It’s Been a While and Where I’ve been

Well, hello there! It’s been a while!

Truth be told, it’s been one of those summers where I was just keeping my head above water. We had graduation parties and home improvements and we were getting ready for an epic family pilgrimage adventure, following the footsteps of St. Paul in Greece.

I have to admit, I lost a lot of sleep over this trip. I can’t explain it but to say that the world has gone a bit crazy and to leave the shire that is our home and step into the craziness of bureaucracies and rising covid numbers in far off lands — in the middle of this never-ending pandemic — was a wee bit much for this mamma’s heart to handle.

Three weeks back, I almost called it quits.

I had been up for a third night in a row worried about all the what-if’s of traveling to Greece and trying to solve the mental gymnastics of having to get rapid tests 48 hours before our arrival in Greece when we needed to show the results before boarding the plane and we had a 10 hour layover in Paris — which would technically bring us to 50 hours since our test time and possibly have us stranded in a sort of Limbo in Greece, our entry to the country barred.

Some reccomended we take the PCR test becuase it gave us a 72 hour window, but for our particular circumstances, we have already had Covid and sometimes you can test positive for months — and a positive would require us quarantining in a far off land or never getting on our plane in the first place.

As you can see, I had reason to want to call it quits. It was way too complicated.

I turned to John after a particular trying night of worry and asked, “Should we just cancel this trip? I’m ready to give it all up.”

Thank goodness for John. He said, “absolutely not. Let’s go for it”.

This was the point I realized something about this entire family pilgrimage: the pilgrimage began weeks before we got on that plane. This pilgrimage was going to be our most ambitious trip yet. We were literally throwing ourselves into the belly of the beast of the craziness of the last year and a half — we were risking a lot — but I also felt there was something important about this trip.

I realized how little I trusted God. I realized that my faith was very, very weak and that I’ve been kidding myself about how I had grown as a Catholic. The truth is, I was always trying to control everything because I was afraid that if I didn’t, disaster would follow.

I realized that I had very little faith in my FATHER IN HEAVEN. I also realized that lack of trust was holding me back from a deeper and more profound relationship with Him. I knew this pilgrimage was about TRUST AND MY LACK OF IT!

So, I began to pray for greater trust. I found myself saying “Jesus I trust in you”. every moment I felt fear creep up. I began to pray to our Lady, Undoer of Knots and asked her to undo the knots of this trip. We began to develop a closeness with Joseph and St. Paul, Sr. Faustina and the merciful HEART OF JESUS.

Then, I began to follow the lead of the Holy Spirit’s promptings and try to do whatever I felt I was begin asked to do. The morning before we left, our family drove to a testing site and we all took our first of 3 tests necessary to get to Greece and get home.

The woman walked up with gospel music blaring out of her phone. The words of the song, “you must have faith.” Coincidence, I think not. On the way home, I said a simple prayer out loud, “Lord, if we’re not meant to go, let one of us have a positive”.

A few hours later we got our “negatives”. The trip was on!

Then I sat on hold for 3 hours with Delta, as I took care of last minute packing and laundry. I prayed the memorare as I waited and asked Our Lady, Undoer of Knots to undo the knots of this trip — gotta say, she delivered.

The agent worked a miracle and got us on a flight that avoided Paris and gave us an entire extra day in Greece — and for no extra skymiles. Amazing!

This meant we could secure a driver to take us to Corinth for the day and see the ancient city of Corinth and visit the places St. Paul landed in Greece and began his mission of preaching the Gospel. It was seriously amazing! It helped me feel closer to St. Paul and see a tenderness in him that I never saw before.

So much more I could say, but over the next few weeks, I’ll try to share more. Just getting back into the swing of things here and I have a mountain of laundry to attend to.

Have a lovely weekend!