Vanessa Gonzalez Kraft tries to balance her traditional Mexican-American cultural heritage and Catholic identity, personified by her grandmother La Lupe, with her roles as a young wife and mother.
Click this banner to see the entire series.
Simplicity During Lent
I was at Target the other day looking at coloring books for Olivia who is an avid colorer. There were about 100 options. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the choices but I still stood there staring at those books for about 10 minutes. Why? Because I couldn’t find one, single coloring book. Every book was a coloring book and something else. They included a pack of triangular crayons, or stickers, or paints and paintbrushes, or glow in the dark pens, or secret messages that could only be revealed if smeared with Cheeto-covered fingers. I couldn’t find a simple coloring book. All I wanted was a book full of pictures that lacked color. There was none.
I often get annoyed when things are more complicated then they need to be. I already feel like I’m constantly running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I don’t need things that add to the crazy. I need more simple in my life.
As Lent begins, my theme for these 40 days in going to be simplicity. What is going on in my life that I think I “need” but don’t really. What seems as essential as water but maybe isn’t? What extraneous stuff is crowding out the thing I should be doing most? I want to turn down the noise in my life and listen more closely to what I should be listening for: God. I want to detach the sparkly pens, the pop-up pictures, and the decoder ring. I just want to be a coloring book. Plain, simple, blank and let God color in what God thinks I need.
