Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

We all experience difficult times and traumatic moments--it's part of our life on earth.  With God's grace we accept these times and find inner strength to cope with them. So when we receive an unexpected gift, our hearts fill with delight and we hopefully savor the gift. I live in a temperate rain forest.  This means we have a good deal of rain and very few truly sunny days.  In April we had a total of 10 inches of rain, but last month we were the recipients of a special gift--warmth and sunshine!  Rainfall total was only half an inch, and the sun shone almost every day.   What do you do with such a gift?  I had to find a pair of sunglasses, and then ate outside as often as I could. Children were able to go swimming in the lakes, families could go on hikes without packing boots.  Everyone was in good spirits. We know this special gift will come to an end--after all, this is  a rain forest.  But this has been a reminder to u...

Driving back to Wisconsin from Spokane, alone but not lonely, became a pilgrimage of sorts for me.   My appreciation deepened for the diversity of Mother Earth, her majestic mountains, rolling hills, bounding and ambling animals, beautiful sunsets.   It was a graced time of reflection, decompression and the processing of time spent with so many really good women and men.   The entire trip became a rolling retreat, an asphalt prayer, a honing of an awareness of the grace that is my life.   I noticed so many things, including this prayer, which I found in the back of a One Year Bible at a Benedictine monastery in South Dakota.   I have no idea why I turned to that otherwise blank page where, in penciled cursive, was written: “Dear Lord, let me be as disturbed about this situation (or person) as you are. No more, no less.   If you are angry, let me be angry, too.   But if you are not disturbed, let me share your Peace.” ~ Fr. Greene I don’t know...