And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
—   Corinthians 13:13

*waves* Hey! Happy New Year and welcome to 2012. I hope you and yours had a lovely New Year. When I decided to stop writing about myself I assumed this first post of 2012 would be about the new and returning TV shows for the winter season. But then a happy confluence of events came together and put me in a more thoughtful headspace.

During this last week I’ve watched quite a few movies. Yesterday I watched An Affair to Remember and Seabiscuit.  The moral of Seabiscuit is even the most broken among us (man and beast) can blossom and succeed and heal with love and encouragement. We can again be whole and grow in the light of love. Seabiscuit’s original owners trained him to lose to other horses so the other horses he lost to would gain confidence. He learned to become a loser until Tom Smith saw greatness in him and loved him into the inherent greatness that was his birthright. In fact, each character in the movie was in some way broken. The last line of the movie is,

“You know, everybody thinks we found this broken-down horse and fixed him, but we didn’t. He fixed us. Every one of us. And I guess in a way we kinda fixed each other too.”

Inspired by these words and refreshed by an afternoon nap we made our way to 6pm mass at St. Mary’s in Williamstown. As it turns out the church is holding a mission this week and so the visiting Redemptorist priest who is giving the mission gave the homily. In what can only be described as serendipity he spoke about how there are those who stay away from Jesus because they fear that he wants them to go through trials and to suffer. He said that if you were to get to know Jesus you would know that he does not want us to suffer or endure trials. This, by the way, is what I believe about God. Father was a wonderful speaker I very much enjoyed listening to him speak. His words brought to mind the story my father tells about finding the church in the fog.

I told this story on the blog in January 2010 but this past October we were lucky enough to have dad in the car with us on a ride down to Cape May. He was able to point out the actual church so we got out and took a few photos, which you see throughout this post.

Dad quit drinking 28 years ago. He struggled for many years after that with the desperate want (need) for a drink. He was a truck driver back then. He’s retired now. Early one morning as he was driving a load of cardboard to Cape May he was in desperate need of a drink and driving through heavy fog on a small two-lane rural highway in southern New Jersey. The fog was quite heavy and so he began to look for a place to pull over until it cleared. Somehow he found a parking lot and pulled in. Sitting in the truck he fell asleep. I don’t want to embellish here so I can’t tell you whether or not dad asked God for help. When he woke up the fog had cleared and his desperate need of a drink had passed. As it turns out the parking lot he’d found was a small Christian church along Rte. 47 in southern New Jersey.

With love we are healed.

I’ll be back later this week with pop culture, politics and a healthy dose of shallowness. Thanks for reading!

Love,

~ Carol Anne