40 hours of life

Fr. Denis came to the Hospital about 1 A.M. and performed the baptism

One week ago yesterday our sweet baby boy came into the world at 12:22 am and was baptized not long after that.  The months of waiting, the last couple of months of wondering if the ultrasound would be correct......were.  It all seems so incredibly fast now.  We found out that something was wrong with our precious baby eight and a half weeks ago.  Even the long waiting all of July for him to come, seems like a blink of an eye now.  And then his forty hours of life....did it all really happen?

resting together after his birth

He was not able to nurse, but was comforted by NG tube feedings every couple hours

I really really really thought that he really really really would have a  miracle in his little body.  Even though I prayed for God's will and felt at peace before his birth about his death in my heart, I thought that if God only healed one thing.  If his heart was healed then they could do surgery on the other things.  If God healed his diaphragm then he would be strong enough for the other surgeries.  Every time I went forward to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, I felt like the woman who just knew that if she could just touch the edge of His garment she would be made well.  I knew that if I could just receive Jesus, He could make my baby well. I filled the freezer with easy things for the girls to make meals with so I could be in the hospital with the baby for as many weeks as it took.  We made a schedule so that life at home could have a routine that worked as Mark and I spent time with the baby and his needs.  Whatever it took, I was up to the challenge and as I held my sweet baby boy in the hospital as he was slowly passing away  I told him "I would do anything in the world for you. anything".

What a joy to take care of Mark-Jerzy for the 40 hours

How do I go from missing his presence to being thankful that he is where I should long to be.  My heart aches and my arms are empty, how do I feel thankful for the precious forty hours that I held him, taking in his sweet newborn baby smell, kissing his little deformed hands and feet, telling him how much I love him.

I have been wondering why.  Not "why God did you do this to us?",  But there seems to be so much purpose in his little life.  Purpose in the pregnancy.  Purpose in us being here in KC.  Why God, why did you give us him?  What is it you are teaching us?  His brothers and sisters who have been loving him since they found out that he was coming.  He gave the world Mark-Jerzy for forty hours. Why?  What is it that You are teaching us?

The kids singing with Jon during communion at the funeral mass

This is the song we listened to during labor, afterwards, Jon sang at the funeral mass, and continue to listen to.

      Mark and I have been reading Interior Freedom, by Jacques Philippe. On the day after Mark-Jerzy's Funeral we picked it up and read the following:

       "It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. It is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to chose to accept what we did not want, and even we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here; one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!

To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control."

Prayers by St. Francis De Sales




O love eternal,
my soul needs and chooses you eternally!
Ah, come Holy Spirit,
and inflame our hearts with your love!
To love - or to die!
To die - and to love!
To die to all other love
in order to live in Jesus' love,
so that we may not die eternally.
But that we may live in your eternal love,
O Saviour of our souls,
we eternally sing,
"Live, Jesus!
Jesus, I love!
Live, Jesus, whom I love!
Jesus, I love,
Jesus who lives and reigns
forever and ever.

Amen.


 Be at Peace

Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life;

rather look to them with full hope as they arise.

God, whose very own you are,

will deliver you from out of them.

He has kept you hitherto,

and He will lead you safely through all things;

and when you cannot stand it,

God will bury you in his arms.



Do not fear what may happen tomorrow;

the same everlasting Father who cares for you today

will take care of you then and everyday.

He will either shield you from suffering,

or will give you unfailing strength to bear it.

Be at peace,

and put aside all anxious thoughts and imagination.
St. Francis de Sales 1567-1622

Mission Formation: St. Lucia style

North and West from here in St. Lucia, at Big Woods every Wednesday night, people in the community, as well as state-side missionaries in Louisiana, join together for Mission Formation.  This is a wonderful evening of food, fellowship and worshiping together.  At least once a month they have mass and the other weeks they have...well the formation of missionaries.  We give testimonies,sharing what the Lord is doing in our own lives, in the lives of those the missionaries are reaching and then there is a topic pertaining to the missionary life (which by right of baptism we are all called to be) that encourages, teaches, and inspires.  In another word, catechesis. 
Since our experiences from living at the Big Woods last year during Intake (our missionary training time) we have desired to have a night like that in our mission post.  A lot of times our desires are brought to fulfillment but not always the way we had originally thought.  Now that we have been here for a couple of months, we are starting to see the fruition of having a Mission Formation night come to pass.  Instead of Wednesday night our family tradition of Sunday night desert is morphing into Mission Formation.  Praise the Lord!

The Food

Tonight Mia made pineapple upside down cake.  Yum Yum Mia!

The Worship

                                                     

The Testimonies

Jessica sharing a testimony

Our mission formation night is small, well considering our own family still outnumbers those who come, but it is still a blessed time of talking about Jesus and encouraging one another.  We pray to see this grow.  Pope John Paul II on Catechesis in Our Time writes:

"If catechesis is done well, Christians will be eager to bear witness to their faith, to hand it on to their children, to make it known to others, and to serve the human community in every way.”

And, as missionaries, this is always our job; to work ourselves out of a job

Trip to Family Missions Company down South

We had an amazing time in Abbeville, Louisiana. The Family Missions Company (FMC) truly is a people of Praise and Prayer. I will write more about our time there soon, all went well and we feel confirmed in our calling, not because they said "yep, you are called to Missions" when in fact they did not say this at all. In fact they said they would welcome us but only we can decide if God is truly calling us.