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Answer “yes” or “no”

1. Do I have community? Not just friends, but a community of people with whom I feel I belong and am loved and accepted by?
2. Am I free from hatred / anger / bitterness / jealousy from all former failed relationships?
3. Am I ready to get married within the next year or two?
4. Have a spent serious time “discerning” (prayerfully finding out) my “vocation” (calling) in life? And am I reasonably sure I’m called to marriage?
5. Am I ready to be totally honest within this dating relationship?
6. Have I experienced substantial healing from any abuse, trauma, or serious neglect in my past or present ? (Note: not total healing, which is only possible in heaven….but enough healing to be able to give and take in a healthy emotionally mature way)
7. Am I ready to give to another person in an unselfish way, putting aside my wants and needs when required by love?
8. Am I finished with any needed schooling (or will be finished within a year or two) and do I have a means of supporting myself and my future family? (or will I have this within a year or two)
9. Do I have a strong foundation in my relationship with God, the Source of all true love? This includes daily prayer, church attendance, trying to follow God’s commandments, humble repentance, etc.
10. Have I gotten to know well the person I intend to date…including having met their family…and have I built a friendship with this person over a substantial period of time (before dating)?

A very simple thing happened today that helps me explain a common phenomenon in human interactions: I waited too long to eat and was starving!! So when I made myself a hotdog, it tasted like THE BEST HOTDOG I HAD EVER TASTED!!! Was it the best? No. Why did it taste that way? Because my perception of the hotdog changed based on my experience.  This was very real to me! The hotdog tasted great!! But I could step back and reason that it didn’t make sense for it to taste so great because it was the same brand hotdog I had had many times before, cooked the same way.  I knew that the reason why it tasted so much better today was because of my extreme hunger.

While this is easy to understand when it comes to something like food tasting better when we’re hungry…its more difficult to apply to our other human interactions. We don’t realize how often our perception of something…words spoken, someone’s behavior, a situation, …is colored by our own experiences. We think we are perceiving what is real…while we are merely perceiving what seems real to us, based on our own experience.

So what do we do? Always doubt our perceptions of everything? Not at all. Merely having a certain humble self-awareness that there may be another side to what I see can help us be open to another’s equally valid perceptions. It can open doors to real communication and help avoid a lot of needless arguing. Good communication is not just expressing how I feel. That’s self-expression. Communication involves each person being open to the other’s thoughts, views, feelings as being equally valid to one’s own. It also involves knowing that what we communicate may not be received by the other as we intended.  Of course whatever I say makes perfect sense to me! That’s why I’m saying it! But communication involves another, and so doesn’t end with my perfectly stated point. How is the other person receiving what I’m saying? Are they getting something other than what I intended? A good communicator is always looking to try and find this out…and always willing to adjust their communication accordingly…trying to achieve mutual understanding.

We can’t be satisfied with staying in the enclosed world of our own great-tasting hotdog… just expecting everyone else to understand why its so great…and thinking its “their problem” if they don’t!   We need to make efforts to understand and to adjust our words and actions to be more understood, if possible. Life this side of heaven will never be perfect communication! But at least we can make efforts with God’s grace to build bridges. That’s the only way to get ready for the family reunion that heaven will be!

On the wall in the Children’s home directed by Mother Theresa:

People are often unreasonable, irrational and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you;
Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight;
Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten;
Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

– attributed to Mother Teresa

Spend your money!! Go out and have fun!! But remember to repent of your sins by December 12, 2012. Why?  Because rumor has it…the world is going to end on that day. What to think? For a Christian who knows the Bible, this is a no-brainer. Jesus says in Mt 24:36 “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” NO ONE knows the exact day or hour when the world will end.  We have that for a fact on the authority of Our Lord Himself. So all these precise day-and-hour predictions are crazy or misguided at best.

What’s the Christian response to the end of the world? We should live EACH day as if it were our last because there are 2 things we don’t know 1) when the world will end as Jesus returns in glory 2) when we will die.  What does it mean to live each day as if it were our last? It means to live the Christian life each day as best we can.  It means to spend time each day in prayer, to receive the sacraments regularly, to attend church, to keep the Commandments, to repent whenever we sin, to seek to grow in the life of virtue especially love of God and others. Jesus says to “keep watch and pray”  Mk 13: 33 because we do not know when He will come again.  This life is not our true home.  Heaven and hell are forever. The choice is ours…and it begins TODAY.