Tagged: life
Organizing my whole life
But while lists get me going and keep me going, I have found I have a few too many goal lists.
So, for example, I’ll take the 12 Week Year (you already know about the 28 by 28).
Daily goals…
But here’s my idea so far:
This system won’t be:
On dating
If you’re been around this here blog for longer than a minute, you know about my previous attempt at a relationship that failed. If you want to re-live it, check out the post here.
Shocking. Embarrassing. Crazy. Foolish.
Contrary to what we like to tell ourselves, a lot of dating is superficial.
This may have been a too-high-standard, but I love being Catholic. I want to raise my kids Catholic.
How the guy answered questions was important as well.
So Friday night, you’re wondering, how did it go?
The date details
After eating, we went for a walk. It was nice out. It was nice to walk and talk.
It was great.
Sunday’s “date”
It was good.
He still walked me to the door.
It was late, but I perused some blogs about chastity and dating, and I think I’m going to talk to him about it when we meet up next weekend.
This is hard
I think I shared this on the blog a while ago, but I broke up with my long time boyfriend in December.
We had been together for nearly six years.
“It was hard.” I hate how short that sentence is, how it doesn’t explain anything, but even explaining it is “hard.”
He isn’t Catholic. He isn’t staunchly pro-life. He wasn’t interested in getting married.
We were living together.
That’s really “hard” for me to admit, even to an online community of people I don’t know.
We lived together for about 18 months when I finally realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I had quit receiving communion in October 2012, about three months after we started living together.
But really, I shouldn’t have been taking it even before then.
We had been sleeping together from the very beginning of our relationship.
So, now that I know what doesn’t work – sleeping together before marriage, cohabitation, dating non-Catholics, dating not-serious-about-any-sort-of-future types – I’m working on figuring out what does work.
Is it the exact opposite? For most of those… yeah
I know that my Catholic faith is so important to me, that I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone I can’t share that with
I know that as a 27-year-old, I want to get married pretty quick. I don’t want a six-year relationship, even if it is made for marriage.
If we know we want to get married, then we don’t need that long to figure it out. I don’t know exactly what time limit I would put on it, but I know if I get married I want to have some babies.
Speaking of, am I meant to get married?
Oh, boy, have I prayed about this the last few months.
I have been trying to get to a retreat for a few nights, just to be around consecrated women. I’ve never done anything like that, but some days I feel that’s where God is calling me.
Other days, I want to be a wife so badly I can taste it.
Discernment is a very tricky process, too “hard” to really figure out in a day. It’s really a whole-life process.
Now that I’m single, though, it seems like I’m back in high school. I’m very awkward around the men in my life, I don’t know how to act.
It’s so… weird.
I don’t have a lot of single men my age in my life that I associate with regularly… there’s just one.
And I think I like him… but I don’t know if I am just having a crush because he’s the only single one around me.
I mean, how do you know? How do you know if he likes you back? How do you know what to say?
See how this is like high school? Yeah.
While I’m trying to discern what God wants for my life, I don’t want to jump back into dating too soon.
But how soon is too soon? I don’t want to be “on the rebound.” I just want a healthy relationship.
I am delaying acting on my feelings toward the guy in my life until I feel more secure about… something. I don’t know what. Just something.
It’s something I pray about and think about too much every day.
Yesterday, I knelt down in my kitchen (a lot of my spontaneous prayer happens there) and prayed to Jesus that I trusted in my with my whole life, including my future.
That’s “hard.” Trusting that Jesus knows best. I need to pray that he helps me trust him with my future.
My finances, sure, easy for me. My relationships? Not so easy to give those over to God, though he’s in control. Of everything.
I think I wrote once that Jesus is the Lord of all or Jesus is not the Lord at all.
He can be in charge of everything in my life or nothing. It can’t be half and half. You can’t serve two masters.
This was quite a soul-sharing post for me, and I don’t know if I explained everything exactly how I wanted too, but if anyone out there is going through the same, just know you’re not alone.
God bless.
28 by 28: See the eagles fly
Oh, hey. We’re just three BALD EAGLES chilling in these trees over here. Don’t mind us.
28 by 28: See the eagles fly
Mission accomplished.
Check one off of my list. Yesssss.
If you’re not following, don’t worry. I’ll become comprehensible in a minute.
In the meantime, here’s some more eagles.
This is a little blurry… because the further you zoom, the more each shake is seen in the photo.
Alright, now to make sense of all this.
Earlier, I published my 28 by 28 list, the 28 things I want to accomplish before I turn 28 in February 2015.
The list isn’t really in any order… but seeing the eagles fly was the first thing I thought of when I wrote down the list.
I had already scheduled and booked the hotel room for the weekend in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where they hold their annual Eagle Appreciation Day in late February.
I got there late Friday night, and barely found my hotel. I get no data service in Driftless Wisconsin, so I had to rely on smoke signals and whatever people used before GPS existed. It was a crazy three minutes in my car.
I woke up early Saturday morning, the day of the event, ready to get started. I drove into the city and immediately saw those first three birds.
They congregate on rivers and open water because they LOVE fish. (But also rabbits as I found out later.)
So I parked my car and walked back to the bridge where I first saw the eagles and took some photos.
The sky was clear, the weather was brisk, cold, freezing, but it was beautiful. And it was quiet. I was expecting a lot more people around for the event. Maybe the weather kept them away. I don’t know.
It was just peaceful to be there. (I just liked the look of this bar… I didn’t go inside. It was 8 o’clock. The rest of the downtown is also gorgeous.)
Yes, I was alone. But not lonely. I had a really good time. I drove around for a while, spotted a few more eagles perched on trees, then went to a few of the speakers the city had scheduled.
One of the speakers had a little tiny screech owl and some type of desert hawk.
The next speaker had a full grown bald eagle, and she fed him a hunk of rabbit while she talked to us.
It was so cool.
After all that, I went over to Iowa.
Can you believe I’ve never been? Iowa is even more quiet and peaceful than Prairie du Chien was. I don’t know if it’s the frozen river or what keeps it so beautiful, but I loved it there.
I went to the Effigy National Monument… couldn’t tour because of the snow, but I will go back (it’s on a secondary bucket list) in the summer.
Then I went to Pike’s Peak state park. That’s where that tree was.
In Marquette, Iowa, there’s a stop over or something for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and that was too cool to see.
I’m not fascinated by trains at all, but it was still interesting. I think I was just in the right place at the right time… at the right height.
There are tons of scenic overlooks in the area. I guess people like to stop and look at the Mississippi River from up height.
Even frozen, it was beautiful.
When I got to work this morning, I had an email about my bucket list story… a company offering me zip lining for free. Awesome!
On to more adventures!
God bless!
28 by 28 update (already!)
Yikes, an update already.
That sounds bad, right?
In fact, it’s good.
Because of snow (surprise! It’s Wisconsin!), two of my meetings were canceled… meaning, two less stories.
So on deadline, my editor asked if I had any column ideas…
Sure, my 28 by 28 list. He said, “What?”
And that’s how my list ended up in the newspaper for all to read.
(Because it wasn’t already out there for all to read on the Internet? Right…)
Here’s a photo… look that’s me!
Everything is awesome.
It’s even in the real paper, see?
God bless.