Third Weekly Challenge

Well, nothing like getting your weekly challenge on the last day of the week, huh? Ha ha. Well, we should be practicing these all the time really, so I'm sure it will be useful anyway. We had a stomach bug go through our house and then pneumonia for my oldest boy so, needless to say, it's not been a good week. I've been saving up all sort of little tidbits for you. I hope I can remember them all over the next few days to post. As I've told you before, I have a terrible memory and I even lost my keys again this week, this time having to borrow my mother's car to make sure I picked my kid up from school on time. Oh brother. I will try to remember all of the things I wanted to tell you though, and post them soon.

Well, here is the challenge for the 3rd Week of Lent. This one is particularly challenging for me. I confess that I have difficulty with gossip. I have improved with God's grace over the years, but woe is me!, a juicy story is hard for me to pass up. Just a side story here, but as part of working on it, I felt I had to give up my almost 22 years-old subscription to People Magazine just a little under a year ago. I had been receiving that publication since my mother gave the subscription to me for my 16th birthday. I was completely under it's spell. How liberated I feel not knowing a thing about what famous people are up to any more! I could talk about it all day, but this one hits home. Who doesn't like to pass on a really good piece of gossip? Well, probably a lot of you, but for me it is only with the strength of Jesus that I can avoid it.

Alright, so without further ado:

Third Week of Lent

This Week of my journey I will be the bearer of good news to others and tell only God of any slanderous words I have heard.

Is it gossip if you're sharing it with God? I guess not since He already knows everything.


And then these two little bits of encouragement:

It was Mark Twain who wrote that it takes an enemy and a friend working together to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

Most people know what is wrong with them; it is their own loveliness they forget.


I also wanted to share this beautiful poem a friend sent to me:

Mother!

In a garden Mary stood when Springtime's radiant beauty Wrapped the
world in sunlight and filled her heart with joy. Down the garden-path there ran
a slender little Figure Bringing her a gift of love - He, her God, her Boy! Mary
opened wide her arms to take her sheaf of lilies: "Mother!" called her little
Son, and never had she heard In the angel's message, in brooklet, or in
bird-song, Music half so lovely as that one tender word.

On a hill-top Mary stood one sadder, later Springtime. All the earth
was wrapped in gloom beneath that blood-stained Cross; Memories thronged about
her, memories of His Childhood, Adding to her loneliness, her pain, her sense of
loss. Mary opened wide her arms but His were nailed securely "Mother!" breathed
her dying Son, and never had she heard In her sword-pierced heart that knew the
very depths of sorrow Anything approaching the pathos of that word.

"Mother! Mother Mary!" a million hearts are calling, "Open wide again
those arms, and in their warm embrace, Take the children Jesus gave you on that
darkened hill-top When He named you Mother of the sin-stained human race."

Sr. Maryanna Robert, Cyril. Our Lady's Praise in Poetry. Poughkeepsie, New
York: Marist Press, 1944.

Isn't that beautiful?? So as I said, I'm gonna try to remember all the other stuff I wanted to tell you and post again soon!