Since I became Catholic nearly a year ago,

I’ve felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I have to learn. As I wasn’t raised Catholic, I haven’t had years to digest the faith as it came at me in stages. But now, there is so much to keep track of! Saints I don’t know anything about, differences between mortal & venial sins, books of the Bible I haven’t read, strange words like scapular and remonstrance, different forms of prayer. I feel like I could study and live out the rest of my life and make hardly a dent. This has felt like a burden to me, but I recently realized that it is anything but a burden.

A long time ago, I started calling times when God gave me more than seemed possible as my ‘water from the rock’, referring to when Moses struck the rock in the desert and water gushed out for the grumbling Israelites to drink (the story found is in Numbers 20:1-13) That’s what Catholicism is to me now, my water from the rock. There is more to Jesus than I thought, there are more ways to be faithful, there is more to this story of Christianity. How can this richness be a burden? My ignorance demonstrates the absolute boundlessness of Christ, a mystery that one could only spend a lifetime pondering.

I wish I could capture in words how BIG! God is, but there's no way I can do Him justice, so I'll have to leave my description at boundless, absolutely boundless.

I have a need to run.

This week has reminded me that I feel crappy unless I get exercise almost every day- I had some oral surgery on Monday, and I’ve been stuck to the couch ever since. I was pretty happy watching TV and taking multiple naps a day, but by yesterday I felt terrible. Sometime around 2:00 I was in the middle of deciding the world is a miserable place, but then I remembered “Wait. Of course I feel awful. I haven’t gotten a drop of exercise all week.”

So I forced myself to take a walk with little blondie, a very slow walk, and this morning I went for a long run.

Especially now, living in a new place where I don’t have friends or activities to go to yet, running provides some much-needed structure to my day. More than just doing something good for my body, pushing myself hard is an accomplishment that makes me feel like I’ve done something that day. (Besides the unending job of keeping little blondie happy and healthy, which I think is pretty important)

I cannot wait for september 22nd to be over.

Today should have been great. I went mountain biking this morning on a group ride, and I had forgotten how much fun speeding through the woods is. But I wasn't able to relax because my bike was making loud, embarrassing noises that seemed to be reverberating off the trees. I felt like a DUFUS ruining the tranquility and I was mad at myself for not getting it worked on. As I'm typing this I'm reminding myself that I must have had a good time because I did not turn around and go home when I could have several times , but it's like I don't believe I had fun anymore.

Why are there some days like this where I just completely loose perspective? On all accounts, it was a well above-average Saturday, but I'm snapping at my husband and had to drag myself through the motions of taking care of little blondie all afternoon, even though I had the morning off from the mommy gig. It's as if I have decided that I am going to be a complainer and I cannot pry myself from that perspective. Where's the Jesus living in me? I am really, really looking forward to getting in the presence of the Lord tomorrow at mass. Only 12 hours 'til I'm sitting in a pew. Yes.

Can I be an advisor to trail builders, please?

I went for a short hike up Mt Pisgah this weekend- check out these views from the top, one of the most photographed views in the south (according to trail propaganda).
Yeah. I couldn’t help but laugh when I got to the top. I wasn’t expecting a view since I’d been hiking in fog all the way up, but the fog just made it all the more ironic because the tower was the only view at the top. How happily I had packed my backpack that morning, looking forward to finally getting some blue-ridge dirt on my boots and some cool photos of the mountains. At least I got to sit on a windy piece of ancient rock and admire the fog blowing around my face, just little me and the big ‘ol tower humming away beside me. Ah, wilderness. Well, the views from the parking lot were pretty good.

Today I finally conquered the hill we live on,

at least as far as our apartment. It’s pretty easy to run on my own, but the problem is: little blondie has a down-right menacing tendency to gain 50 pounds each and every time I pop him into the jogging stroller. I think I’m switching him to skim milk sometime soon. I’ve been kind of embarrassed that I can’t make it up the hill, because it’s really not all that steep, or even long-and I have a pretty decent light-weight jogging stroller, so it should be no problem. I haven’t attempted the hill in the past week or so, but today I was reading a blog about some rock-climbing folks, and it was full of photos taken off the top of those crazy huge mountain ranges you find in Alaska, and I thought ‘curse word! what sort of elevation gain does my street have? It’s a pimple-sized hill!’ So I strapped little blondie into said stroller, and yes, he ballooned out as soon as I started up the driveway (it’s a hill, too) but I shouted ‘not today, little man!’ or at least I wanted to.

I’d never tried running down and up the hill first off, but I managed to today. This didn’t seem to really count since I’d just had coffee and I wasn’t worn out yet from the 25 other little hills that comprise my usual route (there isn’t actually anywhere flat to run around here), so I tired myself out by running the route. I arrived back at the bottom of the hill feeling done with running. I almost whimped out, but I told myself if I mentally wouldn’t let myself stop, I physically wouldn’t stop. All there is to it. To my disbelief-I’ve told myself this many, many times before with no magical result- it worked! Part of the sidewalk up the hill is behind a hedge, so if you had driven by, you probably would have thought I was walking by my speed, but no, world-that was me running all the way up the hill. Now I have this idea to buy one of those cheap plastic watches so I can start beating my time. Eventually I’ll be sprinting up that hill, just booking.