10/4/2023

Hello Blog Readers,

I’ve been attending the International Catholic Stewardship Council (ICSC) Conference this past week here in Orlando, and it’s been quite the rewarding, spiritually charged, motivating experience. Perhaps it’s the timing of other things that are happening in my life right now, but after spending much of the week in deep prayer and listening to my professional colleagues’ experiences from across the country, I’m feeling deep stirrings within my heart right now. The sort of feelings, confidence, and trust in the Lord that I haven’t really felt since making that big decision a little over two years ago, to step forward from Red Bluff towards a new chapter in my life.

Who would have thought that God would have moved my heart here in a place like Orlando – a place that I made fun of just a few days prior, and at a convention center that (but for a Jesus poster hung by the event organizers) seems as secular as they come? But after the past few days, I’m feeling (a) ready to return to Marquette with both some new ideas and some new bravery to implement my own ideas; and (b) ready to further discern and reflect on where it is that I feel God is leading me. Because if what I’m feeling is true, then I’m inching towards an absolute spiritual avalanche of goodness, explanation, affirmation, and love in my life where God is finally answering not a few of my prayers; not this prayer or that prayer; but all of my prayers going back to even my earliest prayer in my early 20’s, which was the prayer that I whispered on the desert winds in my town of Red Bluff during a summer run to the end of Payne’s Creek Road, back when I was 24 years old and first accepted my Catholic upbringing and truly came to the Catholic faith. As with my last blog entry, I unfortunately have to remain vague on what I mean by all of these words for the time being, but I will say that during this past week, as the little signs, hints, and pieces have all been coalescing and coming together, several times I fell into a deep prayer during the Eucharist at our daily masses, and each time, instead of just hearing or feeling silence, I felt something so electrically charged, so loud, and so uplifting in my heart, that it was almost shouting at me to hold on, stay patient, and not to fear. It was making my body shake and driving me to tears. And when you feel that feeling, you know that something is growing near. You know that it’s time once again in your life to let go of your own understanding and to allow God to direct your path.

As for the conference itself, it’s been a very intense conference schedule – starting at 7:30 a.m. each day and continuing for 11-13 hours a day. Given the insanely long days, I opted to instead set my own schedule for the conference (something that I learned during my lawyer days to not feel guilty about) – generally skipping each morning’s 7:30 a.m. morning session to instead get in a morning run and workout in the Florida humidity. The scenery and Florida architecture that I saw during my runs were actually enjoyable, in contrast to the human behavior that I was witnessing when I first got here on Saturday. The streets were also more subdued than that weird Saturday evening energy.

I followed my humid morning workouts each day by showering, donning a suit, and attending the second morning session, followed by mass, the afternoon sessions, and then dinner (as an aside – my sister and brother-in-law have kind of become food snobs since moving to Florida, and I’m starting to see why – the food has gone so hard here! Everything has been delicious. I love the restaurants and food here in Florida!). Following meetings and dinner, I would skip the crowds heading out for the night and instead head to the hotel bar, order for myself an Angel’s Envy old fashioned, and bring it back to my room where I’d take a relaxing nighttime bath (taking baths being the best new habit of mine following my time in Japan) while sipping my drink. During each bath, I listened to lofi and made certain to reach out to the woman that I referenced in my last blog entry, to catch up with her and wish her a goodnight. Honestly…it was probably the best daily routine that I could create, and I wish that humid morning workouts, midday masses, great dinners, hotel cocktails, nighttime baths, and goodnight wishes could just become a permanent fixture in my life.

And that pretty much brings the blog up to date. With the conference now over, I’ll next be hanging out with my sister Sam. Stay tuned for our wild adventure to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter!!! Woot!

Cheers,

-Rob