Following

If the spiritual life is filled with peaks and valleys, I am definitely in a valley. My prayer life is completely dry, and I am lucky if I remember to say my daily offering. Every night I kneel at my bed to say my usual night time prayers and think, "I hardly thought of you at all today, Lord. How easily I forget about you these days." I know we all have valley's, but I don't like them. I don't like them at all.

Last weekend we needed to attend the Saturday evening vigil mass, because we were helping with a pro-life university outreach all day on Sunday. I really don't like theSaturday vigil mass. In my experience, most people attend it with the attitude of "getting church over with" and come in with shorts and a Hawaiian shirt on at best. I was a little miffed at having to attend this mass, and even more miffed we had to attend a church I didn't particularly care for with a priest who reads canned homilies from the pulpit. Then my friend's words came to my mind. I remember him telling me, "pray to the Holy Spirit that He will give you some nugget of wisdom, no matter how superfluous the homily may be." So I did.

I asked the Holy Spirit for a nugget, and that's just what I got. Nothing more and nothing less. The kids were restless during mass and so was my mind. Just as the priest was wrapping up the homily I realized I had heard almost none of it and made one last attempt to listen. And then I heard this:

"And so you think of Him, but you do not follow Him."


Nugget. That short little sentence explains my valley. I think often of what I should be doing. I think of ways I should be living and think of prayers I should be praying. But I am not following. I am not doing, which is what following is all about. Following Christ demands action. Action that I am often to scared and down right lazy to take. But if I, a Christian woman, do not follow, do not act, who will? I am the salt of the earth. We are the salt of the earth. And it's time for action.
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