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.

The White House issued an accommodation Friday exempting religious employers from having to pay for contraceptive services in their insurance policies. When I heard this first line, I immediately rejoiced that the Administration had heard the cry of its people and changed its policy. Then came the next line, “Contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly, with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception.”

The USCCB has understandably responded to this accommodation with caution as outlined here. This is drastically more articulate than my response to the accommodation which was, “Wait, what? How does that make sense?” Or posed as Olivia’s favorite question, “How they do that?”

So according to the government, religious employers (which was not defined) will not have to pay for contraceptive services, but instead insurance companies will pay for the contraceptive services themselves. Last time I checked, insurance companies were not in the business of doing stuff for free. Now that insurance companies will have to cover the contraceptive services that religious employers won’t, wouldn’t that make insurance companies raise the rates on religious employers’ plans because they will have to pay for those claims? I just don’t see how this will stop church money from being used for contraceptive services.

The government did throw in this line about insurance companies, “Covering contraception is cost neutral since it saves money by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services.” Obviously insurance companies will cover contraceptive services for free because in the end it will save them more money than having to pay for pregnancy and kids. Uh, what? No, it won’t. Insurance companies will be paying for something that they weren’t before. Pregnancy and kids are covered by insurance plans and the employer is paying for those incurred costs. So the insurance companies save no money by giving birth control to women for free.

I appreciate that the White House is trying hard to appease all sides here, but this still falls short. Mostly because it’s so vague.

I was trying …

I voted for President Obama in the 2008 election. Leading up to that election and after it, I’ve fought an uphill battle trying to explain how I could be Catholic and vote for a president that so obviously has pro-choice goals. In my argument, I kept coming back to the USCCB’s statement, “As Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support.” There are 7 principles of Catholic Social Teaching. When I weighed how many of the principles McCain stood for and how many Obama stood for, my tally was overwhelmingly in favor of Obama. Just to name a few, Obama is in favor of the DREAM Act and more comprehensive immigration reform. Obama wanted to reform healthcare (an issue I have written about at length). Obama’s economic policies were intended to directly help those at the bottom as opposed to using the trickle-down effect. And on and on. Even though Obama is pro-choice, I couldn’t ignore all those other extremely important issues that I agreed with. And even when it came to FOCAor other pro-choice issues, I guess I just didn’t believe that he would rock the boat too much.

Then a couple weeks ago, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal: “Obama Offends the Catholic Left.” I’ll ignore for a second how I hate the terms liberal Catholic and conservative Catholic. The amount of discord and division between Republican Catholics and Democrat Catholics is disgusting, and the disdain that both groups have for one other is just plain depressing since we’re all on the same team. As Catholics we do not fall perfectly in line with either party. But that’s for another post.

The new Department of Health and Human Services ruling has people reeling over how the President could make a move that …

I’m going to be honest. At the end of December I was not in a good place. I was unhappy with everything — my home, my relationship with everyone in my life, my spiritual life, my performance at work. Everything. I felt really bad about how I was doing all around. I just kept playing these scenes over and over in my head about times I had screwed up or done something to offend someone or said the wrong thing. I couldn’t get these conversations out of my head.

On my first day of vacation I just couldn’t shake this cloud that was hanging over me. So as I usually do when I’m feeling crummy, I decided to poke around the Internet for something interesting to read to get my mind off of myself. Whoa, did that make everything worse. I read about a mom who homeschools her kids and built a kiln in their backyard to teach them about chemistry and how it applies to pottery and glazing. Then I read about a Notre Dame grad with a beautiful family who is home with them full time, has a really successful sewing business, has great style, and has one of the prettiest blogs I’ve seen. Not to mention she makes her kids really cute clothes. Then there was the mom that was showing her luscious garden and all the beautiful food her family ate from it. I read about a mom who cooks every single meal her family eats and only eats out once a year. Then, to top it off, I read a blog about a mom who had just finished reorganizing and redoing the last room in her house and was showing the befores and afters of her whole home. I remember sitting in our living room with our laptop and Brandon sitting across the room reading. I’m pretty sure that I audibly screamed, slammed the laptop shut, and ran to the closest sugary snack I could find.

I couldn’t admire these women’s accomplishments. I couldn’t appreciate how wonderful …

I always pictured my life differently. I’ve always been a simple girl with simple wants. I pictured that we would have a home without a TV, definitely no video games, a big garden out back where we’d grow a lot of our food, chickens for eggs. We’d make everything, our own clothes, our own laundry soap, etc. A pretty hippy existence all in all. My husband has a totally different picture in his head. He envisions a life where we would have most of the new gadgets that come out on the market. He is really interested in new technologies and how they can be integrated into everyday life. How the iPad or the Kindle Fire or smart phones can help us and actually be learning tools for the girls. Whenever a new piece of technology is released, we inevitably have to have a conversation about it and how it would fit into our life.

I’d say this is the hardest part of our marriage, having to blend my idea of life with his idea of life. This is something that a lot of marriages struggle with. When you get married, you’re not the only one calling the shots about your future. You have to include another person with different desires and goals.

We talk about this a lot. We look at our life, try to stretch it and pull at it and take parts out and patch parts together. We have calm conversations about it. We have heated discussions about it. We have screaming fits about it. We have fights about it that leave me seething and stomping around for days. It’s a tough issue that probably will never fully get figured out.

The other night we were having a rather light-hearted argument about technology and Brandon asked, “Why did you marry me? You knew what you were getting into. You knew how much I love all this stuff.” I half-jokingly responded, “Because you just didn’t have that many gadgets back then. They didn’t exist yet.” Then I asked, “Why did you …

Every year the rollercoaster speed at which the year passes from Thanksgiving to New Year’s is always baffling. Every year I’m caught so off guard when Christmas Eve rolls around that I’m positive that everyone else has their days mixed up. This year was no different.

This year we had both Thanksgiving and Christmas here at our house. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, La Lupe actually made the trek out to Austin to spend it with us. In case you don’t remember the debacle from last year, which was my hostessing skills, it suffices to say that I ended up sitting in a pew on Christmas Day crying because I felt like I had ruined Christmas. That was my first try at being the matriarch of the family. It was a total fail.

But this year was different. Well, a little different. I entered the holiday season determined to mellow out a bit and take things in stride. With La Lupe in town, I knew that I wouldn’t be in complete control of everything. I knew she would call some of the shots. And that made me feel a lot better.

We had 12 people staying with us, so I very carefully planned everything out: meals, activities, Mass, etc. But as I was planning, I repeated to myself over and over that all these things would probably not work out and that it would be ok. Just roll with it.

The holidays started with me getting off of work late and rushing to meet my mom at the grocery store to buy all the food we needed for the week. Apparently the same thing happened to the rest of Austin because it took us 30 minutes to find a parking space, a cart, and get inside the store. La Lupe called us, “We’re 1 hour away.” Dear God. One hour. Ok, we get home and put away groceries just in time for La Lupe’s characteristic knock on the door.

The stakes were high. I really want to prove to La Lupe that I’m …

For the past 18 months, I have seen a man pass our house in his wheelchair every week. He has long, dirty hair, lots of bags, and a bandaged foot. The first time we saw him was startling. If you remember, I previously wrote about how we moved into a suburban-ish area. We were unpacking boxes when we saw him move slowly past our window. He stood out. He wasn’t a twenty-something jogger listening to an iPod, he wasn’t two moms pushing their strollers and chatting, he wasn’t our neighbor walking his dog, he was a sick, slow moving man who, very likely, did not have a home. We stopped what we were doing and peered through our window until he was out of sight.

The more years that separate me from my time at Notre Dame, the more I realize how easy college made certain things in life.  Making friends was easy as I was surrounded by a great community of people with whom I had a lot in common; I never had to spend a lot of energy finding people with similar interests.  We also had Mass in our dorm, which meant we all went to Mass with our closest friends — it didn’t take a lot of extra work to be part of a spiritual community.  In fact, being a theology major and, in general, just being a Domer, it was never difficult to find tons of groups, retreats, events, or volunteer opportunities that guaranteed an awesome spiritual community.

Then I graduated and lived in a Catholic Worker house.  As a community we said daily prayers together, usually attended daily Mass, and were always having discussions about faith and Church teachings and how to live out the Gospel.  It too was a wonderful spiritual community.

Then came Austin — when I finally found out how hard it is to make friends in the “real world”.  There was no longer a guaranteed community.  I was in the world where most people were very different from me and I had to work to find people that I could relate to and be friends with.  As for a spiritual community, this was even harder.  I couldn’t just walk down the hallway with my roommate to go to Mass.  I couldn’t just get dressed and head downstairs for Morning Prayer.  I had to put effort into finding a place to call home.

Ever since getting married and moving to a new part of town, Brandon and I have been bouncing from parish to parish looking for a home.  Parish-hopping if you will.  Between me, the theology major, and Brandon, a complete and total liturgical nerd, we are extremely picky when it comes to finding the right parish.  A good homily is a big deal to me, which immediately narrows down …

While I am partial to things that people may classify as hippie — like peace, love, granola — I don’t very well understand the Occupy movement. I don’t quite understand why people are camping out there. I don’t understand why they can’t just take shifts and then go home. I don’t understand why they are asking for donations of food and clothing. I don’t really want to understand how bathing and bathroom breaks work around there. But what I wholeheartedly agree with is that something needs to be done about corporate greed.

I know there are a lot of reasons for the economic recession but a huge cause of it was some people thinking their pocketbooks were infinitely more important than the people they were swindling. And this has been the model for most corporations. It truly is disgusting. The idea that someone could deceive others, knowing that it would drive others to total ruin, just so they could buy their sixth house off the coast of France is just flat out horrifying. How we have allowed these people to rise to power and stay in power is beyond me.

In Matthew 25:31-46, it is clear how we should treat our neighbors. We have the responsibility to care for them and if we don’t, well, there is no way that we will get to heaven. We cannot love God and ignore the hungry, the homeless, the sick. The idea that business and profit is more important than people is totally contrary to the message of Jesus.

There is a big energy company that I am well acquainted with. They are just as corporate as the next, but they do a lot of good in the community. I know an employee that has worked there a long time. He has been at the forefront of the company’s movement to encourage all of its workers to get active and help in their community. He has encouraged his coworkers to join him in working with the numerous nonprofits he is involved with. Whole departments have gone …

I’ve never celebrated Día de los Muertos. I’ve never heard La Lupe speak of celebrating it, either. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

A lot of people wrongly think that Día de los Muertos is celebrated on Halloween but it is, in fact, celebrated on November 1 — All Saints Day — for babies and November 2 — All Souls Day — for everyone else that has passed away. People mark the day with huge parties/parades and faces painted to look like skeletons. They make elaborate paper maché skeletons or skeleton puppets and dance all through the night. Families set up ofrendas dedicated to deceased loved ones with pictures, flowers, skulls, and food. What is especially touching about the day is that many families go to gravesites of their loved ones and sometimes eat the person’s favorite meal over their grave as a way of breaking bread with them once again.

A good friend passed away last Wednesday. He had fought cancer a long, long time.

Ruben was that cool kid that everyone, and I mean everyone, immediately loved. He just had this vibe. Laid back but totally present. Go with the flow but very purposeful. He was so comfortable with being himself that he emboldened everyone around him to be more uniquely themselves. Everyone felt a little more adventurous and free around him.

Due to my admittedly Amish tendencies when it comes to technology, I was surprised at the wave of sadness that washed over me when I heard of Steve Jobs’ death. The kind of sadness I would feel if someone I knew personally died.

I don’t love Apple, I don’t love iPods, I definitely don’t love iPhones. I honestly don’t know, nor really care about what technology he advanced. I can appreciate his brilliance, his charisma, his aesthetic. He really was the best in his field. I can respect that.

But that’s not what made me sad. Maybe it was partly that he had kids and now some kids out there in the world are without a loving father. Maybe it was partly because he has been fighting cancer for a while and, while he fought the good fight, he was finally called home. Maybe it was a bit jarring the message that it truly doesn’t matter how much money you have or how at-the-top-of-your-game you are — when it’s your time, it’s your time.

What made me sad was that Olivia and I, for months now, have been praying for Steve Jobs. Really, we have been. Our nightly ritual is to pray right before she goes to sleep. We go through our litany of people we pray for. We pray for Mommy, Daddy, Baby Lina, Grandma, Grandpa, Grandpa James, Grandma Bobbie, Ruben, Jen, Christine, and Steve Jobs. I’m not kidding. We have prayed for him by name every single night for months and months. Of course we pray for other family and friends, too, but these are the constants.

While I may avoid technology like the plague, Olivia is just like her daddy. She loves it. Whenever my mom and dad come to visit she gets giddy with the anticipation of playing with their iPhone and iPad. She can work those things like a pro. She can do more on them than I can. She loves Apple. So after a while she started listing the usual suspects during prayer but then also started praying …

I am a perfectionist and a micromanager and am easily overwhelmed. There really is no combination that would result in a more tightly wound person. So it’s safe to say that sometimes I can get really hung up on a problem, and I can take life a little too seriously.

This is usually when something happens that is so random that it just has to be a sign for me to lighten up.

A professor once told us about a time that he was in New York City and was running late to catch a flight. A cab finally pulled over and they proceeded to La Guardia. This professor is a friendly guy. It was going to be a long drive so he tried to strike up conversation about the yoga book that was in the passenger seat, but the cab driver barely spoke English. He saw some tattoos on the man’s hands that he knew to be native to a region of Sudan that he was familiar with. Then he told us, “Only in New York can a fat-faced Irish man talk to a man from Sudan in a cab about yoga in Italian.” Seriously, an Irish man and Sudanese man had a conversation in broken Italian about yoga. Talk about random.

I find that I have moments just like this exactly when I need to have them. Really random moments that are akin to someone taking me by the shoulders and shaking me saying, “Snap out of it.”

One time a friend and I were working away with, seemingly, the weight of the world on our shoulders. The two of us were really stressed and teetering on the brink of a meltdown. All of a sudden, we heard a buzzing sound followed by the smell of smoke. We both jumped up and ran outside our house to figure out what was going on. In the furthest reaches of my imagination, I would have never guessed that the buzzing was the sound of a hair clipper, and the smoke was from a joint. …

This week was one of those weeks when I was so exhausted I didn’t have the energy to filter. Truth – in the sense that it was exactly what I was thinking — was just coming out because I didn’t have the brain cells necessary to stop it. Out of that came one of the most correct observations I think I’ve ever made — deciding to be a teacher is like deciding to be a priest. You avoid it for as long as possible because it’s just so darn hard but, eventually, you have to give in because it’s all that really makes sense.

Deciding to be a teacher, and a good one at that, is a decision that is just as unnerving and avoided as is the call to the priesthood. For all the vocation stories I have heard, most include a period of ignoring God and avoiding this very clear internal compass pointing them toward Holy Orders. They could hear the footsteps of God steadily following every decision they made trying to get away from this vocation until they had to give in to such a persistent pursuant.

This is exactly how I have felt about the vocation to be a teacher. Since I was little I knew I had many qualities that would make a good teacher: patience, good listening skills, compassion, an intense desire to help others, a strange love for rules and procedures, and especially a love for organization. And yet, if you ever asked me what I wanted to be, I never said, “Teacher.” I wanted to be everything under the sun except a teacher. I even wanted to be Kenny G for a while, but never a teacher. What an unglamorous job. No, not a teacher. Never a teacher.

Then I started high school and it became even more clear that I had a natural affinity for teaching. Most of my community service was tutoring, mentoring, teaching CCD classes, leading Vacation Bible School. All teaching positions. But I still turned my back on the idea …

My last La Lupe blog post generated some comments about what people believe leads to so many abortions. You know why I think there are so many abortions? Society no longer associates sex with babies.

If we really stop and think about the most natural things about our bodies, sex creating babies is right up there with being hungry and eating. Sex resulting in pregnancy is the natural order. When we’re hungry we eat. When we are tired, we sleep. When we have sex, we sometimes get pregnant.

But we don’t hear this message anywhere in society. Everything in society tells us that sex is for pleasure. Sex is for fun. Sex is for getting closer to another person. Sex is no big thing. Sex has nothing to do with babies. And this attitude is not just among non-married couples but married couples as well.

When we separate sex from babies then I can see how it might not take a huge leap for some people to believe it is ok to have an abortion. If sex is not “supposed” to end in pregnancy then having an abortion is just getting rid of something that was never supposed to happen in the first place.

A while back I read this article in America magazine that so clearly articulates why it is imperative to change the way society talks about sex. The author writes about her journey from being a pro-choice atheist to a pro-life Catholic. Along this journey, she found that her language changed a lot.

Here are some snippets of her writing that really resonated with me:

“In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies.”

This is so true. The term unprotected sex is thrown around all the time. In fact, when a teenage girl gets pregnant, society does not question her decision to have sex but calls her irresponsible for having “unprotected” sex. The term unprotected sex is very misleading. Any sex outside of marriage is “unprotected” whether using birth control or not. The …

The other day I read one of the most horrific, truly mind-boggling statistics I’ve ever read. But I will get to that in a second. First I want to establish a few points. I am pro-life. Obviously. Hopefully that is clear from my writing. But sometimes I am so embarrassed by the 1% of pro-life people that believe they are furthering the cause when really they are just giving others ammunition against us.

A few months ago I read this post on pro-life euphemisms. The author very articulately scolds pro-life advocates that put their energy into not-so-important hair-splitting instead of something useful. She talks about people who correct mothers that use the phrase “welcome into the world” at their child’s moment of birth. They argue that we “welcome the baby into the world” at conception and “meet for the first time face-to-face” at birth. I read that and said, “Ok, I get your point. Technically this is correct. Nit-picky, but ok, I get it.”

Then a few weeks ago I read this from a pro-life advocate, “A baby should be named as soon as the mother knows she is pregnant, giving that baby a girl and boy name. Deciding to name the child until after they are born only reinforces the thought process that they are not a person until birth. From the moment of conception, they are a child of God, and individual deserving of love and care, by name.”

Ok, now it’s time for that horrible statistic: In New York City, 41% of pregnancies ended in abortion in 2009. Among the black community, the rate of abortions was 60%. Sixty percent. Really, I cannot wrap my head around this.

When pro-choice people rip on pro-life people, their main arguments are that pro-life people are out-of-touch with reality and do not understand the burden that comes with an unplanned pregnancy.

When some pro-life people tell me that my Facebook status of, “We welcomed Maria Catalina into the world Feb 10,” actually degrades our sweet baby’s humanity or when they tell me that we …

This summer, we were lucky enough to spend a week in El Paso. Apart from the obvious great things that come with being in El Paso — La Lupe, La Lupe’s food, La Lupe’s hospitality, the descendants of La Lupe — one of the things I look forward to the most is going to Mass.

Whenever we are in El Paso we attend Our Lady of Guadalupe parish. When we lived in El Paso we were so loyal to this church that I actually thought it was the only church in all of El Paso until I was about 9.

Despite the popular sentiment found in Office Space, the 8-hour workday was a huge victory for laborers burdened with 12-16-hour workdays. 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours sleep seems very reasonable and makes sense. But after I moved to Austin to live in the same city as Brandon, I started to get the feeling that an 8-hour workday didn’t really work for me.

Before I moved to Austin, I never had a real 9-to-5 job. In college, I worked in the dean’s office with other people that lived in my dorm, and I had at least some classes with my roommates. After college I worked at a Catholic Worker house where I lived and worked with the same people. I liked life like this. Home and work were kind of one in the same.

Brandon and I had been dating long distance for a couple of years, and we decided that we needed to live in the same city to truly discern whether or not we wanted to get married. So I moved to Austin and got a regular 9-to-5 job. I didn’t see Brandon every day until 6 or 7 at night. We’d go for a run together, cook dinner, and eat. By then it was usually 9 or 10 p.m. and time to get ready for bed. I moved to Austin to better figure out my relationship with Brandon and I only got to see him 3 hours on weeknights. That did not seem like much. Especially when you further subtract driving time to and from each other’s apartments across town.

The “8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours sleep” breakdown is pretty misleading. Say you work 8 hours and sleep 8 hours. 8 hours recreation = 1.5 hours getting ready in the morning and eating breakfast, 1-hour roundtrip commute to work (if you’re lucky), 1 hour to cook dinner. That leaves you 4.5 hours every day to spend with your family, do any chores that need to be done, workout (if you’re into that kind …

Before coming to write at Busted Halo™ I was already a fan. At that time I was a high school theology teacher so I LOVED how real and relatable everything was on the website. I showed quite a few of the Busted Halo™ videos to my classes, and they loved them. They appreciated that a ministry of the Church was vibrant and modern and tech-y. They ate it up. They were especially impressed with the video explaining the Church’s stance on evolution.

By a completely fortuitous string of events, I submitted my first La Lupe post (after asking permission to write about her), and since then I have really come to value being part of the Busted Halo™ family.

I think that being a young adult is hard but being a faithful young adult is even harder. There is so much transition after leaving college. In college you find insta-friends and don’t have to look far for people that are like you and interested in the same things — for the most part. Then you’re thrown out into the real world. You could move to Seattle and work on an organic farm. You could join the Peace Corps. You could pack fish in Alaska. You could accept that job at Deloitte or ExxonMobil. You could move back in with your parents to save some money (c’mon, we’ve all been there). You could backpack across Europe. You could get married and have babies. You could join the seminary or convent. Ugh. The possibilities are exhilarating and a huge burden at the same time.

Then you do it. You make a choice. From one day to the next you have no friends, are living in a strange and foreign city, and are alone. You continue going to church but you might not really see any other young faces and maybe are too shy to introduce yourself even if you do. It’s at this point that Busted Halo™ is so crucial. For people that may not have found a faith community yet, Busted Halo™ …

Before I met Brandon, whenever I heard of the Knights of Columbus, I pictured a bunch of old, crotchety, white men sitting around selling chicken or pancakes after Mass. I think we’ve probably all had the experience of being at a church event and instructed to do something by a surly old man in a Knights polo that acts as if he is running the show. Needless to say, my impression of the group was negative and I have met a lot of people who are not shy about voicing this same opinion.

Being a Knight, Brandon is always telling me stories about them. He told me how the Knights were actually founded during a time of rampant Catholic discrimination.  The Knights of Columbus wanted to give men a strong Catholic community to help support their family values and maintain their faith during a time of persecution.  Brandon has also told me about how much good they do. It really is amazing. Just a couple of neat facts about them: Every year they give away about $150 million to charitable causes. All the members combined work 70 million volunteer hours a year. After Hurricane Katrina they gave New Orleans $10 million to get the schools back up and running. Every year they give the Pope $1.6 million to use for whatever charitable causes he sees fit. But on a smaller scale, the parish and its members can always count on the Knights for whatever they need. Here in Brandon’s council they helped a widow who was recently confined to her wheelchair. Along with building her a ramp, they raised her flowerbeds and added a walkway in her backyard for her wheelchair so she could still get out there and do gardening from her wheelchair.

I’ve never really encountered or witnessed the Knights in action until a couple of weeks ago. We went to a wedding in a small town outside of Austin. It was for the son of one of Brandon’s fellow Knights. I’ve honestly never been so impressed with a group of …