Howdy, friends!

Katie and I have been given the honor of starting Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration (PEA) at our parish, St. Louis.  It has been a challenge for me especially, so I would like to ask that you say a prayer that God will start PEA at St. Louis for his glory.

It has been a challenge because I have helped coordinate adoration for the past 4 years (5 days per week, roughly 7 am to 6 pm each day), but we have just enough adorers to cover one per hour, and when someone can’t come anymore, it leaves a hole that is difficult to fill.

It causes the adorers who have a hole after their hour much anxiety to leave the Blessed Sacrament unadored, and it does the same for me as the scheduler because I am partly responsible for it.  more…

What an excellent movie!  My dear sister-in-law, Courtney, gave me “Sophie Scholl” for Christmas, and a few days ago I watched it with Katie and my mom.

I found out about it from Steven Greydanus’ DecentFilms.com review.  He gave it his highest marks in every category, including Moral/Spiritual value.  But it is a German film that only played at one small theater in Austin, and Katie and I weren’t able to see it.

Sophie Scholl is a real woman who lived in Nazi Germany during World War II.  The movie depicts the last days of her life, which finds her protesting against the Nazis with her brother and friends, disseminating tracts about the horrible things that the Third Reich is doing.  more…

 

On this feast of the Holy Innocents, my heart is aching for all those women who’ve had abortions, for those mothers who will never be able to hold their babies, this side of heaven.  And, I’m inspired by the many women who seek healing, using their experience to evangelize others through programs such as Silent No More and Rachel’s Vineyard.

If you’ve had an abortion and are ready to receive the Lord’s healing, or if you’d like to share your experience with others in order to educate about the horror of abortion, the following are a few links for you.  YKC!

Silent No More: http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org/

Project Rachel: http://www.hopeafterabortion.com/

Rachel’s Vineyard: http://www.rachelsvineyard.org/

Our friends, the Brumleys, sent us a unique gift for Christmas: A hive of honeybees!

When I first read about their gift in an email they sent me, I was confused because the picture showed an African woman receiving honey from a man dressed in a beekeeper outfit. I kept reading and realized that the bees were not for us but were for a poor person in another country so that they can become self-reliant by selling honey, beeswax, and pollen.

This gift, given in our honor, was made through Heifer International, an organization that provides different types of animals (and even bees) to people as well as training in how they can make a livelihood through them.  The people given this gift are then held accountable by being required to give one or more of the offspring of their animals to another family.  Cool!

In somewhat related news, my mom told me that our dear next-door neighbor growing up, whom we called “Moon”, had passed away recently.  He kept bees in his backyard right next to ours, and I was fascinated by them.

I expressed interest in them, and one day I got to skip school so that he could take me to some other hives he managed.  I donned the beekeeper suit and was given a smoke can, which is used to drug the bees while you take the honey out of the hives, and we went to work.

It was very neat, and I never forgot the experience.  Katie and I want to keep bees one day, as well!  They are marvelous creatures.

May God rest the soul of my old neighbor, Moon!

 

Hi, readers, and happy final days of Advent!  I haven’t written in a number of weeks, being fully occupied with “pondering things in my heart” and other such worthy efforts.   And, now, it’s nearly the Feast of the Incarnation!

Dev and I have had a deeply blessed Advent, enjoying the light from the candles on our Advent Log and singing the two verses we know of “Oh Come, Emmanuel.”–we seriously need to learn more.  I’ve been blessed by my reading from St. Alphonsus Ligouri on the Incarnation; he offers daily meditations for each day of Advent and closes with a novena preceding the nine days of Christmas.

And, now, we’re off to my childhood home in Deming, New Mexico, to celebrate our first Christmas as the Rose family.  Please pray for our safety as we drive.  May Baby Jesus find His home in your heart and make it His prisoner of love.  YKC!

I just read a great article in our new magazine that our friend Maria K. gave us a subscription to, “Faith and Family”.

Patty Kiernan writes in the first-person about her life. She grew up nominally Catholic (twice-a-year Mass goer). In her mid-twenties, she went to Hollywood to find fame and fortune where she found some small acting jobs and accepted vague New Age beliefs as her religion.

She writes: “Seven years, two dysfunctional relationships, and one child later, I found myself a single mom and frustrated actress. With nominal acting credits and a slew of commercials under my belt, I fled to New York seeking solid ground both physically and emotionally.”

She realized in New York that fame was an empty god who brought no true peace or joy. And it was at this time that God made His move in her life, through her 5-year-old daughter:

I accompanied my daughter and a few other children across the street to a bodega to purchase some snacks for the ride back to school. As we perused the aisles deciding on the perfect post-tortilla-making snack, my daughter stumbled across a shelf stocked with religious candles. She pointed to the one of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns and asked, “Who’s that guy?”. I looked at her blankly. I was stunned at first that she did not recognize Jesus, but it quickly dawned on me that I had never introduced her to him, and plainly replied, “That’s Jesus.”

I thought the tone of finality in my voice was enough to end the line of questioning and move on, but she pursued it. “Why is he crying?” she countered. That was too much. “I will tell you later,” I said. “Let’s go!”

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You may have noticed that Katie and I changed the name of our blog from the old “St. Joseph’s Vanguard” which was appropriately for my bachelorhood and unequivocally masculine, to “St. Joseph’s Vanguard Meets Feminine Genius”, which reflects the complementarity of the masculine and feminine that me and Katie bring to our marriage and subsequently to our blog.

Also, I am going to get around to redesigning our blog image/banner even more “soon”.

Finally, Veronica had a great comment on adoption in the post below, but we haven’t heard from anyone else, and I would really like to hear more of your ideas and opinions about this important matter.

Thanks and God bless you in this second week of Advent!

After reading about David and Mary (posted below), Katie and I have started talking about adoption.

It is too early for us to know whether we will be able to have children of our own flesh or not, but with so many children needing a family here in the U.S. and in the world, the question has come up for us: Should we consider adoption regardless of whether we can conceive on our own?

Would it be strange for us or for our children if we had a mix of adopted and natural children?

If you have thoughts about this, please post a comment–I would enjoy hearing your ideas.

I recently read about a Catholic couple here in Austin, David and Mary, who had been married for 3 years but had been unable to conceive children.

Like many couples in such a situation, they looked into adoption, but instead of going to China or Russia or Guatemala to find the children that God wanted them to adopt, they stayed in Texas and researched foster-care adoptions.  Usually these children are either 1) older, or 2) have some disability, or 3) have to be adopted with their siblings.

Well, there were 5 little girls–sisters–ages 4 – 9, who the state was going to split up because no one would adopt all 5 of them.  No one, that is, until this amazing couple stepped forward and opened up their home to all 5 of the girls!

These once-poor but now very rich little girls had been taken from their birth parents for neglect, gone to a shelter for some time, then to foster-care where they were split up for a while, reunited in foster-care again, but now have found their home.  One of them asked their new mother, Mary, “where will we be sent off to next?”, and Mary told her, “Nowhere.  This is your forever home”.

Let’s hear it for heroic generosity and love.

Katie has had some neat ideas for our first Advent together, and I wanted to share some of them with you:

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