Our Lady's Lamp

I'm a dreamer. I'm pretty sure I always have been, and that hasn't always been easy for me. It means I dreamed up crazy things I wanted to do with my life, didn't always hold to the proper ideals for a young Christian woman, and I utterly despise practicality when it imposes itself upon my life. And I had many, many people when I was growing up speak caution to me. Most of them were well meaning, I'm sure. But unbeknownst to them, their words of caution crippled me. They made me start to doubt myself. I allowed their words of caution to clip my wings. So, when I would have a crazy idea, I'd slap it down and chastise myself for not being practical. "Don't you know you can't do that?" "You cannot travel the world and be a responsible adult." "Do you really want to waste your time on school when you really just want a family?" "You know, if you'd just settle, you'd be married by now." "You'll ...

“Unless you become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven .” That verse in Matthew gave me so much grief for so long. I mean, the rest of scripture talks about us putting on armor and fighting evil spirits, about setting examples, and about not clinging to milk in our faith but instead becoming adults and eating “real food.” Especially being someone who has always taken pride in being told I am more mature than most people my age and knowing that I’ve been gifted with many different gifts and talents that tend toward leadership, I never was able to reconcile the idea of being a child with myself. So, in many ways, I ignored the verse and focused on the other verses that I did relate better to. But one day, when I felt like I had absolutely nothing left to give to God, when I felt like everything I wanted to do was being blockaded, like I was unable to do anything at all that would ever be of merit to the Kingdom, I looked up at the cross and just said, “I ca...

What is the worst thing that can happen to the Church? Not torture, murder, threats, persecution, or even the whole world conspiring to exterminate her from the face of the earth. That already happened once, and the result was the greatest growth the Church has ever seen. The worst thing that can happen to the Church is what is happening to the Church now in the West, namely that the Church is deliberately conforming to the world. This is a betrayal of her primary task, which is to conform the world to Christ. The leader has become a follower. The Lion of Judah has become tame. Nowhere has this deadly process been more apparent than in the very thought processes and categories that modern Christians use. They are the categories of the world. What categories? The modern world politicizes everything and imposes the political categories of Right and Left on everything. They are the two knee-jerk categories that save us from the awful necessity of  thinking through issues on their o...