October is my favorite month of the year! I love the cooler weather, football Sundays, apple picking, apple pies, apple crisps, cooking in the oven(there's a homemade chicken pie cooking as I type), wearing sweatshirts, the changing leaves, apple cider....I could go on and on!
October is the month of our Anniversary! 23 years on the 24th!
October is also a month filled with some power house saints! There's no waiting, either! Right from the get go, October arrives ushering in the littlest power house of a saint, St. Therese of Lisieux!
I love the Little Way of St. Therese. She's a saint that everyone can emulate because she spent her life focusing on doing little things with great love. Those "little things" are really hard to do well! A hundred times a day I have opportunities to do little things with great love! Yet, so often, I totally miss the chance!
St. Therese has popped into our lives in special ways over the years. I read a random prayer to St. Therese while dusting in the late summer of 1997. In late September, early October, a dead rose bush in our yard started to bloom and produced lots of roses! We named our first daughter, conceived by the doctor's calculation on October 1st of that year, Therese Elizabeth. During our Therese's short life, God was very present in so many ways. One of the moments that has stuck out the most was the gift of a single rose that our next door elderly neighbor brought over the day we brought our daughter home from the hospital. It was the most beautiful rose I have ever seen. It bloomed fully and perfectly, as did our daughter, when God brought our Therese home to Himself at 2 am the next morning.
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| Not a pic of our rose...but it was orange and beautiful like the one in this pic! |
More recently, St. Therese has been on my heart after finding a book in Adoration. It's a mini retreat book that focuses on how God's love poured into St. Therese and how she returned His love so perfectly, that the love spills over as grace for the world.
Another "St. Therese Moment" for me started with a question from a very good friend's conversation with my Sarah. Sarah asked me, "Mom, what's the area that is the focus of your mothering?" It took me a little while, but when I really pondered the question, the answer was, "Love. Trying to make sure that each of you feels loved as much as I can. Even in the little things."
By little things I mean: buying someone's favorite treat because it catches my eye at the store. Cooking someone's favorite meal. Creating a menu every week that includes at least a couple of meals I know that my pickiest eater will like...and making extra so he has leftovers. Spending time listening to my older kids late at night when I'd rather just go to bed. Giving thanks that I seem to always be the one that gets to change an empty toilet paper roll. Always looking for God's inspiration to make any of them(and all of them) feel special.
I think that's why I love St. Therese's little way! I'm just a mom, but all the little things that I do in love can do big things!
Another friend from our parish sent out a link to a St. Therese Novena last week. I'm not usually good at doing novenas...and I'm a day behind because I forgot one day. But over the course of the novena, all of the things that I've prayed for have had either answers or opened a path for the next step I need to take. Thank you, St. Therese!
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| I put on my Jamberry Nails with a rose design today to honor St. Therese and our little Therese, too! The flowers were a surprise from Jay last week, "Just because"! :) |
Happy October!
