Welcome to She’s Making Room!
My first blog post…ever!
Hello, World! Welcome to my very first blog post ever. I won’t lie, I’m a little bit nervous about what’s to come but I am also really excited! If you have been looking around, you’ve probably noticed my “slogan” or “tagline” or whatever you’d like to call it that says, “Romanticizing Life & Living Out the Faith”. Well, that pretty much sums up what I’m trying to do here. I want to romanticize my life and live out my Catholic faith the best I can.
College versus Post-Undergrad
I recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2022. It was a great four years and I spent a lot of that time at the University Catholic Center, studying (or at least trying to) and growing deeper and deeper in my faith.
By the time senior year came around, I was doing things that high school me wouldn’t have even thought possible for me. I was going to adoration consistently, going to daily mass every chance I had, I even got to a point where I was praying four rosaries a day! I had a great prayer life and felt like I was finally building a personal relationship with God. But in that time leading up to graduation, a fear grew inside me that once I graduated and left UT and the UCC, I would lose my motivation,my desire to keep up this prayer life. I had seen this happen to other UT/UCC alumni and I could foresee it happening to me…and it did.
I fell into a state of complacency, of being just comfortable with what was. I made a decision to take some time to rest, to get acclimated to working an 8-5 job, and then, later on, I would try to balance everything out, my prayer life, my health, and my work. But it’s been 6 months and it hasn’t happened. Not only did my prayer life disappear, but I also started to fall back into some old habitual sins and started wanting to justify them. It’s all been kind of on and off for the past few months and honestly, it still kind of is. So that’s where “She’s Making Room” comes in.
A Turning Point
As I’m writing this, it’s December 28, 2022. On this past Sunday, Christmas Sunday, I of course went to mass with my family. Now, at this point, I have fallen back into an “off” period in my faith and I can tell. The last few days of Advent felt so…dry. I felt nothing. I knew I was supposed to be celebrating the birth of our Lord but I didn’t feel anything. Christmas just felt like it was going to be another day that came, and went. Until I went to mass. I was able to attend mass at my home parish in Dallas with my parents which has had a tremendous stream of life this past year. I kind of knew going in that I was going to get something out of the homily that day and I DID.
The priest starts his homily by talking about the true reason that we celebrate Christmas, Jesus Christ, not the holiday parties, the gifts, the shopping, etc. But then he says something to me that really resonated with me. He said, “Christ was born into this world to save us, to bring light and peace not only into this world but also in our hearts. But He can’t do that if you don’t let Him.” And at that point, I realized that I truly have not been letting Jesus into my heart and I hadn’t in a while.
“Christ was born into this world to save us, to bring light and peace not only into this world, but also in our hearts. But He can’t do that if you don’t let Him.”
In my day-to-day, nor in major life events, was I letting Him in. Not only was my faith feeling dry, but so was life. For the rest of the homily, as I continued to listen, I prayed about what I could do to change this. And that’s when I came up with “She’s Making Room”.
What is “She’s Making Room”?
She’s Making Room came from a phrase I saw all over Catholic social media during advent, “Make Room for Jesus”. During Advent, we are called to make room for Jesus in our homes and in our hearts amidst the commercialization of Christmas. I realized that I needed to do that every day of the year, not only in Advent. And its hard, very hard. Especially when life as a whole feels dry, like your prayer life.
A trend on social media now is to romanticize your life, appreciating even the most mundane things in your day-to-day life. I think this is a beautiful trend and I think it’s my turn to take part in it. But, I wanted to add my own spin to it. In romanticizing my life, I want to capture the beauty in my daily activities, including my prayer. Doing this, I believe will help me in growing that motivation and desire to bring my faith back into my everyday.
I will be putting together weekly recap videos and uploading them on YouTube, as well as writing frequent blog posts to keep myself accountable and to be able to capture the beauty of everyday life. These blog posts can be anything from random thoughts to weekly, prayerful reflections.
I’m really excited about this new chapter of my life. I am not sure if anyone other than my close friends will see these. I am, however, hoping that if there is someone out there who’s going through something similar to me, they can see these posts and realize that they are not alone. We are not perfect in our faith and that’s okay, but let’s keep working at it and trying. That is, after all, what the Lord asks of us. He knows we aren’t perfect, He just wants us to do the best we can, so let’s do the best we can, together.
