Association Of Catholic Bloggers

While some may consider strange occurrences in the world as coincidence - I definitely prescribe to what I refer to as the GODCIDENCE mindset! Why wouldn't the God of the universe, who created me out of love, not also want to show himself to me -- especially when I am seeking!!   "Seek and ye shall find!" Today's godcidence is brought to you by the letter J for JOY!! Though when this all began to fall into place, one would have never seen joy as the end result. Late Saturday night I received a private message on Facebook to pray for a young man who had been in a serious accident. I prayed, but went rather quickly back to my reading - feeling confident that all would be fine.   The next morning I learned, sadly he did not make it. My heart ached for the family's great loss; but also within those emotions was great shame and guilt for not praying harder. If it had been my son; I would have gone to my knees to beg God's mercy - regardless of...

How many times have we said, "Jesus, please, please, please grant me this", "Lord, please help this work, please give me it...", "God, please - I  need  this to work out", or even the famous last words of "Lord, if you'd only grant me this, I'd never ask for anything again"? When we pray like this, it's as if we have just grabbed the steering wheel from Our Lord because we think that we can drive better than He can.  But can we?  Of course not.  It's so hard to let Him take full complete total control of our life.  When we surrender to him, we let go of all of our petty handrails and we take the jump.  Sometimes, it feels like we're falling.  It's frightening.  But if we try to plan our own lives, we enclose ourselves in a small cage.  If we give our lives to God, He will shatter the chains that we would have been tempted to cling to, and He will set us free. We don't trust Him enough, do we?  Do we  really  believ...

It is almost November and the feast of All Souls and All Saints. Before I give you all the official Church teaching on the souls in purgatory. I must tell you why this subject is close to my heart. I KNOW  personally, the agony of a soul who is desperate for my prayers. I have learned through personal experience, that souls in purgatory, although they cannot pray for themselves,  press in on the most sensitive of their relatives for prayer. My Ukrainian grandmother, who had been in Canada for barely 15 years, died accidentally under extreme duress as a young mother of three boys when her husband was at war. Since this occurred in the 1940′s, she was denied a Christian burial in the Catholic church. When my grandfather returned from the war,  the young family left the Catholic Church and my grandfather remarried a Protestant Presbyterian. In turn, I was raised in this church with no knowledge of any Catholic roots until I converted. My father pleaded with me to reco...