Christ, Coffee, and Cornfields

    I have been blessed (or cursed?) with the ability to vividly recall many of my dreams, even years after dreaming them. Sometimes they are the good, exciting dreams, but most often they tend to be my nightmares. My most recent nightmare happened this weekend and involved me getting mortally injured and the intense need to say goodbye to my family. The thing is, I never died. I kept going to different places to find different family members, all the while dying, but never actually passing away. The same night I had another dream. A murderer was after me, and I was dying in that one, too. This time, the murderer killed someone else and I managed to get away, but still dying. Needless to say, I woke up having cried in my sleep and having gotten no rest that night.   I watched an episode of my favorite TV show last night, and at the very end, one of my top 3 favorite characters in the show died. His wife had just given birth to their first child and he was on his way to ...

 Holy Week can be a very difficult week for modern Catholics. There's a lot of fasting involved, which is a custom most people are not familiar with. As a general rule, Holy Week is a period of intense prayer and meditation of the coming of our Lord's Passion. It also is a time of recommended fasting in addition to what we gave up or took on for Lent. This is especially true on Good Friday. On this day, Jesus died and we are asked by the Church to commemorate it by fasting from meat all day and only having one full meal and two smaller meals. As a human, this is hard. As a member of modern society, it's very hard.  I went to a frozen yogurt place with my youth group this past Wednesday. As a devoted Catholic, I chose to abstain from purchasing anything, seeing as it was Holy Week. I was the only one. This isn't to say that everyone else is a bad Catholic, they aren't. It's just that most people don't recognize the importance of what we celebrate this week....

 I think the hardest thing to be in the 21st century is Catholic, especially a Catholic woman. We've got all these different ideas of what the world tells us to be that are the opposite of what we're called by God to be. This goes for modesty, passions, pastimes, and even our personalities.  Our very womanhood gets called into question every day and we must choose if we want to be how God made us as beautiful creations in His image or to put on society's mask. It's a decision we must make every day, and it can be very difficult sometimes. I struggle with it as much as the next woman, but then I remember that I'm nobody if I'm not myself. God made me in His image and I am fearfully and wonderfully made. No amount of makeup or clothing will change my quirkiness so I don't even bother trying anymore.  The thing is, the people who God wants in my life accept my faults along with everything else that I am. That's the way it should be. Does that mean I...