Written On Our Hearts

Our entire seventh grade class had been warned about our behavior. Instead of posing for a picture we decided to play a pickup game of basketball in the gym. We were reprimanded for being disobedient and defiant during our opportunity to take the traditional “incoming eighth graders class photo.” Our teacher, Mrs. Cullen was not only angry at our insubordination but also perturbed that the one photo she managed to take she thought we looked like “disheveled hooligans” instead of “nice Catholic school children.” Clearly, our picture was not making it into the St. Patrick’s Easter bulletin. Now that she had managed to gain control of us again, we were about to be walked back to her classroom for more academic enrichment. Many of us, myself included, still had “the naughty giggles” and some left over energy from our unfinished game of basketball. This being evident, she said, “anyone who makes a sound on the way back to class will be punished”, as we started walking. Personally, I ...

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; in Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the Church; He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, that in everything He might be pre-eminent  ~ Colossians 1:15-18 It was an early spring Friday afternoon, my little brother and I got off the school bus and walked the familiar two blocks home. As we approached our house we could hear the sound of chainsaws and soon noticed a crew of so-called “landscaping professionals” just about finishing the removal of our neighbor's apple tree. While the roots of this particular tree were definitively on our neighbor's property, the branches hung over a fence by our vegetable garden providing some shade and blocked the view to an ugl...