Just pray

Sounds so easy "just pray". When things are going great, when you want to kill someone, when you're having a blah day, when one of your dreams come true, when you feel blah, etc.  But when done correctly it really works. Being in that constant communication with God, I've found, has made me a much better person. He becomes this intrical part of your life...like a best friend that you can call on day or night, who will never judge you, someone that already knows your deepest secrets and silly thoughts...so there's no point in keeping anything from Him because he already knows! You can just be yourself. Most importantly I've realized that He is the only entity in your life that loves perfectly. Nobody..not your husband, parents, family members, friends, dogs...can love you perfectly like God does. That was a powerful realization for me. For a long time I think I expected certain people, especially my husband and some would say their parents, to love me perfectly. The bottom line is they are not perfect and they will make mistakes or get off their path and that's ok...I make mistakes and get off my path or have bad days...we are all here to help each other on our pilgrimage through life and  take comfort that there is one that loves us perfectly and that is God. I feel like knowing that has made me much more patient, kind, gentle, and most importantly humble and forgiving as a human being in the way I treat others, especially those nearest and dearest. This is why it's so important to pray...to keep in communication with the one that loves us perfectly, to our best friend that gives us grace when we need it and always loves us. I love to say prayers of gratitude throughout the day...especially when things are NOT going my way. It really puts life in perspective at a moment when I'm weak. If I have a baby shower to go to or someone announces they are pregnant that I'm not too close too, I pray for God to give me the grace to get through those moments and to place me back into a positive, hopeful place...I gotta get back on track because I can easily sink myself into a "why them and not me...all I yearn for is to have my children..what is my purpose in life if not to have kids..." And that can go on and on. I don't want to be there...it doesn't serve me. I want to be in a place of trust, hope, and peace. The bottom line is I want to be happy for others...I wouldn't wish this upon anyone. But the hurt that it hasn't happen for us is still there and the only thing I've found that truly gives me peace to just to stop and pray. God will give me what I NEED not WANT to get though those moment. I'm a much happier person now and it shows when I forget to pray and start to drift I start to feel more and more negative emotions. 

I've also struggled over the years with keeping God at the center of my marriage. The intention has always been there but I hadn't figured it out really and truly until recently. It goes along with what I was saying in the previous paragraph. In my mind now I make an intimate part of my life by thinking of Him as a best friend. It works the same in a marriage..He is literally another person in our marriage. He is the core of marriage now and unites us. We not only make decisions about our lives between the two of us but now we actually will ask God through prayer...any choice we have to make we run it by God first and ask Him to let us know in our hearts what we should do. If one of us is being out of line with the other we tell them to basically take a time out and talk to God who is the other person in our marriage and ask Him for His opinion. We pray before or after we are intimate, when we have a hard day at work we pray before we talk to the other person. God is not just a prayer before bed...now He is literally becoming part of our marriage. Maybe it sounds cray cray but it has brought our marriage to a whole new level of peace and happiness that we never knew existed. 

So bottom line here...just pray.

You're never "done"

Here's my disclaimer: I treat my blog like a journal. I don't think too much about grammar, sometimes I type fast on the iPad and it autocorrects wrong, run on sentences, typos...the works. I will definitely try to do my best but my objective with this blog is to share my thoughts and my journey through life...to simply be me.

So I haven't written any more blog since May because I didn't think people would be interested. I started writing in a journal on my iPad instead, however I feel inspired to start up again. So here it is...

 I feel that I have grown so much over the last couple of years and I'm not done growing. You are never "done" growing and learning...that's probably one of the first "secrets" to life that I have learned. Being complacent with where you are in your spiritual and emotional growth is when a person stops becoming the best they can be...we should always humble ourselves in realizing that we will never be perfect in this life...this life is a pilgrimage to heaven...it is a constant growing experience. For example, have you ever heard people say this to or about their spouse or something to this extent? "I don't know how this is possible but I feel like I love you deeper today than yesterday but yesterday I felt liked I loved you at the deepest level". That's how I, personally, began to understand the concept of always learning and growing...you always be better than yesterday and grow deeper especially when it comes to my relationship with God. I'm so grateful now in my life for everything good and bad. I'm even grateful for the struggle of trying to having children. This experience, though probably THE hardest trial of my life, has led me to grow in faith, to work on myself, to find peace, and to be ok with not always being in control. Its like...you hear people say these expressions of being peaceful and letting go of control, etc, but it never sank in or possibly I never truly understood those concepts until I had to deal with this ordeal of trying to have a baby. I've been through stages throughout these 6 years. I've bumped my head against the wall many times...I've been depressed, angry, I pulled away from God, I allowed myself fall apart every time my period arrived, I felt like a failure...like my body was failing me...I would try to do everything possible and do everything right but it wouldn't happen and then see people that get pregnant like nothing. Every one of those stages was a bump...sometimes a huge hump or even a mountain to cross over during my journey but like I said I'm so grateful now because at some point during those 6 years I started to pray. I just said I'll try it and my prayer was literally "God, please let me get pregnant". That's it. But I didn't know it then but that selfish prayer was the tiny opening that God needed to work in me. Whether I knew it or not I was letting Him in and little by little my prayers started to change, I was praying more often, I started making friends with people that helped me grow more in faith because I was open and wanting to learn more and grow more. It's been that way ever since...one revelation has led to another. I still haven't gotten pregnant but there's a peace within me now. I know that God is taking care of me. I know that He knows better and I know that He has been at work with my petition ever since the first time I prayed "God, please let me get pregnant". As I said in a previous post, He has led me to good Catholic people that have supported us through this time of waiting and struggle. He led us to good Catholic doctors in Omaha, NE that have found and fixed many physical issues that have been in the way. It hasn't been an easy road with surgeries, blood tests, and medications that make me feel sick; but I go through it and pray through the tough times knowing that God knows better than I know. I've become a different person with different ideals about life. I now aim to keep God first and surrender my hopes and dreams to Him, I don't aim to be a career woman but to be a good wife to my husband now and hopefully one day a stay at home mom. I want peace, humility, and simplicity in my life. I've been able to work through how to deal with my family which was hard for me before. What beautiful gifts and perspective to gain from not being able to conceive.  If I were to get pregnant right now I would be a completely different parent than what I would have been if I would have gotten pregnant 6 years ago...even 3 years ago. I'm all over attachment parenting now..lol! 

Part of growing and learning is figuring out that you're never done and though I feel like I have turned a very important corner in my life, I feel like its only beginning. I have now been reading so many books to gain more insight and knowledge. For example, I got married 7 years ago. I grew up in a home that didn't set a very good example for marriage and family life. I knew I wanted to be different and learned basically what I didn't want to do, but now I'm realizing that I need to learn how to have the marriage that God teaches us about. What is the right way or at least a better way? I don't think David and I did too bad but we didn't know how amazing it really could be until we started to read and learn and open our hearts to what it could be. I want to do the same with parenting. When I get pregnant one day, I already have tons of books on my amazon wish list that I want to read about to make sure I learn to be the parent I want to be.