekend on the couch does not look so bad. It looks almost gentle by comparison.

But it is the wrestling that fascinates me. When did rest become unacceptable? When did we decide that stillness is laziness, that stopping is quitting, that a body asking for quiet is a body that has failed at something? My in-laws never got the memo that rest was allowed. My mother never had the room to consider it. I inherited that. Maybe you did too.

So today I am giving myself the same grace those grieving widows were given. Not a year. Just a Wednesday. Just pajamas and a blanket and permission.

Turns out the pajamas were never the punishment. The pajamas are the privilege.

xoxo
Mary

Dear August,

We need to talk.

I will be honest, because pretending has never been my spiritual gift. You are not my favorite month. There. I said it. You are hot. You are muggy. You are the exact kind of humid that gives my hair opinions I did not ask for. Every year you roll in with your sunshine and your thunderstorms, refusing to commit to either one, and I greet you the way I greet a relative I love but would never choose for a road trip.

You are not all bad, though.

On August 6th, Jerry and I hit thirty-eight years of marriage. Thirty-eight. I want to be clear that this has nothing to do with our natural compatibility. This is a full-blown miracle, and we say so out loud to God every single day. We are still standing. We are still going strong. And here is the part that stuns me most. We are actually having fun. If you had told thirty-two-year-old me that this man would still make me laugh in my fifties, I would have believed the laughing part and questioned the still-married part. Grace did that. Not me. Not him. But God’s grace alone.

You also hold what would have been my in-laws’ seventy-second anniversary. Don and Eleanor Lenaburg made it to sixty-three years before Don went home to the Lord. Their marriage was solid as a rock, the kind of solid you can build an entire family on. Now, Eleanor and I did not always braid each other’s hair and swap secrets. We had our seasons. But I have deep respect for those two. They loved each other with intention. They stayed the course. They handed their children a legacy of devotion and respect that outlived them both. That is not nothing, August. That is everything.

So really, it is the day in between that gives me pause.

August 18th. Courtney’s day.

That is the day my baby girl was born. Depending on the year, I have met that date with wide-open joy or white-knuckled grief. Some Augusts, the 18th is a celebration. Other Augusts, it stands in front of me like a mountain. Unmoving. Unimpressed by my tears. Mocking me with how hard it is. Last year was rough. Very rough.

This year, as it comes toward me, it feels quieter. More neutral. Less like a mountain and more like a hill I have hiked before. She would be thirty-four this year. Probably married. Probably chasing a couple of little ones across a backyard and hollering their names. But that is not the story God wrote for her. I have spent a lot of years learning to sit inside the story He did write instead of the one I drafted in my own head.

Here is something you taught me, August, whether I wanted the lesson or not. I have come to see my whole life in befores and afters.

There was before my father died, twenty-five years ago, and there was after. After rearranged the whole shape of my family. My place among my siblings shifted. My relationship with my mother became something new. There was before I discovered Jerry’s addiction to pornography, and there was after. In that after, we chose, to fight for each other instead of against each other, and we let God into the wound to heal what we could not reach on our own. There was before our son married and left home, and the after that handed me a daughter-in-law to love and grandbabies to spoil rotten, along with a new family rhythm to learn from scratch.

And then there is the big one. The one that split my life clean down the middle. Before Courtney died, and after.

That after nearly finished me. It dropped me into an identity crisis so deep I did not recognize the woman in the mirror. I write about all of it in my new book, which, wouldn’t you know, releases on the 31st of this very month. So fine, August. Put that one in your win column too.

I do not have a master plan for how I will mark Courtney’s birthday this year, and I have decided I am okay with that. I know there will be Mass. I know there will be a trip to her grave with an armful of flowers in her colors. Hot pink. Orange. Yellow. My girl never did one single thing quietly. I know there will be chocolate in her honor, most likely a soft-serve cone dripping down my hand in your ridiculous heat. Those parts are settled.

But how I will feel? This year I would rather not rehearse it in advance. I would like to simply wake up and see what is there. Maybe a heavy heart. Maybe a soft one. Maybe a sad heart, or one so full of gratitude for her life that it spills right over. Maybe, knowing me, all of those at once before I have even finished my coffee. I am going to let the day be whatever it is and trust that God will meet me inside it.

So here is my one ask, August.

I know you will be hot. I know you will be muggy and bright and stormy and, somewhere in there, probably painful. I am not asking you to change your nature. I am asking you for one thing.

Be gentle with this old gal.

She is more fragile than she used to be. She is a little braver too, though please do not tell her I said so.

And to everyone reading over my shoulder from your own porch this morning, coffee in hand, whatever this month holds for you, joy or ache or both at once, go easy on your own tender heart.

With love and exasperation,

Mary

A Prayer to Begin

Read more

A Prayer to Begin

Read more

A Prayer to Begin

Read more

A Prayer to Begin

Read more

A Prayer to Begin

Read more

Nobody ever asks the right question in the dressing room.

We stand under that unforgiving fluorescent light, turning sideways, sucking in, tugging at the waistband, and we ask the question we always ask. Does this make me look fat? We ask our sister. We ask our best friend. We ask the poor woman two stalls down who only wanted to try on one cardigan in peace.

But we never ask the question that actually matters. Does this worry make my butt look big?

Because it does, friend. Worry is the most unflattering thing any of us owns. It adds ten pounds to every situation. It pools in all the wrong places. And unlike those jeans you keep in the back of the closet for the someday when they fit again, worry goes with absolutely nothing, and we put it on every single morning anyway.

I know, because for one long season of my life, worry was basically my entire wardrobe.

I did my best worrying at the kitchen sink. Hands in the dishwater, scrubbing a frying pan like it owed me rent, running every worst-case scenario in my head like a horror movie I could not turn off. Scans I was waiting on. Bills I could not pay down. A daughter whose body kept betraying her. A son carrying more than any young man should. I was a professional, friend. Olympic-level. If worry were a sport, I would have a shelf full of medals and a very expensive sports bra.

I also gained forty-seven pounds in six months living off grief snacks and Diet Coke, so we can save the literal version of the question for another day.

And the whole time I stood at that sink catastrophizing, right outside my window, the birds carried on. They did not sow. They did not reap. They did not doom-scroll WebMD at two in the morning with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon, diagnosing themselves with six diseases and a rare tropical parasite. They just were. Fed. Held. Fine. Smug little things.

For years I read the words of Jesus in Matthew 6 the way you read the care label on a sweater. Technically important, never actually followed. Do not be anxious about your life. Sure, Lord. Easy for You to say. You are not the one in the PICU parking lot bargaining with heaven and eating vending-machine pretzels for dinner.

But grief and fear have a way of stripping the varnish off Scripture until you finally hear what it actually says. And here it is, once you stop treating it like poetry and start treating it like a lifeline. Worry is not the price you pay for loving people well. Worry is the thing that keeps you from it.

St. Francis de Sales, a gentle man who understood anxious hearts far better than his calm reputation lets on, wrote that anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, sin only excepted. I used to think that was dramatic. Now I think he was being generous. Because I know what worry did to me. It did not add one single day to my daughter’s life. It did not fix one thing. It just showed up on all my good days and made every one of them look worse.

So here is what I want us to do together.

For the next five days, paid subscribers of this Substack, are going to take Jesus at His word and finally clean out the closet. We are going to try on trust instead of dread and see how it actually fits.

Now, I am not going to stand here and pretend I have become one of those serene women in the matching tracksuits who walk off their anxiety at the mall with a tiny weight in each hand. That has never been me and it never will be. I am the one out there muttering Hail Marys, dodging acorns, while my Apple Watch cheerfully lies to my face. Great job. Only seven thousand steps to go. I may have said something back to it that I would not repeat here.

We are going to do this trembling if we have to, because trembling faith is still faith.

Over the next five days, we will walk slowly through Matthew 6, one small piece at a time. Each day I will bring you a saint who knew something about handing worry back to God. Francis de Sales, who called anxiety exactly what it is. Teresa of Ávila, who kept a note in her prayer book that said let nothing disturb you. Thérèse, the Little Flower, who found a whole spirituality in being small. Padre Pio, who boiled the entire thing down to three words. And Mother Teresa, who fed the poorest of the poor on nothing but the promise that the Father knows what we need. Not one of them, I would like to point out, ever owned a single pair of shapewear. And they managed to trust God anyway.

Each day there will be a short video, a meditation to sit with, journaling prompts for deeper work and one prayer we pray together to begin. Small steps. One day at a time.

I am not going to promise you that five days makes the worry disappear. That is not how this works, and I refuse to sell you a lie dressed up in a Bible verse and slimming vertical stripes. What I will promise you is this. God wastes nothing. Not the scans. Not the sleepless nights. Not the forty-seven pounds. Not the frying pan you are scrubbing right now. He is in the middle of your mess, and He is not going anywhere.

The birds knew that all along. I am still learning it. Slowly. In stretchy pants.

Come learn it with me. Pull up a chair. Become a paid subscriber friend. There is a seat at this table for you, and nobody here is checking the size of your worry or anything else.

This week, let’s try loving them without dragging around a suitcase of what-ifs that was never ours to carry.

I’ll see you on the road.

Mary

I am a woman who likes to drive. Ask Jerry. Ask anyone brave enough to ride shotgun with me on the Beltway. I like my hands at ten and two, my coffee in the cup holder, and a printed itinerary in the glove box in case the GPS gets ideas. So you can imagine how well it went the first time I understood that Jesus was not asking to help me steer my life. He was asking for the keys.

It happened in an adoration chapel, which is where most of my best arguments with God have taken place. This was during the years when our daughter Courtney’s health ran our whole household, when I was so tired that I once put the coffee canister in the refrigerator and stood there wondering who broke into my house and rearranged the kitchen. I would drag myself to that chapel with a list of grievances organized by category, and I would present my case to the Blessed Sacrament like a lawyer who had not slept since the Clinton administration.

Then Jeff Cavins shared a piece of advice during a talk I heard that came from a wise friend of his who happened to be a priest. I heard it again last week on the Hallow App and it took me back in time. This advice has flipped my prayer life upside down.

Divide your Holy Hour into three parts, he said. Twenty minutes to say thank you. Twenty minutes to say teach me. Twenty minutes to say take over.

My first reaction was pure Mary. Thank you? Sir, I have problems. Big ones. Starting with gratitude felt like showing up to the emergency room and being asked to compliment the wallpaper. But I tried it, mostly out of stubbornness, and something shifted almost immediately. When you spend twenty minutes rehearsing what God has already done, your memory starts outshouting your fear. I thanked Him for Jerry, who has loved me through every version of myself. I thanked Him for Courtney’s laugh, which could reorganize your entire soul. I thanked Him for my son’s strength and good health, my friends, my porch, the way morning light lands on a coffee cup. And by minute nineteen, my mountain of problems had not moved an inch, but it looked smaller, because my God looked bigger. Gratitude does not change your circumstances. It changes your eyesight.

The second twenty minutes undid me in a different way. Teach me is a dangerous prayer for a woman who thinks she already knows it all. I would open the Gospels and ask the Lord to show me what I was missing, and He was never short on material. He showed me the places where I was carrying things He never assigned to me. He showed me that half my exhaustion was not from my cross but from my grip. And then, some days, He taught me nothing at all in words. I just sat there and let Him look at me. Saint John Vianney used to tell of an old farmer who sat in church for hours, and when asked what he did there, the man said, I look at Him, and He looks at me. Friend, I used to roll my eyes at that story. Now it is the whole reason I keep going back. Some of the deepest prayer of my life has been wordless, just a tired woman letting herself be loved by the One who made her.

The last twenty minutes are the hardest, and I say that as someone who has buried a child and still finds surrender difficult. Take over. Take over my marriage. Take over my grief. Take over my calendar, my finances, my adult children, my fears about the future, and the three things I am pretending are fine. This is the prayer of Our Lady, let it be done to me according to your word. It is the prayer of Gethsemane, not my will but Yours. And it is the prayer that finally answers the invitation Jesus makes in Matthew 11. “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Read that again and notice what He promises first. Not solutions. Himself. Before He touches a single circumstance, He offers His presence, because His presence is the point. And that yoke He mentions is not one more obligation for your groaning to-do list. A yoke bound two oxen together so they could share the load. When Jesus says take my yoke, He is climbing in beside you. He takes the heavier share. He sets the pace. Your job is to stop trying to pull the plow alone like some kind of one woman farming operation.

Here is my honest testimony after years of practicing thank you, teach me, take over. I have almost never walked out of that chapel with my problems solved. Courtney’s diagnosis never changed. The hard seasons stayed hard. But I walked in carrying the weight of the world and walked out carrying the peace of Christ, and I am telling you, those are two different loads entirely. Saint Augustine wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” and he was not being poetic. He was being precise. You can chase rest through vacations, achievements, retail therapy, and one more episode before bed, and wake up just as weary, because your soul was not made for comfort. It was made for communion.

So this is me, your straight shooting friend, telling you to hand over the keys. Find a chapel, a porch, a parked car outside the grocery store. Give Him twenty minutes of thank you until your blessings outnumber your complaints. Give Him twenty minutes of teach me and actually hush long enough to listen. Then pray the bravest words you know. Take over. He is a far better shepherd than we are sheep, and He has been waiting at the door of your restless heart with rest in His hands.

Lord Jesus, I am done pretending I can carry this life alone, so today I hand You the keys to all of it, my worries and my plans, my people and my fears, my past and whatever comes next. Thank You for Your faithfulness in every season, even the ones that broke my heart. Teach me to sit still long enough to be loved, and take over every room of my life until Your peace fills the whole house. My soul was made for You, and I will stop looking for rest anywhere else. Amen.

Now go love your people well,

Mary

Jerry and Listened to Bishop Barron’s Sunday sermon on the Hallow App this morning and it slammed into our hearts and got the conversation going after Mass.

Most of us learned the Serenity Prayer somewhere along the way. Maybe from a grandmother’s needlepoint pillow. Maybe from a meeting in a church basement. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. We can say it in our sleep. It’s short and tidy and fits nicely on a coffee mug.

But here’s what I didn’t know for years. There’s a whole second half. And the second half is where the surgery happens.

Living one day at a time. Enjoying one moment at a time. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will.

Read that middle line again. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. Not around peace. Not instead of peace. As the pathway to it.

The first half of the prayer asks God to help us cope. The second half asks us to surrender. And if you’re anything like me, surrender is not your favorite word. I like a plan. I like a list. I like to know how the story ends before I agree to live it.

Which brings me to Paul.

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul writes about a thorn in his flesh. We don’t know exactly what it was, and honestly I think that’s on purpose, because it lets every one of us fill in our own. The chronic pain. The marriage that’s limping. The child you’re worried sick over. The grief that moved in and never left.

Paul begged God three times to take it away. Three times. This is Paul we’re talking about.

Shipwrecked, imprisoned, church-planting Paul. If anyone had earned a yes, surely it was him.

God said no.

Now here’s where I have to get honest with you. I read that passage and I think, three times? Paul, honey, those are rookie numbers.

I have asked God to remove my thorn more than three times. More than thirty. If we’re counting the middle-of-the-night prayers and the ones whispered in the car and the ones that were less prayer and more ugly cry, we’re well past three hundred. I have negotiated. I have bargained. I have flat out demanded. And the thorn is still here.

For a long season, I let that mean something about me. I decided my faith must be too small. My prayers too weak. I treated my unanswered prayer like a report card with a failing grade, and my ongoing struggle like the evidence.

But listen to what God actually said to Paul. My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.

He didn’t say, ask me a fourth time and we’ll talk. He didn’t say, come back when your faith is bigger. He said, my power is made perfect right here. In this. In the weakness you keep begging me to remove.

Which means the struggle is not the sign that I’m doing this wrong. The struggle is the whole point.

This is where the Serenity Prayer and the thorn shake hands. The wisdom to know the difference isn’t just about sorting my to-do list into “can change” and “cannot change” columns. It’s about learning that some thorns stay, not because God isn’t listening, but because the thorn is the very place where His grace gets to do its finest work. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace is just another way of saying what Paul said. When I am weak, then I am strong. That’s not a verse I memorized. That’s a verse I’ve lived.

And I still struggle. Present tense. This is not one of those tidy essays about a hard thing safely tucked in the past, wrapped up with a bow. Some days I barely notice the thorn. Other days it’s all I can feel. I still ask God to take it, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about that, because Paul asked too. Persistence in prayer isn’t a lack of faith. Sometimes it’s the truest faith we’ve got, showing up to the same conversation again and again because we trust the One on the other side of it.

So if you’re still asking, still struggling, still carrying something you’ve begged Him to take, hear me. You are not failing. You are in very good company. The wrestling is where He meets us.

Here’s my invitation this week. Pray the whole Serenity Prayer, both halves, slowly. Then keep bringing your thorn to God, as many times as it takes, and add one more question. Not just “will You remove this?” but “what are You building in me while it stays?” Sit still long enough to listen. Then hit reply and tell me what you hear, because I read every single one and your stories preach to me more than you know.

You are not disqualified by your weakness, friend. You are positioned by it.

This week the Holy Spirit has been showing off, directing me to seek the light and praise Him for every smudge win that window. On Tuesday He whispered. On Thursday He sounded like Jerry.

I didn’t learn to look for the light because my life was easy. Opposite, actually.

Let me set the scene. It’s Thursday at 6:22 am. My coffee has gone cold because I set it down somewhere between the laundry room and the pantry, which means it is now hiding in whatever dimension cold coffee goes to. The kitchen sink is full. Not artfully full. Not “one bowl and a spoon” full. Full like someone hosted a dinner party in here and forgot to tell me I was the staff.

And I am standing at that sink having a full argument. With myself. Out loud.

“This is ridiculous. Nobody else in this house knows where the dishwasher is.”

“You could just be grateful you have people to feed.”

“Don’t you dare come at me with gratitude right now. I haven’t even found my coffee.”

Jerry walks in during round three. almost 38 years of marriage means he can read a room in under two seconds. He looks at me. He looks at the sink. He picks up a dish towel like a man reporting for duty.

“Who’s winning?” he asks.

“Neither of us,” I say. “We’ve moved to name calling.”

He nods like this is completely reasonable, because after four decades with me, it is. Then he says the thing he always says. “Where’s the light this morning, Mary?”

And I want to tell you, some mornings I could throw a sponge at that man. Because he’s not being cute. He’s holding me to something. He’s holding me to us.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re new around here, if you’re standing in the doorway of my little corner of the internet deciding whether I’m the real deal or just another woman posting sunrise quotes over her third latte.

That question Jerry asked me? We earned it. Every syllable.

We didn’t pick it up from a throw pillow. We forged it in years I would not wish on anyone. We have walked through seasons where the light wasn’t just hard to find, it felt like someone had turned it off entirely and taken the switch with them. We have known grief with a first name. We have sat in rooms where hope had to be chosen hourly, sometimes minute by minute, because choosing it once a day wasn’t going to cut it.

I’m not going to unpack all of that in one essay. Stick around and you’ll hear the stories. But I need you to understand something, and this is the part where I get a little fierce, so buckle up.

When I say “God is good all the time,” I am not being cute either.

I am not saying it because my life turned out tidy. It didn’t. I am not saying it because I’ve forgotten what the dark feels like. I remember exactly what it feels like. I am saying it because I stood in the dark long enough to learn that God doesn’t leave the room when the lights go out. He sits down next to you in it. I know because I checked. Repeatedly. With attitude.

Gratitude isn’t my personality. It’s my practice.

Big difference. Personality is what you’re handed. Practice is what you build. Nobody says a pianist has “piano fingers” as a personality trait. She sat at the bench for thirty years. Same with me and the light. Thirty-something years of standing at kitchen sinks, hospital bedsides, gravesides, and grocery store checkout lines, asking the same stubborn question. Where is the light in this? Some days the answer is huge. Most days the answer is small. Cold coffee, found. A husband with a dish towel. A dog snoring under the table like she pays rent.

This Thursday morning, I looked out the window over my disaster of a sink and the sun was coming through the maple tree in stripes, laying gold bars across my counter like heaven was showing off. And I laughed. Out loud. Argument over.

“There it is,” Jerry said, drying a pan.

“There it is,” I said back.

That’s it. That’s the whole miracle. Not a lightning bolt. A window, a maple tree, and a man who has asked me the same question through our best years and our worst ones, because he watched that question hold me together when nothing else could.

So no, I will not waste the light. Not after what it cost me to learn how to find it. That kitchen sink moment wasn’t day one of choosing gratitude. It was year thirty-something. It was muscle memory. It was practice.

If you’re in a season where the light feels gone, I’m not going to hand you a sunrise quote. I’m going to hand you a practice, one small stubborn question at a time.

Stick around. I’ll show you how I do it.

I took a field trip today. Destination: the mall.

I can hear you laughing from here. The mall, Mary? Not a mountain trail or a museum or a charming little farm stand with hand-lettered signs?

Nope. The mall. And I would do it again tomorrow.

Let me back up. In my twenties, I was a personal shopper. A stylist. I spent my working days with my hands in fabric, pulling pieces for clients, reading color and pattern the way other people read novels. I could look at a woman for thirty seconds and know exactly which neckline would make her stand taller. I loved every minute of it.

That girl never went anywhere. She just got busy. Marriage, babies, caregiving, casseroles, decades of loving my people well through the long middle of life. The stylist got tucked into a drawer like a scarf out of season. Still beautiful. Just folded up and forgotten.

Then came this particular Tuesday. Ninety-something degrees, humidity thick enough to butter, and me needing my steps. Friend, I know myself. If I walk this neighborhood in July, I come home looking like a drenched rat, and no amount of hot rollers makes that cute.

So I signed my own permission slip and drove to the mall.

I mapped out my route to include a stop at my favorite gelato place, because a field trip without a treat is just an errand. Then I walked. Every wing, every level, no list, no agenda, nothing to buy and nobody to shop for.

And somewhere between the first storefront and the pretzel stand, the stylist woke up.

I ran my hand down a silk sleeve and felt that old familiar spark. I stopped in front of a floral print and studied it like it was hanging in a gallery. I found a color combination I never would have dreamed up, some shade of coral sitting next to an olive green, and I actually said out loud, well done, whoever you are. A teenager gave me a strange look. Worth it.

Nobody was paying me to be there. No client waited in a fitting room. I was simply a woman letting beauty do what beauty does, which is remind you that you are alive and that God is endlessly, extravagantly creative.

Because that is what was really happening in that mall, and I do not say it lightly. Every bolt of fabric started as somebody’s idea. Every pattern began in an imagination. And every imagination is a borrowed flame from the One who invented color in the first place. He did not have to make sunsets show off like they do. He did not have to give us ten thousand shades of green. He is not a God of beige. When I stand in front of something beautiful, even something as ordinary as a well-made summer dress, I am standing in an echo of Eden.

Scripture tells us, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is lovely, whatever is beautiful, think about these things. We quote that verse about guarding our thoughts, and rightly so. But I think it is also an invitation to go looking. Loveliness rarely chases down a woman who is running the same six errands on repeat. Sometimes you have to put on real shoes and go find it.

Here is what I did not expect. I came home full. Not with shopping bags. With ideas.

The colors followed me into my kitchen. All those far away prints and flavors got me thinking, and by five o’clock I was building a summer dinner for Jerry and me inspired by everything I had seen. Bright, fresh, a little exotic, made by my own hands at my own stove. He walked in, took one look at the table, and asked what the occasion was.

The occasion, my love, is that your wife took a field trip.

That is the part I really want you to hear, friend. The inspiration did not stay at the mall. It came home with me and turned into love in a practical form. A meal. A pretty table. A wife with light back in her eyes. Filling your creative well is never selfish. It is provisioning. You cannot pour beauty into your people from an empty pitcher.

So this is your assignment for the week, and yes, there will be a quiz in the comments. Take yourself somewhere beautiful on purpose. Maybe it is a garden. Maybe it is a bookstore. Maybe, like me, it is the mall on a humid Tuesday with a fancy gelato in your hand and air conditioning as far as the eye can see. Get your steps. Touch all the things. Study the colors like the daughter of an Artist, because that is exactly what you are.

Then come home and let it spill out somewhere. Into your kitchen, your needlepoint, your garden, your table.

The stylist in me is telling the writer in me to wrap this up, so here it is. You were made by a creative God, in His image, and that means the creative girl inside you has no expiration date. She is just waiting for you to sign the permission slip.

Where will you go? Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Mary

This morning I will stand beside a baptismal font and make promises to a baby girl named Julia. She is my grand niece, my nephew’s first child, and she will be wearing a gown I stitched with my own hands. When the water is poured and the ancient words are spoken, I will become her godmother. It is the thirteenth time I have been given this gift, and it still takes my breath away.

I want to talk about what that moment really means, because I think we have let it grow soft around the edges. Being chosen as a godparent is a far more serious decision than most people realize. You are not being asked to buy nice birthday presents. You are not a ceremonial accessory in a christening photo. You are agreeing to walk alongside a family as they raise their child in the faith. You are promising the parents your support. You are promising that child your presence, your prayers, and your witness for the rest of their life. That is not a small yes. That is a lifetime yes.

To understand the weight of the promise, you have to understand the weight of the sacrament. As Roman Catholics, we believe baptism is the gateway sacrament, the door through which we receive the grace of all the others. We see its roots in Acts 2, when Peter tells the crowd to repent and be baptized. It is one of the three sacraments of initiation. Baptism incorporates us into Christ. Confirmation strengthens us as soldiers of Christ. The Eucharist heals the wounds of sin and draws us into one heart with the whole Church. This is how we love. This is how we live our liturgy.

Baptism was prefigured in the mikveh, the Jewish pool of purification and healing. Seven steps in, seven steps out. The word baptism itself means to submerge. Saint Paul teaches that we are baptized into Christ’s death so we can rise with Him into new life, and the Catechism unfolds what happens in those waters.

And what happens is staggering. Original sin is washed away. The child becomes a son or daughter of God by adoption. Sanctifying grace floods the soul. Supernatural life begins. That baby becomes a member of the mystical body of Christ, and their little body becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. They are incorporated into the Church with all the rights and responsibilities that come with it. And they receive an indelible mark. Nothing can remove it. Not sin, not doubt, not decades of wandering. The Lord marks that soul as His own forever.

So when you stand there holding a beautiful baby in a white gown, understand what is actually happening. This is not just a day for photos and a big party afterward. Heaven and earth meet at that font. A new soul is washed clean. In that moment, that child is a little saint, pure and radiant. And you look down at that sweet face and you have no idea what life will bring.

You do not know what they will suffer. You do not know what challenges will test them. And you are saying, out loud, before God and His Church, that you will help this child follow the Father’s will. You will be there when they have questions. You will be there when they struggle. You will walk beside their parents and hold them up too.

Even the child’s name carries mission. The Church encourages us to name children after saints, and in the rite of baptism we invoke those saints in the litany, asking them to pray for this child and to pass along the virtues they excelled in. A name becomes an icon. Names and mission are linked. Every time you speak your godchild’s name in prayer, you are calling on their heavenly patron to fight for them.

Godparents assume a real share in a child’s religious upbringing. We become part of their story for eternity. I do not say that lightly. Thirteen times I have made these promises, and every one of those souls is woven into my daily prayer life. I pray for them by name every single day. I check in. I show up. Some of my godchildren are grown now, married, starting families of their own.

Walking a lifetime with someone, watching them grow from a squirming baby into a person chasing after God, is one of the most beautiful privileges I have ever known.

If you have been asked to be a godparent, take it seriously. Pray about it. Say yes with your whole heart or do not say yes at all. And if you already are one, may I gently ask, when did you last pray for your godchild? When did you last reach out? It is never too late to pick that promise back up. That child needs you, whether they are four or forty.

This morning, Julia will wear her gown, and her name will be spoken over the water, and heaven will lean close. I will make my promises with tears in my eyes and joy in my heart. May God bless her and bless her mama and daddy. May we always walk with her toward Christ and never away.

Lord, thank You for the gift of godchildren. Give every godparent the faithfulness to keep their promises, the wisdom to guide well, and the love to never let go. Amen.

Go love your people well today friend,

Mary

Picture it. The Son of God is assembling the group that will carry His message to every corner of the earth, for all of recorded time. The stakes could not be higher. And who does He draft?

Fishermen. A tax collector, which in first-century Palestine was roughly as popular as a telemarketer calling during dinner. A zealot, which is a polite word for a man with strong political opinions and a short fuse. Not one rabbi. Not one scholar. Not one person you would trust to plan the parish picnic, let alone the salvation of the world.

And Matthew writes down every one of their names like it is the most natural thing in the world.

I read that Gospel passage this week on my front porch, coffee in hand, dogs at my feet, and I laughed out loud. Because if Jesus can build His Church on that roster, then He can absolutely do something with me. And with you.

Here is what I know about being unqualified. I have made a second career out of it. When I stood in front of a room to speak for the first time, my hands shook so hard I nearly baptized the front row with my water bottle. When I signed my first book contract, I waited a full week for someone to call and say there had been a clerical error. When my daughter needed round-the-clock care, nobody handed me a manual. I learned by doing, by failing, by getting up the next morning and trying again.

That is not a résumé. That is a testimony. And God builds His kingdom out of testimonies, not résumés.

St. Francis de Sales wrote that the soul watered with charity brings forth good works in due season, the way a tree planted by the water bears fruit when the time is right. I love that image because it takes all the pressure off performing. A tree does not strain to produce apples. It stays planted, it stays watered, and the fruit comes. Your job is not to manufacture holiness by sheer willpower. Your job is to stay close to the water.

But here is the part of Matthew 10 we skip past, and I refuse to let you skip it today. Jesus did not just call the Twelve. He sent them. Out the door. Into villages full of sick people and skeptics and Roman soldiers. He gave them authority and then He gave them a shove.

Friend, you have been given the same shove.

I know what you are thinking, because I have thought it too. Who am I to talk about faith when my own prayer life runs hot and cold like the shower in a cheap motel? Who am I to encourage anyone when I lost my temper yesterday over something that, in hindsight, did not warrant a full Shakespearean monologue?

You are exactly who He is looking for, that is who.

Go read the roster again. Peter, who folded under questioning from a servant girl. Thomas, who demanded proof like a skeptical insurance adjuster. Matthew, who spent years taking money from his own people. The kingdom of heaven was proclaimed by recovering messes, and it spread like wildfire precisely because everyone could see that the power was not coming from the messengers.

That is the mercy of God in action. He does not wait for you to be ready. He makes you ready by sending you.

And His mercy is not a trickle. The saints describe it as an ocean, vast beyond measuring, waiting to pour out on anyone who cracks the door open with a single honest prayer. I have stood in that ocean. On the days when grief flattened me, when I could not string together a Rosary if you paid me, when my whole prayer was one word, help. That word was enough. It has always been enough. Mercy came rushing in like the tide, not because I earned it but because that is simply who He is.

So what does the mission look like for you today?

Probably not preaching in village squares. Probably something smaller and, I would argue, harder. Forgiving the family member who never apologized. Sitting with a friend in her grief without trying to fix it. Making dinner one more time for people who will inhale it in nine minutes and leave the table. Praying for someone who drives you up the wall.

Little by little. That is the scandal of the kingdom. It advances through ordinary faithfulness that nobody applauds. Two thousand years of casseroles and rosaries and midnight prayers built the Church you and I get to stand in. Your little matters. Your name is on the roster. The King picked you on purpose, knowing everything, and He has never once regretted it.

Stop waiting to feel qualified. The feeling is not coming. The call already came.

Answer it.

Prayer: Merciful Father, You called twelve ordinary men by name and built Your Church on their imperfect yes, and today You are calling me. I will not wait until I feel ready, because You have promised to supply everything I lack. Pour out Your ocean of mercy on my weary places, water the roots of my soul with Your charity, and send me out to the people You have given me to love. Let my small faithfulness today build Your kingdom in ways I cannot see, and when I falter, call my name again, because I will always come back to You. Amen.

And we made him a saint. I find this deeply comforting.

St. Thomas gets a bad rap. Somewhere along the way we slapped “Doubting” in front of his name like a permanent nametag, and the poor man has spent two thousand years as the cautionary tale of Christianity. One rough week. That’s all it took. Meanwhile, the rest of us have rough decades and still expect a nice write-up.

But read John 20 again, slowly, with your coffee. Thomas was not a cynic sitting in the back row rolling his eyes. He was a man whose whole world collapsed on a Friday afternoon. He watched Love Himself get executed. His heart was not hard. His heart was shattered, and shattered hearts do not hand themselves over again without proof.

Thomas wanted receipts. I understand that man in my bones.

After our Courtney went home to Jesus, I had questions. Big ones. The kind you don’t raise your hand and ask at Bible study. I sat on my front porch with coffee gone cold and prayers gone quiet, and some mornings the most faith I could produce was the fact that I sat down at all. If you have ever loved someone into eternity, you know exactly the room Thomas was standing in.

Everyone around you says He is risen, He is faithful, He works all things for good. And you believe them, sort of, mostly, except for the part of you that whispers, prove it.

Here is what undoes me about this Gospel, every single year.

Jesus did not lecture him. He did not send Peter over with a strongly worded message. He did not wait for Thomas to clean up his theology. He came back. He walked through the same locked door, into the same room, and went straight to the one man who was struggling the most.

And His opening move was not an argument. It was an invitation.

“Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side.”

He led with His wounds. Sit with that.

The risen Lord of the universe, who could have erased every scar, kept them. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that this was no accident, that God allowed Thomas’s doubt so that in touching those wounds, Thomas would heal the wounds of unbelief in all of us. Even our doubt gets recycled into grace. God wastes nothing, friend. Not even our skepticism.

Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not.” Faith has never been about shutting your brain off. Catholicism has a long, glorious history of hard questions. The other great St. Thomas, Aquinas, spent his entire life asking them. Questions are not the enemy of faith. Isolation is.

Because notice the detail we skip past. Thomas missed the first appearance because he was not in the room. That’s it. That’s the whole setup. He was absent, and absence made belief harder. The same thing happens to us. Skip prayer for a week. Drift from Mass. Avoid confession. Stop calling the friend who reminds you who God is. Doubt does not need to attack you. It just needs you alone.

I do cross-stitch , as you know if you have been around here longer than five minutes. Flip a canvas over and the back is chaos. Knots, crossed threads, colors ending mid-air for no visible reason. It looks like a mistake factory. But the front is a picture, and every ugly knot on the back is holding something beautiful in place on the other side.

That is what faith in this life looks like. We are staring at the back of the canvas. God sees the front. Blessed are those who have not seen the finished picture and have believed anyway.

And when Thomas finally touched those wounds, all his demands dissolved into five words.

The boldest prayer in all of Scripture.

“My Lord and my God!”

The skeptic out-believed the room. The man who wanted proof gave us the clearest confession of Christ’s divinity in the Gospels. And then he got up and carried that faith all the way to India, where he gave his life for it. His doubt was not the end of his story. It was the doorway.

So here is my word for you today, friend, and I am saying it with my whole chest.

Your questions are not disqualifying you. Your doubt is not a defect. It might be the exact place Jesus is walking toward right now, wounds out, arms open, saying peace be with you before you even apologize. He is not waiting for you to be certain. He is waiting for you to be honest.

So come back to the room. Return to prayer, even clumsy prayer. Get to Mass. Say the doubt out loud to God so He can get His hands on it. Then borrow Thomas’s five words and pray them until they are yours. Pray them when you believe. Pray them harder when you don’t. Watch what the Lord does with a woman who refuses to fake it and refuses to quit.

He came back for Thomas. He will come back for you. That is not wishful thinking. That is His track record.

My Lord and my God!

Prayer: Lord Jesus, You did not shame Thomas for his doubt, You crossed through a locked door to meet him in it, and I am asking You to do the same for me. Meet me in my questions, my grief, and my thin places, and let me touch Your mercy until belief rises up in me again. Give me the courage to stay in the room, the honesty to bring You everything, and the faith to pray with Thomas, “My Lord and my God,” every day for the rest of my life. Amen.

The most under-celebrated miracle in the whole Gospel might be a grown man folding up his own bed.

I am serious. We talk about the healing of the paralytic like the headline is the legs. And sure, the legs are a big deal. But sit with the scene for a minute. A man who cannot walk is lying on a mat. Four friends love him enough to lug him across town, and when they hit a wall of people jammed in the doorway, they do not shrug and go home. They climb up on the roof and start peeling it back like the lid on a jar. I picture the homeowner watching plaster fall into his living room and thinking, well, this is not how I planned my afternoon.

Down comes the man, right in front of Jesus. The whole room leans in at rapt attention. And Jesus, who could have led with anything, looks at this man and says, Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.

If I am honest, my first reaction is the same as everybody else’s probably was. Lord. With respect. He came about the legs.

But Jesus was reading a deeper chart. He knew the heaviest thing holding that man to the ground was not his spine. It was the weight he had been carrying on the inside for years. The regret. The shame. The running tally of everywhere he had fallen short. And mercy had to come first, because you cannot walk forward while you are pinned to your past.

I know that mat personally. I have my own. It is not made of straw. It is woven out of old conversations I keep re-litigating while I stir a pot on the stove, and moments I wish I had handled better, and a couple of failures I was still apologizing for long after everyone else had moved on. I have laid on that mat during morning prayer on the porch with a good cup of coffee going cold beside me, replaying a scene from years ago while the dogs waited patiently for me to notice the actual sunrise happening right in front of my face.

You have a mat too. You know exactly what it is.

Here is what I love about our God. He is not confused about your history. He is just finished with letting it run your life. When Jesus says your sins are forgiven, He is not being polite about your record. He is prying you up off the floor.

Forgiveness in the Gospel is never a soft pat on the head. It is a rescue. He forgives you because He wants you upright and moving and useful, not curled up and flinching at your own reflection.

And then He says the sentence that turns the whole day around. Rise, pick up your mat, and go home.

Do not skip past that. He tells the man to carry the very thing he was lying on. Your past is not erased like it never happened. It is redeemed. You pick it up and walk it out the door as evidence of what mercy can do, not as a weight that flattens you into the ground. The scars come with you. They just stop being your cage.

There is a story from Saint Teresa of Calcutta that I keep close. A young woman came all the way from Paris, brilliant, on the edge of finishing her doctorate, and asked to spend two weeks serving the dying in Calcutta before her final exams. In that hidden, humble, unglamorous work she found Jesus. She went to confession for the first time in fifteen years, and Mother Teresa said her face was practically glowing when she came out. Fifteen years of lying on a mat, and grace found her over a bucket and a broom in the poorest corner of the world.

That is the pattern. God does not usually meet us in the throne room. He met that paralyzed man in a cramped little house in a small fishing town on a completely ordinary day. He met that young woman with a mop in her hand. He meets me on a creaky front porch and He is going to meet you in your kitchen, your car line, your inbox, your very forgettable Tuesday. So keep your eyes up. The same Lord who told that man to rise is standing in your ordinary corner right now.

You were forgiven so you could move. So get up. Fold the mat. Tuck it under your arm as proof, and walk out into your day like a woman who has been set free, because you have.

Father, I have spent long enough lying on the mat of what is behind me, rehearsing failures You have already forgiven and forgotten. Say to me what You said to that man on the floor. Call me child. Forgive me. Put the strength back in my legs. Then send me out my own front door into this plain and ordinary day, expecting to find You in every corner of it, ready to rise and go love the people You have given me.

I could stage a prayer life that would stop your thumb mid-scroll. Golden honey light through the curtains. A frothy mug catching the glow. My Bible flipped open to something poetic, ribbon draped like it had been styled by a professional.

That woman is fictional.

The genuine article rolls out of bed at six with hair that suggests I wrestled a leaf blower and lost. No coffee in me yet. No full thoughts either. I plop down in the dark and start talking to God in fragments, and half of those fragments dissolve into me squinting at the wall trying to remember if the dogs got let out. Nobody is filming. Nobody will ever caption it. It is the two of us, before the day starts handing me its list.

It took me years to believe this next part. That unstyled room, the one with the wild hair and the coffee I forgot to drink, is the room where everything important actually gets built.

Jesus was direct about it. In Matthew chapter six he tells the crowd to pray, to give, to fast out of sight. No trumpet. No gold star. Go into your room, he says, close the door, and pray to the Father who watches what happens where nobody else is looking. I’m paraphrasing, so read it yourself, but the spine of it holds: God is not studying the stage. He is studying the closet.

That rearranged something in me.

Because I have spent serious mileage trying to be seen. We all have. We figure out young that the applause goes to whoever performs the cleanest, posts the smartest, nails the angle. So we funnel our best energy into the visible life and pray quietly that no one clocks the parts coming apart behind the door.

Jesus aims us the opposite way.

He is saying the sturdiest part of your faith is the part that earns you exactly zero applause. The prayer you muttered in the parking lot before walking into the appointment you’d been dreading for a week. The generosity nobody got a notification about. The check with no name attached. The forgiveness you handed over without a single witness, the kind that cost you a piece of yourself. He clocked every bit of it. Not one piece slipped past.

I think hardest about the brutal seasons. The mornings where getting dressed and upright was basically a triathlon, and not one soul knew how near I was to skipping the whole thing. After we lost Courtney, staying vertical some days took everything I had. No medal ceremony for those mornings. No clip worth posting. But hear me, that was not me being weak. That was endurance with a spine. That was the quiet courage that builds something in a woman the visible stuff never can touch.

The Lord stays close to the brokenhearted and rescues the crushed in spirit, the psalm promises. Psalm thirty four, eighteen, scribble it on your wrist if you need it today. He’s close. Not impressed by your numbers. Close to you, right in the wreckage.

This is the truth I keep circling back to. God is not running a contest, and you are not losing one. The tally under your post says nothing about how he sees you. He is not red-penning your grammar at six in the morning. He is not tapping his foot waiting for you to tidy up before you come in. He stays near the woman standing in the unfinished middle who keeps turning toward him anyway, again and again, with the room completely empty.

You were knit together for steady faith like that. The kind that flexes instead of snapping. The kind that keeps hoping when the odds look thin. That is not a small thing. That is your strength, threaded into you by the Spirit of God, the same quiet stamina women have hauled through every hard age since Eve. You descend from a long, unbroken line of them. I do too.

So here is my assignment for today, and I want you in on it. One good deed only heaven will witness. Just one. Choose something. A prayer for the person who gets under your skin. A note you mail and never bring up. A dose of mercy for yourself, because Lord knows you’re due. Do it in the unfilmed room. Keep it sealed between you and him. Let that be plenty, because it is. It is the whole prize.

The payoff was never the clapping anyway. The payoff is him. Nearness to the Father outlives every heart and thumbs-up you’ll ever gather, and it’ll still be standing long after the algorithm misplaces your name.

So go be faithful where the cameras can’t reach.

A prayer to tuck in your pocket:

Father, you find me in the hidden places, the cold coffee, the broken sentences, the seasons I weathered without a word. You call me yours regardless. Grow me brave enough to live unseen and steady enough to keep walking, today and every quiet day that follows. Amen.

Mary

I should be thrilled. Instead I have been a little lost.

It has been a tender couple of months. Hard conversations with extended family. Job things that did not go the way anyone planned. Quiet personal struggles I have carried straight to the Lord and nowhere else. And underneath all of it, a calendar with more white space than workspace, leaving a kind of confusion in its wake. What do I do now? What do I want this next few years to look like?

Mind you, I am not retired, not even close. I am running two businesses plus a full writing and speaking calendar. But for the first time in my adult life the days are not stacked floor to ceiling, and the quiet has been heavier than I expected.

I finally understand my mother-in-law. When Eleanor and my father-in-law retired, that woman became the volunteer queen of the century, busier after retirement than she had ever been before. Because for people who serve as a love language, a blank calendar is simply unacceptable. I get it now. When showing up for everyone else has been the shape of your whole life, an empty page does not feel like freedom. It feels like a question you do not know how to answer.

The word that keeps surfacing, the one that makes me roll my eyes a little, is dream. I have always been a perfectionist with an advanced degree in overthinking, so of course I have pondered it to death.

Jerry and I were talking the other night, and I said it out loud. Dreaming feels almost silly to me now. Wasn’t that the assignment for our twenties and thirties? You can only clean out the same closet so many times, friend. Although, full disclosure, mine is due for yet another round.

And then I woke up this morning, looked at my husband over my coffee, and said, let’s dream a little. Where do we want to be in five years? Ten years? This house? This neighborhood? This state? Traveling? Serving? Jerry, God love him, wants to climb into an RV and visit every single Civil War battlefield in this country. Every. Single. One. I am not entirely sure my body can absorb that much history from a camp chair, but it is his dream, and his dreams matter too. That is part of the deal.

The answer to “Do we still get to dream?” is yes. Again and again and again. You get to want something. You get to imagine a life that is not built entirely around what other people need from you. I think dreaming is hard for women in midlife because we have lived so long under the weight of everyone else’s expectations that we forgot to ask ourselves what we wanted. And somewhere in all that showing up, we stopped showing up for ourselves.

The thing that stops us is not age. It is regret.

Regret is an anchor tied to your leg. It does not protect you, it does not teach you a single thing you have not already learned, and it certainly does not carry you forward. It just drags, and you spend all your strength treading water in it. I am fifty-eight, almost fifty-nine, and I have collected a few of those anchors over the years. I have worked hard, so hard, to cut them loose and walk in freedom. Every so often the snake slithers up to remind me of each one by name, because he knows that regret stops the dreaming. It is one of his favorite tools.

So we must let it go. Place it into the hands of the Lord with mercy and grace and we say, this is Yours. I messed it up. You have already forgiven me, so I am not going to keep carrying what You have set down. God wastes nothing, even our worst chapters. But He cannot redeem what we refuse to release.

Now do not hear me wrong. I am still a be-where-your-feet-are woman. Tomorrow is a gift that has not been handed to us yet, so I try to live today and love the very next person who walks through my door the way God has asked me to. Dreaming just means leaving a window open.

And through that window I can see things. I can see Jerry and me walking the beaches of Normandy, his lifelong dream, retracing the steps of the men he has studied for decades. Ireland after that. The Cotswolds after that. The two of us debt free, with a little something in the bank, just drinking in the beauty of this world God made. I can see another grandbaby in my arms. I can see a book of mine landing on the NY Times Best seller list. I can see a stadium full of women praising Jesus while I stand on that stage and remind every last one of them that anything is possible with a God who walks beside us. I can even see Jerry and myself in a tango lesson. Will I bust a hip? Entirely possible. Will I bust a move? Also possible. We shall see.

So I will ask you the same thing I keep asking myself. What are you dreaming about? Is it hard for you to dream? What is the one dream you have been too scared to say out loud?

Pull up a chair. I would love to talk about it.

Love, Mary 💛