Good talk with Mom...

Andy volunteered us to take Mom and Margaret to the cathedral in Dallas to watch their cathechism class receive the rite of election. The cathedral was beautiful and we got to sit right next to the altar. You could feel the Holy Spirit in the room and I was moved to tears a few times. Afterwards, we took Margaret home and we went back to Mom's for a bit and for some reason we got to talking about brokenness. She was saying how God can't use us until we're broken first because God too became broken for our sins and to become broken makes us more aware of our blessings and makes us that more compassionate to others and their situations. If there weren't moments of brokenness we would be filled with pride and thinking that we were better than others. Anyway, she talked about how she really didn't come to know Jesus until God broke her during her divorce and how she wouldn't be a member of the church had it not been for my wanting to go so badly when I was younger. I've always loved to go to church even as a little girl. But, I think my real walk with faith began back when I found out that we had infertility problems and it came back again when Andy lost his job when Deidra was born. Man, those were some very hard and emotional times and it's something that I don't think people can really understand unless they go through it themselves. I really feel for those who deal with both of those issues. But, I told Mom that I really do see children for the blessings that they really are...they truly are a gift from above...I just wish some people didn't take their ability to have them for granted. And as for Andy's job loss...it taught us to live below our means and to appreciate what we did have. But, as Andy pointed out over Valentine's day...if that never would have happened we wouldn't be here today. So, everything does happen for a reason. We are very blessed and although nobody likes going through the hard times and it really is hard to go through those moments...we do learn from them and sometimes God does have to break us to get us to open our eyes about the things we take for granted. Mom said that she learned at a retreat that she went to that while we all have guardian angels that battle for us everyday, the devil appoints at least 2 of his angels to wreak havoc on us. Our guardian angels must really have to battle hard for us every moment of every single day and we're not even aware. Anyway, it made me realize that things could definitely be a lot worse if we didn't have our guardian angel there to watch over us. The bad things definitely come from the devil, but God allows them to happen. I guess it's no different than the choices we make in life...we make good decisions and bad decisions and when we make the bad decisions we learn from our mistakes. So, when the bad things happen to us in life we learn from those incidents too. Anyway, we had a good talk and I just wanted to jot some things down here about it.