by thinkingfromhope | Aug 10, 2022 | 10x your Hope
By Jennifer Lindberg
Those back-to-school days we are juggling in these coming days and weeks need a beautiful prayer of hope. We hope so much for our kids during school days because most of us remember the joy of new crayons, the way new books smelled, and the expectation of seeing old friends and making some new ones.
Taking time to bless our kids is good practice — this is the prayer I use — your benediction may look different. I’ve learned praying over my kids becomes more natural for them and me the more I do it. It doesn’t have to be a big event. Sometimes, I just read this prayer to them and we go to the Scripture verse to see how I adapted it. What counts is that it’s full of hope for them.
The book of Isaiah is full of hope and I love using its verses to make all things new in my life.
Here you go:
pray hope into yoru childs life
by thinkingfromhope | Aug 10, 2022 | 10x your Hope
By Jennifer Lindberg
My surprise lilies surprised me this year — rocket-style hope on an elegant stem.
I forgot where I planted extra bulbs from a friend at a busy time when I was just trying to get them in the ground– unfussy — like my gardening style. I’ll plant things and let them grow giving them their free creativity and mine. It usually works. Other times I’m like what was I thinking? I was being free and barefoot with hands digging in the dirt because that’s some kind of fun for me. I seem to have never got the memo as a child that making mud pies on the sidewalk was not enjoyable.
The surprise lilies obeyed this free-range approach and arching their slim stalks started peeking out of my ornamental grass. The shade did not do them in. Instead, they grew longer like a rocket with a Fourth of July fountain head firework that would be seen.
I remember now my plan of glorious pink surrounding green but forgot to trim the verge –as they say–to fully hatch this plan. The lilies had a plan of their own and it still worked out as the flowers in the back provided fresh cuts for my dining room. Nature’s plans are always best. Hope is this elegant. It gives us surprises even when we forget where we planted it. We sometimes forget that kind word might matter months down the road. We forget the cultivation of peace we try to maintain actually might bloom someday in places unexpected.
A surprise lily reminded me of this. Oh, these beautiful lilies have many names — like resurrection lily– and remind many of pink flamingos hanging out. But the Ressurection of Christ was a surprise wasn’t it? Mary Magadelene didn’t expect Christ to show up outside a boulder-blocked tomb. It’s the kind of surprise that makes flower gardening glorious for an unfussy gardener like me. It’s those kinds of surprises that keep hope alive and well. Sometimes, hope isn’t neatly planted, but it’s always waiting to be found.
by thinkingfromhope | Feb 10, 2021 | 10x your Hope
By Jennifer Lindberg
A holy monk, St. Isaac the Syrian, said, “Make peace with yourself and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.”
It sounds simple, but this peace is often at odds in an anxious world full of ideas that might not be God’s will for us or distract us from living our vocations. We worry about a lot of things that will never happen and fail to realize we are embraced by the strongest grace of Christ’s love. A wise saying like St. Issacs’s still begs the question, “How do we make peace with ourselves?” I believe it is from one simple prayer: “Jesus, let me be who you want me to be.”
Praying like that is some sort of freedom. I don’t have to do it all, or make all the choices, if I let God lead. If I’m praying for Christ’s creating hand over my clay pot to make it a masterpiece, I can rest and trust that what happens to me is within God’s Providence. This simple prayer, came from my priest’s homily, opening a door to deeper trust in God.
That potter representing God, the Father, takes an ugly gray clump of clay and transforms it, cutting here, shortening it there, and turning it constantly until it is put into the fire, burning away my deficiencies, vices, and worries into something stunning in its beauty. It reminds me of a practice in Japan. If a dish breaks it’s glued together with gold. The broken pieces are not thrown away, they are transformed. It is some of the most beautiful pottery in the world known as Kintsugi.
It’s like this brokenness of ours can still be made into something new because God’s mercies are new every day. It reminds me that sufferings, disappointments, hurts, wrongs, and unanswered prayers can be pieced back together with God’s greatest attribute: mercy. I just have to let God pick up the pieces and be at peace knowing I’m in good hands.
“Jesus, let me be who you want me to be.”
It’s a bold prayer when we are wanting to be something less, or something below our dignity that is leading us to sin, or waywardness. It’s a bolder prayer when we are so sure of something, but will ask in humility, “Jesus, is this right and good for me? Is this what you want me to be?” That’s the peace surpassing understanding when we surrender to Christ’s providence for our life.
David was a shepherd boy, ruddy to look at, who became a great king because he took sticks from a tree to make a slingshot, and stones from a creek that defeated a giant spewing hate. David said I’ll defeat this evil in the name of God. Esther risked her life to save her people. Ruth clung to her mother-in-law refusing to throw away the heritage of the Jews, and ended up being a relative to Christ. Mary Magdalene washed Christ’s feet with her tears, becoming one of the greatest evangelizers who ever lived. Each of these people asked God what He wanted them to be, so that generations later Christ would come and make all things new.
Every ‘yes’ to God sometimes starts with a ‘no’ to something else. These people may have wanted or chosen for themselves something different until God’s grace entered into their life. Some of them might have wanted to stay in their sin, but they learned to repent and be healed. They knew God could take the pieces of their lives, shards of broken dreams, and make it into everlasting joy.
We can do that too by praying: “Jesus, let me be who you want me to be.”
Pray it in good times. Pray it in bad times. Pray it when there are major decisions facing you. Pray it and feel at peace with yourself and then the words of one holy monk will enter into your life with a golden thread of grace.
by thinkingfromhope | Jan 29, 2021 | 10x your Hope
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It’s Three Oclock Somewhere
by thinkingfromhope | Jan 29, 2021 | 10x your Hope
When St. Clare of Assisi looked into a mirror, she didn’t see herself. Instead, she saw the Image she was made into – that of Christ. St. Clare was learning to see the soul behind the face in the mirror.
Clare believed people saw Christ when looking at how she and her cloistered nuns lived their life. It’s a daring claim for a group of women who rarely left the convent. How does one’s life reflect Christ if no one sees it? How does one meditate on Christ when looking at your own face in the mirror?
I feel St. Clare’s teaching deep as a mother. I can go days without seeing anyone except those entrusted to me in my home. If I do see people it is through car windows as I drive away from dropping kids off at various appointments or getting my grocery order from the store’s curbside-pickup area.
Clare is the saint for my motherhood lately, a firm reminder that God sees me in my motherhood journey alone at home washing dishes, folding laundry, and sometimes silently crying when the day goes wrong and I don’t want to alarm the children. I learned long ago that lack of sleep, busy schedules that cannot be simplified some weeks – no matter how hard you try — can cause the tears to flow. You feel like the ordinary tasks in life go unappreciated, but St. Clare says this is when your light shines the brightest. She said this is when to look into the mirror and see beyond yourself.
Mothers have their own type of enclosure in the sanctity of their home life. In the candlelit morning hours, you try to read your Bible — and then the baby cries or the toddler comes to cuddle. You blow out the candle so no one gets burned, open your arms wide, and know you won’t get the Bible opened again that day. Maybe one verse was read and you can ponder it in your heart before making breakfast and checking off the to-do boxes.
It’s here in these moments that St. Clare says is a witness to the world. It doesn’t matter if anyone sees you. It doesn’t matter if you fill stadiums with your speaking engagements, get a raise, or have the cleanest house ready for a Better Homes and Gardens photo shoot. What matters is that God sees you reflecting Him in your piety with your tiny sacrifices at home, or big ones. He sees you teaching your children the Hail Mary and telling your kids for the 100th time to brush their teeth and change their socks. God sees you instructing your sons in how to be gentleman, opening the door for their sisters, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ God sees you instructing your little girls in the art of femininity – that they are the worthy daughters of a King – and how to be polite and how to know their worth as a woman. And somehow all this draws the light of Christ that reflects out into the whole world. St. Clare tells us to look deep at ourselves and be filled.
She uses the mirror as a metaphor for the spiritual life. We look into the mirror every day. Sometimes, we see its toll on our life – the wrinkles, the puffy eyes from lack of sleep, or those great hair days when we feel and look fabulous! Yet, St. Clare says to use this every day object as a way to gaze into eternity.
St. Clare wrote:
Look into the mirror each day … and continually study our face within it, so that you may adorn yourself within and without with beautiful robes and cover yourself with the flowers and garments of all the virtues.
She was writing to another noble lady, Princess Agnes of Bohemia, who left her fine robes for a coarse tunic to follow in the steps of St. Francis and St. Clare. But these letters are golden threads of light for any women because all of us are daughters of Christ seeking to live the virtues. The mirrors of St. Clare in the 13th century are not like our modern ones. They were made of polished metal with a curved surface something like the bottom of a pan. St. Clare uses the mirror as a meditation on the life of Christ.
Here’s how St. Clare said to look in a mirror:
-Look at the parameters of this mirror, that is, the poverty of Him who was placed in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes.
-Marvel at how the King of the angels, the Lord of heaven and earth, is laid in a manger!
Then, at the surface of the mirror, dwell on the holy humility, the blessed poverty, the untold labors and burdens which He endured for the redemption of all mankind.
-In the depths of this same mirror, contemplate the ineffable charity which led Him to suffer on the wood of the cross and die.
Clare encourages us to look prayerfully, to think deeply, by gazing at Christ through the mirror of our daily lives that will “place our souls in the brilliance of glory.”
After reading St. Clare’s words, I look into my mirror a lot differently now, knowing that Christ looks in the mirror with me, holding up heaven for me to gain from all the little things no one sees except Him.
—by Jennifer Lindberg
by thinkingfromhope | Dec 24, 2020 | 10x your Hope
By Jennifer Lindberg
He found me slathering turpentine on a white wall sprayed with black graffiti. I only had one glove wiping off the letters smeared on the convent wall in Tijuana, Mexico.
Father John Tasto’s fortitude was that when any graffiti showed up, he took swift action with turpentine to wipe it off. He had other duties for me, a Mary type girl with a bunch of Martha type women on a mission trip. I was willing to do the hard labor, but this priest knew my heart, pulling me out and having me type out his thank you notes to donors on a clackety- clack typewriter made in 1920. The office was primitive but the love that came out of those convent walls was like a flashlight seeping into the darkest corners of Tijuana.
The other men and women in the group went out to build, paint, and repair depilated homes made of plywood, cardboard, and old tin cans. I went out with the sisters, the Missionaries of the Cross, to meet the people with a rosary and a handshake. Father told me to use my light with my ready smile, and too quick to laugh.
“Oh, there is much misery here in Tijuana,” Sister Guadalupe said, offering no comfort but letting the reality around me settle deep. She’d seen my big green eyes wondering much, surveying the shacks we passed walking up a hill single file on a path as wide as a soda can. Into the homes we went with dirt floors or plywood floors and most with walls as thin as paper but always the television set showing images of American towns, movie stars, and faraway dreams. As the others worked in different parts of the city hammering nails and rolling paint, I worked by looking deep into eyes and praying blessings that I will never know if they came true or not. We went to the parishioner’s homes, the ones who had not sent their children to the free school for a few weeks, or ones the sisters knew needed a visit. That’s all we did — visit and sit with them. Offering me a stained chair from the local dump, I took my seat as a cat ran between my legs and a baby cried in one home. The sisters in their starched white with a red stripe running down their sari took no notice of the dirt or the stains. Somehow their habit stayed white and pure like light that cannot be snuffed away.
My next outing was shopping for sandals for the nuns and haggling over a stove part. The sisters fixed everything they could, and reused what we would throw away. They knew how to make a penny scream. Men made concrete in wheelbarrows mixing it right on the road for minor building projects as we walked past pot holes in the street. Tijuana swirled around me as we went in and out of stores and then back to the convent where lunch was left in the refrigerator for us two who had gone out and about.
That mission trip was long ago, but it has lived in my mind and soul all these years. There were many things I learned from one dedicated priest and determined nuns carving out hope through education and a smile. I found that darkness cracks with a sliver of light from a small smile, a hammer and nails doing a good deed, and a heart overflowing with the tiniest prayer. I walked dirt strewn paths two by two like the apostles of old, going out because I believed in the light of Christ. It did not matter if others didn’t. This Christmas day, I remember those lessons learned on a long-ago mission trip to help others. Light you candle and pray that Christ makes you a light even with the smallest wick or the smallest effort because the larger effort has already been done. Believe when all seems dark because St. John tells us why: “In the beginning was the Word: The Word was with God and the Word was God. What has come into being in him was life, life was the light of men and light shines in the darkness, and darkness could not overpower it.” John 1:1
Merry Christmas!
+JMJ+
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