Man, I don't know about all this snow. Mom says it's farmer's fertilizer or some thing. I think the Farmers made reservations this year...
What a month... I have recently found out that one of my sisters is getting married... in the fall of 09. She is currently living with him in California and hopes to finish College by the summer of 09.
Being Catholic, I don't believe in cohabitation or whatever it's called. I was doing some research on it as a concern and I came up with this: http://www.probe.org/faith-and-sexuality/marriage--family/cohabitation.html#text1 which is an article by Kerby Anderson.
All the things that I read in there basically summed up all that I feel on this subject. I have visited several sites via www.probe.org/ and they are wonderfully informational and Christian. I suppose these people are the ones I would trust to tell me the info I want to know about.
On a different subject......
I once visited a "Mount 2007" retreat in Maryland at Mount St. Mary's Seminary. The theme that year was "Do Whatever He Tells You". They had a Eucharistic Procession on the last night of the weekend. Ever since, I find that if I think about God and His Ultimate Love and Mercy, I start to cry and I feel an aching in my physical heart... When we came back from the retreat, and I told Mom, Cathy and Judy (the last two being two of my sisters), Mom called it the "Gift of Tears". Something that she said was discussed in the "Charismatic Renewal" that my Grandparents had participated in a great deal around the 60s and 70s. Anyway, when I asked Mom what this "Gift of Tears" was exactly, she said "Well, just that. When you are feeling that kind of powerful emotion, you are able to release it in the form of tears instead of keeping it bottled up like some people do. It is a gift in that it cleanses and humbles you." I thought about that for a while but soon excepted it as normality. I have not lost this ability and truly hope I never do. But the thing that made me think about it the other night, Mom and I were driving back the two hour drive from Burlington and we were listening to some casset tapes she'd bought the day before at a Christian book store. The tapes were praise music and one song struck me powerfully as I looked out at the mountainous horizon-line and then up at the unusually starry sky. It was one of those African choirs that was singing beautifully. I pieced together the music with the beauty around me and thought of all God's Gifts to humanity and that's when my "Gift of Tears" started to surface. Mom didn't notice until she heard a small sniffle as I tried to keep my airway clear. She pulled over and asked if everything was all right. By that time, I'd mostly pulled myself together and wiped most the tears away but I still sounded like I had a stuffed up nose, (which I had). I said I was fine but, as they say, 'Mothers can always tell'. When I realised it would be better to tell her what really happened instead of her thinking the worse, I did just that. She was relieved and soon after, continued our journey. After we were settled back on the road, I asked her a little more about what the "Gift of Tears" is, or rather, why it's cleansing. She talked about how some people bottled up their emotions and didn't know how to let it out. Thus, misbehavior and such. For the first time in a while that I understood why it felt good to cry like that.
