What a Beautiful Day! And Thank God for Rain

It's a beautiful afternoon, here in Sauk Centre, Minnesota: the sort of day the Chamber of Commerce might want you to think is 'typical.' It's about 68° Fahrenheit, enough breeze to discourage mosquitoes, lots of bright sunshine and fleecy clouds.


See what I mean? June 9, 2010

I drove downtown to get a couple errands done - with the van's window down, to enjoy the wind - and combined business with pleasure by stopping by a lakeside park to take pictures for the Sauk Centre Journal. Then I spent a good fraction of an hour sitting outside with my wife, reading.

In short: what a beautiful day!

It's comparatively easy to praise God on a day like this.

The trick is to praise God when gray clouds ooze through a viscous sky, while sullen drizzles suffocate pleasure and that cold I caught seems destined to last forever.

I'll freely admit that I don't do a particularly fine job of remembering to be thankful for just being here, for the incredible gift of salvation, and all that. But I've got to keep trying. The Catholic Church doesn't expect Catholics to feel all 'hallelujah' all the time. The Church does expect us to stay focused on God - even when we don't feel like it.

I've talked about the dark night of the soul before, in connection with Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She went through a quite remarkable 'dry period' in her life. Against which my little spots of spiritual dullness are - trivial.

What I'm trying to figure out at this moment is why, with today's lovely weather, I'm still feeling substantially less than cheerful. And, remembering that God is to be praised: even when - maybe especially when - I don't feel like it.

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:

• "Prayer, Medicine and Trusting God"
  (March 4, 2010)
• "Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Born August 26, 1910"
  (August 26, 2009)
  Particularly
  • "Mother Teresa's Letters and the Dark Night of the Soul"