Practicing Practicality - Help for the Confused, Disorganized and the Scatterbrained

I'm not the most organized person on the planet - not by a long shot. I seem to be quite incapable of following Orders and Rules. By Orders and Rules I don't mean laws and earthly stuff. I mean the type of Rules the saints write about that lead one to a holy life. I read the books and decide to put these wonderful teachings into place ...and then I promptly forget about most of them. Not on purpose. You see, the truth is:

I AM SCATTERBRAINED, CONFUSED, AND DISORGANIZED. May God bless all the well-put- together folks on the planet but...I am not one of them. I surround myself with notes and reminders and then forget where I put them. I LOSE things all the time. I put stuff in the wrong places. On any given day my husband may find ice cream in the cabinet or peanut butter in the freezer. I once forgot to take the cardboard off the bottom of a frozen pizza before cooking it and tossed it in the oven, paper and all. And the reason I had to cook a frozen pizza is because I forgot to take the meat for our meal out of the freezer.

Welcome to my world. I simply could not function without the grace of God. And I'm talking practical graces here. Oh, I like the fancy graces as much as the next person, who wouldn't? But the graces I have to pray for the most are the practical ones or I'd stumble around in circles all the time. I even pray for the grace of remembering God is always with me...or else I'd probably forget HIM, too. Don't think I'm exaggerating. I'm not.

God knows that I have tried to be more organized. If I'm being honest, I believe God thinks my bumbling efforts to please Him are rather sweet because He sure likes to ply me with many, many graces - both the ordinary ones I need so much and extraordinary ones that He sends as reminders of his amazing love. Perhaps He's following the "No Child Left Behind Rule" in my case. It doesn't seem to matter a great deal to Him whether I pass or fail. I am really beginning to understand that it's not WHAT we do but the LOVE we do it with that concerns Him. So I have my own "Rule" and though it may not be extremely productive in a physical worldly sense  it seems to please God spiritually and so in my next post I will share some practical ways for those who are confused, disorganized, and scatterbrained to "not get left behind".

God is both practical by nature and hugely IMPRACTICAL in his love for us. When his beloved children reach their hands out to him, He hears them and helps them.  His ways are not our ways though. Sometimes the things we want to do are only big in the eyes of the world. Look at the Little Flower, St. Therese - her holiness lay in her smallness. She did little things with great love. And she's a Doctor of the Church.  Not everyone is called to build huge monasteries for the Lord. (Obviously, some ARE called to do such things. Their sanctity, however, had nothing to do with the huge edifices they left behind but with the LOVE in which they built them. They did everything for God and they did it through grace.) We, too, can learn to do everything with great love. There is hope for the confused, the disorganized and the scatterbrained. We can take a page from God's book and do practical little tasks with an impractical love. To help us with this we start by asking the Lord for a constant awareness of Him in both our hearts and our minds. I'm not talking about a feel-good sense of his presence but a constant awareness of his presence whether one feels good or not.  This is a great gift and one He will not refuse those who ask for it with pure (or somewhat pure) intentions. The intention being to glorify God in our daily lives...whatever that daily life might be comprised of. And I really mean whatever. Whether you are a mother, a student, a retired person, or bedridden due to illness - God has sanctified every aspect of your existence in the person of Jesus Christ and by uniting your life with Jesus' life every person can become a saint. Why would we want to do this? Because for those who want to be with God:

Becoming a saint isn't optional...it's mandatory