Category: Family

Deadlines – An Advent Reflection

Published on by KateLeave a comment

I have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. 

Deadlines are highly motivating. There is a clear project, direction, and end in sight. Deadlines can often spark creativity. Time instantly becomes more precious and there comes a moment when I just have to commit to a plan and go with it so that the deadline can be met. 

However, deadlines can also be hugely stressful. Deadlines apply pressure to finish a specific project in a specific window of time, even if there are other things I am more interested in focusing on. They can be unrealistic for the scope of a project, especially if a project has evolved to something larger than originally planned. Deadlines can feel defeating when they arrive before I am really ready to present what I’ve been working on. The project is finished in a rush and hasn’t had time to grow to it’s full potential, if it gets completed at all. 

I am a stay at home mom with a love of crafting and gift giving, so my deadlines are mostly self-imposed. The biggest deadline of them all is rapidly drawing upon us – Christmas. There are so many crafters in the world who are right now, in this very moment, scrambling to complete the projects they decided would make excellent Christmas gifts. Maybe they started early, but have so many gifts to make they still aren’t finished yet. Maybe they didn’t realize how long their project would take. Some only just began their crafting in the past few weeks because life and timing got away from them. They woke up on Dec. 1 and realized how many hats they wanted to knit for their co-workers and have been knitting non-stop since then. 

I have been in all of these circumstances. There was even one year I completed a pair of knitted socks for a loved one while we were driving to their house. I have made grand plans only to run out of time. This year, thankfully, my gift making required a large loom that will definitely not fit in the car, so I knew that back up plan would not work. I’m so happy to say that as of Dec. 12, my gift crafting is done (well, for now. There’s always the car ride to whip something else up) (Joke’s on me, I wrote that last line before we left. Guess what I’m doing while we drive…). 

As it does every Advent, the Church asks us to consider another deadline, a rather final one – the Second Coming of Christ. It actually brings a whole new meaning to this compound word we use so frequently – Dead. Line. A line which beyond is death. Christ’s return to earth is difficult for us to grapple with. It is a deadline, to be sure. Yet Jesus told us that we would not know the timing of it’s arrival. How are we supposed to prepare for a deadline that we don’t know the time or location of?

First and foremost, we listen to and pray with Scripture. We listen to John the Baptist, crying out in the desert for repentance. We listen to Jesus in His parables that teach us to stay awake and alert. We listen to St. Paul when he tells us to pray without ceasing, and to rejoice in the faith and salvation we have from Jesus Christ.

Second, we continue to seek out God in our everyday ordinary existence. This means looking for opportunities to love our neighbor. If we can go to bed every day thinking about the ways we helped others, served others, died to our own selfishness, and extended God’s love to those we met (be they new people or the same people we share each day with), we will be well on our way to heaven.  

Just because we don’t know when Jesus will come back does not mean the project of salvation isn’t the highest priority. Of all the things on your to-do list today, of all the projects and plans you would like to accomplish by a certain deadline, where does God’s plan for your sainthood fall?

Reality Check – Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time 2023

Published on by KateLeave a comment

Matthew 21:33-43

Well, we’ve had a week. And it’s ending with our dog needing to have one of his eyes removed. I’ll spare you the details.

But, even in all that, I still wanted to get a brief reflection out there about this Sunday’s Gospel reading. It even loosely ties into the dog business that has consumed so much of my waking and sleeping thoughts.

To boil it all down: None of this world actually belongs to us. Not my sweet dog, not my joyful (or not so joyful when certain math problems get tricky) children, not my home, not my husband, not even my own life. None of this big, wide, beautiful, messy world belongs to me. Nor, I’m sorry to say, does it belong to you. All of what we have belongs to God.

In this Gospel passage, Jesus lays out the whole of humanity’s reality in a few brief sentences.

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard,
put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. 
Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.

Matthew 21:33

God created the world and everything in it. He then gave it to His most beautiful creations, humans, to be stewards over what He had made. And while the parable mentions a journey, we know that God has not walked away from His creation to leave us to struggle on our own. It is, after all, a parable and meant to illustrate a point. The point here is that God, the land owner, has given the tenants, aka us, the ability to freely choose how to live in the vineyard.

If we really, truly, take this to heart, it has some important implications in our relationships with others and with the wider world around us. It’s the whole, “With great power comes great responsibility,” moment. Both my husband and I have really felt the weight of these words as we have struggled in discerning how to best help our aging dog, Max.

Max is 13 and we discovered last week he was having eye concerns. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get detailed here. Suffice to say that after many, many different eye drops and antibiotics, he was still in a great deal of pain and even had to go to the vet emergency room. We found ourselves Thursday morning deciding between trying to save the eye (with a hefty price tag) at a pet hospital 1.5 hours away next week, or taking it out today and ending his misery. We have never had to make a decision like this before and I am still emotionally exhausted from the experience. All we wanted to do is to minimize his pain and maintain the highest quality of life he can have while also not going into debt. I desperately wanted for someone else to tell us what to do. But we are Max’s owners, and in bringing him into our family God had entrusted him to our care.

There is a delicate balance being played out here. Max belongs to us, we determine what care he receives. Yet at the end of the day, we have to be able to answer to God how we cared for His creature. The same logic can be applied to our children, to our bodies, and to anyone or anything we find under our earthy authority. God does not swoop in and lay out how each choice should be handled (wouldn’t it be nice sometimes though?). But He does give us the grace to make those decisions. At the end of time, or the end of our earthly life, we will need to be able to offer an accounting of how well we fulfilled our vocation as a steward over creation.

I’m happy to say Max is doing well and the kids are already planning pirate-themed costumes for Halloween. My favorite ideas so far are either: A. Max is the pirate captain and we are all his crew, or B. Max is the pirate and we dress Nathan (the 2 year old) up like a parrot to be his sidekick. Both options crack me up!

Daily Graces. kktaliaferro.wordpress.com

Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Published on by KateLeave a comment

There’s a lot happening around here at the moment. If you watched this week’s YouTube video, you already know we are safely in Alabama. Thank you to all of you who prayed for our family on our journey. We appreciated it so much, especially when a certain Mississippi state trooper pulled us over because the registration on our cargo trailer may (or may not, you’ll have to take it up with my husband who insists because it was purchased in California there’s some kind of special rule out there) have been expired. When I explained we were military in the middle of moving cross country he let us go without any problems, but boy was my heart pounding for quite a few miles after.

I also can’t talk about this move without sharing a bit about how incredible my dad is. He had to navigate peers also being on vacation at the same time as our planned move and got everything all lined up. Then, about a week before we planned to leave we found out that if we didn’t want all of our household goods to end up in storage we would need to move up our timeline by 4 days. We would have already been in Alabama by the time his flight got into Wichita. We called immediately and told him we were so sorry for all the work he had to do to make the first plan work, how sorry we were to be changing things last minute, etc. He didn’t even flinch. He (and my mom, she’s a flight ticket wiz) got the tickets changed and he workout whatever needed to be done at work so he could drive with us. He drove my car, with 4 of the 6 kids, hauling that semi-registered cargo trailer, from Kansas to Alabama without complaining once. He then stayed for 2 days and helped Ben get the trailer unloaded, reloaded with storage stuff, and stored. And helped get the camper pushed into the garage after helping reorganize the garage (have I mentioned tomorrow it’s going to be 109 Fahrenheit tomorrow). AND still found time to play in the community pool, spend time on the floor building and rebuilding towers for Nathan to crash, hear all about the kids’ Zelda and Super Mario games, and I could go on.

I’m exhausted just writing about all the things my dad, Papa to the kids, got done while he was with us. We would be no where, absolutely no where, near where we are right now if he hadn’t come. I will always talk about this crazy move with our kids, because I want to share this story with them. I want them to remember the fun memories of being thrown across the pool and playing Minecraft Uno with all the rules (my dad likes to read all the rules before starting a game). But more importantly, I want them to remember what an incredibly selfless choice this was.

My dad did not have to come. We made it very clear that we did not expect him to rush to change all kinds of things to make this work. He did anyway. He could have griped about only going 60 miles an hour the whole first day (Ben tries to manage the number of times we have to stop for gas) (we got to go 65 on day two, hooray!). He didn’t. He could have said, “No, I think I’ll take the room to myself if that’s ok, it’s been a long day in the car with the kids and tomorrow will be just as long,” when we stopped overnight. He had 3 kids in his room with him, including the 4 year old who kicks in his sleep but adores his Papa. Every time I turned around, there he was, doing something sweet or kind or helpful. He was amazing.

While I know this story isn’t exactly what our Gospel is about, in a way it is. What I saw in my dad was someone who was putting Jesus first. He continually showed our whole family what it means to show up and be present in this moment. What crosses we asked him to carry, he carried. He so perfectly modeled that song from Mass, “Here I am, Lord, here I am. I come to do Your Will.” This is what I hope our family remembers from this past week.

For something a little more on topic for the Gospel reading, be sure to check out the YouTube video below.

Daily Graces. kktaliaferro.wordpress.com