I mentioned in an earlier post that I have trouble praying the rosary. Quigster challenged me to pray it 2 to 3 times a day for at least a week and give God the chance to “overcome” me with it, which I take to mean in a good way give me interior consolation and joy in praying it.

My laziness is a powerful force, unfortunately, so I think I am going to pass on this challenge. However, in part from this challenge, after daily Mass I have been staying and praying the rosary with the handful of people (most of whom I am friends with) who faithfully pray it everyday. It is a (small) sacrifice for me, as I could get to work a half hour earlier if I just left directly after Mass without staying to pray.

I have tremendous difficulty motivating myself to pray the rosary by myself. I try to go as quickly as possible, which tires me out as I breathe-whisper the words of the Hail Mary rapidly. I have to keep my mind from wandering all over, especially over all the neat things I can do after I finish praying the rosary. My faith in it being the Devil’s scourge and that I am weaving a crown of roses for my Blessed Mother in Heaven are admittedly weak, although I do believe both of those things.

Nonetheless, I have found praying the rosary in a group is 10 times easier and better for me. I enjoy having different people lead the prayers, myself included, and I enjoy the back-and-forth way of splitting up the Haily Mary, Our Father, and Glory Be. It is also easier because usually other people are counting, and so I don’t have to worry about getting off one bead and saying one too many (inefficient) or one too few (was that really a valid decade? ). Offloading this mental accounting energy allows me to focus more on praying and on meditating on Jesus’ life.

One more thing: I think women more than men are (super)naturally disposed to praying the rosary. I don’t have any statistical evidence for that, but it seems true based on a limited sampling of people I know.

Finally, for a heartfelt story of how hard praying the rosary as a family can be, and praying together in general, read this faith-filled article by mum2twelve.

Blessed Mother, pray for us when we entreat you to do so through the rosary–especially when we find praying it difficult.

Today’s the last day in September, so for interest’s sake, here are the top search strings through which people found this blog and my personal website:

Top 20 of 256 Total Search Strings
# Hits Search String
31 vanguard and (piracy or virus or firewall or hack or pin or sab
11 processlogger.exe
11 winmsc32.exe
10 elliot segal
9 catholic courtship
8 danielle bean
6 devin rose
5 saltine challenge
4 catholic game
3 blessed mother songs
3 kevin waruinge
3 priesthood and discernment and anxiety
3 review of joan of arc book by beevers
3 songs of mother mary
3 st. joseph’s vanguard
3 u2 theology
3 warhammer 40k starter kit
3 when did st. joseph die
2 anakin padme not believable
2 angry twins blog

The website’s statistics program isn’t that great because there are other strings that I see very often with slight variations, but they don’t show up because they get counted as different (unique) strings. Tomorrow begins the month of October with my patron saint, St. Therese of Lisieux’s feastday! May the Little Flower of Jesus pray for you today.

I went over to the Kress family’s house tonight after work just to hang out with them. They have five children, ages 3 through 16, and are a Catholic family.

I love to hang out with them and am blessed to be friends with them. I have a lot to learn about what a Catholic family is like, and how to be a good Catholic husband and father, since I was not raised in a Catholic or even Christian home.

Before I left for home tonight, Jeff (the Dad) asked me what they could pray for me about.

Me: “Two things: purity and my future wife.”

Jeff then gave me advice he had given me before, but which I need to hear regularly. From the last time he told this wisdom to me until now I have begun to understand and believe it.

It is this: the man pursues the woman, but he also remains detached from and confident in who God has made him to be. The man must say, “This is the man I am–a man of God. Right here is where I am establishing myself, preparing my home and self for the woman God has created for me. Here is the way I am going: to Heaven and I am going to lead my family there. Woman, do you want to join me in this amazing journey?”

It is the woman’s God-designed role to then choose whether this man is who she wants, whether this is the direction she wants to go in.

Some women want to lead and take the man’s role. This reversal is backwards and unhealthy. If you are a man who is striving to become the man God made you to be, you should not let yourself be so stricken by a woman that you allow this situation to occur. Rather, you must be strong in who you are and in what God is working in you, and with humble confidence take your stand and invite a woman you are pursuing to come along with you.

This notion sounds chauvinistic to our modern, emasculated ears, but I believe Jeff is right on about it, and I pray and resolve to become a man like this.

So, I admit my nothingness before God and my total dependence on him for strength. Here I am, in Austin, Texas, and this is the place I take my stand. I am blessed with a great career and tremendous grace to become a man like St. Joseph. I am preparing myself body, soul, and heart for my future wife and family, and I want to lead her and my children in a blessed life of Christ to Heaven. [To any potential future wife God's leads me to pursue:] Do you want to join me in this journey?

The G is in Europe this week, so I’m flying solo at the house tonight. “Somewhere North”, by Caedmon’s Call, started playing through our G-connected iTunes Airport speaker system.

It’s a love song that is kind of slow and a bit melancholic. Well, it gave me the great idea to make an iTunes playlist with songs that I can sing for my future wife. I try to sing each song as a prayer to God for her, and it makes the songs that much more meaningful.

Here are some of the songs:
I Love You Always Forever (Robert’s bane)
Godsend
The Fly
Beautiful Girl
Wait for Me
Somewhere North
Time of My Life
No More Cry
Heaven is a Place on Earth
Love & Affection
I’d Die Without You
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now
Wait for Me
Pure
Glory of Love
Breathless
Countin’ On a Miracle
Measure of a Man
Just Like Heaven
Disappear
At Your Side
All I Want Is You

Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for Me” is intentionally on there twice, as that song is just perfect for single Christian men and women to listen to and sing. I think Rebecca is still single but so far she hasn’t called me to get to know each other. Perhaps she doesn’t know about my l337 bouncing ball screen saver?

Waiting for her is hard for me, but good. I know God is teaching me lessons right now as a single Catholic man. Even so, I DID ask that he speed up the time that her and I meet by a factor of 50. For such an outrageous request, I knew I couldn’t get it by praying alone, so I asked the Little Flower to obtain the grace (and maybe our Blessed Mother–I usually ask her to help always). I patiently explained to God that that meant if he had planned for her and me to be married in 50 years, that time would now be only 1 year, and that if it were 50 days til we were to meet, it would be only 1 day!

It’s been a few days since Sunday when the adoration article went out to parishioners at St. Louis, and so far no one has contacted me to sign up for an hour.

Rather than being disappointed, I continue to ask our Blessed Mother to pray that God will inspire someone to sign up, even just one person. I have done my best with it, and so I accept these results as God’s will.

That doesn’t mean I am going to give up, but I will take from this that a parish newsletter article may not be the best way to invite people to adoration. I understand the reluctance of people wanting to sign up–it takes up one hour a week from your life, and most of us are careful about making such commitments because our time is precious.

I won’t say that others are selfish with their time, but I admit that I am, viewing it as my time and not God’s time.

Praise be Jesus Christ, now and forever, amen.

I am blessed to be friends with a very dear elderly couple named the O’Sullivans. They are Irish through and through, accents and all, and they are so faithful.

John and Margaret

They go to daily Mass, and Margaret always offers intercession for victims of abortion and preborn babies. They have been in the St. Vincent de Paul society, of which I was also a member, and whenever we passed out the cases for the week and asked who took which case, they would call out: “The O’s have it!” indicating they took that particular case.

After daily Mass, they always pray the Rosary. I usually don’t pray it and instead just go to work, but today I stayed for it. It felt great to pray it, and time flew by. After we finished, John O’Sullivan came up to me:

John: “Devin, I never see you with a girl here at Mass or around.”

Devin: “It’s not through lack of effort! I’m open to meeting a nice young Catholic girl and have been keeping a look out for her.”

John: “Well, I know a nice young girl who goes to the same Sunday Mass Margaret and I go to. Would you be interested in meeting her?”

Devin: “I would be delighted to.”

Now, whether or not this girl and I ever meet, or if we do, whether or not we become friends or anything beyond, I was so thankful to God for blessing me with such kind friends. The O’s are in their seventies or eighties, and they are just awesome. How blessed I am that they thought of me!

As I walked to my car to go to work, I imagined how wonderful it would be to be an eighty year old man and go to daily Mass with my wife everyday, having spent our entire life together in love. May it be…

I get disappointed fairly often. I hope for some situation to turn out in a certain way, and if it does not, I feel disappointed to one degree or another.

Disappointment over things out of my control is a waste of time and energy. So, taking wise advice from the My Daily Bread devotional, I am going to do my best with things and then accept the results as God’s will.

That last part is the difficult one for me. If I truly believe that God wills all things for my good each day, then that means graciously accepting whatever he allows to happen to me with confidence that it is truly what’s best for me, even if I cannot see how at the time.

I am pretty far away from being able to do this on a regular basis, but I did it once tonight in facing a disappointing situation. You can try it, too! When you feel frustrated with someone or something that has happened, reflect on whether you did your best on the matter, and if so, turn to God and say, “Okay, Lord, this is the way you wanted it to happen, so I accept it as your brilliant will.”

We’re all gonna be saints in no time!

Oooh, another language. What can it mean?

It’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in Spanish! And after over a year of slow and sometimes laborious reading, I completed it, thanks be to God! On my trip to Thailand, I had lots of time to read, and I comprehended much more, until finally I didn’t even need to look back at my English translation. It was really cool to read an entire book in another language.

I took Spanish in high school for three years, but then in college I wasn’t required to take it, since I was a nerdy electrical engineering major and had taken 2 years in high school already. Now I wish I had taken it in college. Still, I wanted to learn it better, so I bought a textbook and the Fellowship of the Ring. Since I had read the Lord of the Rings many, many times in my life, it helped a lot because I already knew the gist of many passages.

What to do now? I need the second book in the series, “The Two Towers”! Providentially, a friend of mine in New York (who incidentally is a nice Catholic girl) gave me “Las Dos Torres” as a gift last Christmas when I made a trip to visit her.

Note the Lord of the Nazgul flying on the evil winged beast by the Dark Tower. Soo evil! John Howe is the artist, and he was one of the two main artistic influences on the Lord of the Rings movies.

To put it in perspective, if you tried to fight against a Ringwraith in real life, it would be like a very puny man trying to fight against the Incredible Hulk, or perhaps against a ninja (with a sword or throwing stars). Yeah I know–impossible! And yet a little hobbit and a woman slew this evil lord and his fell beast. Kind of resembles the Woman fighting the Dragon in Revelation, eh? Tolkien was a Catholic after all, may God rest his soul.

Let the Spanish reading continua!

This is Devin posting on the G’s Macintosh. I just remembered that the parish newsletters are being passed out tomorrow after Sunday Masses at St. Louis, and so many people will be reading the adoration article I wrote, with the invitation to sign up for an hour.

So, I just had a great idea–to make a promise to God.

I promise you, Lord, to pray one Rosary for every person whom you inspire to sign up for adoration.

God knows how much I struggle with praying the Rosary, so I hope he will receive my desire to make this small sacrifice and make it a big one by inspiring HUNDREDS to sign up!

I wrote an article on my personal website about overcoming pornography addiction.

If you are a man who has been struggling with this addiction, you may find some ideas to help you. If you are a woman who has a man in her life (boyfriend, fiancee, husband, son) who has an addiction, go read the article and if you feel it would benefit your loved one, send it to him.

I probably don’t have to tell you what an evil pornography is and how it undermines men’s hearts and lives and their most important relationships with their wives. But God is greater than even these tricks of Satan. God can overcome any addiction, including this one.

May St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother pray for us all, for holy purity!