Parenthood

Finding Comfort in the Communion of Saints and Hedgehogs

/ chicoinematt / 1 Comment

Editor’s Note: Post originally published on May 3, 2023.

The Catholic Church has a teaching called the “Communion of Saints,” which is basically a fancy way of saying that all believers are part of one big spiritual family. To put in modern-social-media terms, it’s like a massive WhatsApp group chat, except without any annoying notifications (all the notifications are prayers of intercession!).

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 962, “the communion of saints is “all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church…in this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always [attentive] to our prayers.” The Communion of Saints is a vital part of Catholic theology because it offers support, guidance, and intercession for all the members of the Church, whether they’re alive or deceased.

Holiness Comes in Many Shapes and Spines

And speaking of devotion and admiration, I’m reminded of my oldest daughter’s (Amelia) obsession with hedgehogs. The girl is absolutely smitten with these spiky little critters. She’s got a hedgehog-themed tape dispenser, hedgehog toys, and even draws pictures of her imaginary pet hedgehog. It’s like she’s a walking, talking hedgehog-encyclopedia.

Goldy the Hedgehog. Medium: Pencil on paper. 🦔🙂

But here’s the thing: Amelia’s love for hedgehogs is a lot like the way Catholics feel about saints. Just like Amelia has a special devotion for hedgehogs, Catholics have a similar devotion to the saints, who are believed to have lived holy lives and to be in the presence of God.

Sacred Objects Prick Your Heart Open to God

Amelia’s hedgehog-themed tape dispenser reminds me of the physical objects Catholics use to help us in our devotion, such as rosaries or holy medals. It’s like a cute and fuzzy version of a saint medal. And just like Amelia’s pretend game of climbing a mountain with her hedgehog toy, Catholics believe that the saints can help us in our spiritual journey towards God.

My daughter loves her hedgehog-shaped tape dispenser. 🙂🦔

Running the Race

The Communion of Saints is like having a group of friends who are always there to support you, like Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends Tails and Knuckles. My kids love the Sonic movie, and we even have a Sonic-themed board game that we can’t wait to play. In Saint Paul’s letter to Timothy, he talks about running the race and finishing strong. He wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 TImothy 4:7). Similarly, the Communion of Saints can give us the encouragement and guidance we need to finish our spiritual race with perseverance, just like Sonic and his friends run through obstacles to reach the finish line. And just as Amelia finds comfort in her love for hedgehogs, the belief in the Communion of Saints can bring comfort and hope to all Catholics.

In conclusion, the Communion of Saints is a significant aspect of Catholic theology that unites all members of the Church, alive or deceased. And while my daughter Amelia’s love for hedgehogs may seem like just a childhood fascination, it’s a reminder of the power of devotion and admiration. So, whether it’s a hedgehog or a saint, let’s all find something that brings us joy and comfort in our spiritual journey.

Thank you for sharing!

Why April 29th is One of my Favorite Days of the Year

/ chicoinematt

I look forward to April 29th now.

This is a special day for my family as my wife and I asked for Saint Catherine to intercede for the safety of our daughter in May 2018. Signs were pointing to another impending miscarriage.

By the grace of God my daughter was safely born and is energetic.

We named her after the Sienese saint.

There hasn’t been a day since then we haven’t asked for the intercession of this amazing Saint and Doctor of the Church.

Saint Catherine of Siena pray for us!

Thank you for sharing!

How God Used My Story as a Special Needs Catholic Dad to Reach Others

/ chicoinematt / 1 Comment

Last week the editor of Franciscan Media informed me that my article about raising special needs kids in the Catholic faith is going to be the cover story for the May 2023 issue.

I’m not crying my eyes are just leaking a bit of joy and gratitude. 🙂🙏

Having an article published on a prominent Catholic magazine has been a dream of mine for some time. It has been almost a decade in the making. Below is a brief glimpse regarding the lead-up to the fruit of my work and the entrustment of my writing to God.

2015 was a rough year for me as I lost a job and struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts in the aftermath of losing my unborn son Jeremiah to miscarriage.

I remember telling my wife some night in June that year, “I just want something good to happen in my life.” Obviously, she and my older two kids were good things and so were my friends, but grief hinders one’s ability to have perspective at times. I was still quite angry with God for allowing us to lose a child.

Less than a week after my “wish/lament” we found out we were pregnant with Josiah. His name means “healer” but I didn’t have that as a reason for picking the name. In hindsight, I believe the Holy Spirit prompted me to pick Josiah as my son’s name.

He was later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2017. This led to many challenges but also immeasurable joys. Josiah has been a source of inspiration for some of my best articles and he helped heal me (and still melts my hardened, and rehardened, heart).

My reaction after I had the first call with Franciscan Media in 2022.

God does work in mysterious ways and he does use all things for the good (cf. Romans 8:28).

Thank you for sharing!

5 Actionable and Simple Tips to Help Parents Write (Right) Now

/ chicoinematt

“But I don’t have anything interesting to say.” “I am tired exhausted from work and household duties.” “I just cannot take time away from my family.” “This is going to add an additional burden on my spouse.” “Honey, there is literally no time. We both have full time and three kids to take of when we get home.”

These were some of the excuses I used in the past whenever I pondered a pursuit in a career in freelance writing. We have a finite amount of time each day. 24 hours. Doctors tell us at least a 1/3 of that should be used for sleeping. That leaves only16 hours a day at our disposal. Add in a full-time job, children and all the various school activities they are in, and meal time. Our time starts disappearing faster than a dozen eggs on sale at the store.

How to write and raise a family?

This article is specifically geared toward parents who want to develop a career in writing. As a father to four children ages 11,9,6, and 4, I completely understand the scheduling struggle. It might be more accurate to call it appointment acrobatics! I am also the husband of an elementary school teacher. Anyone who is married to or has a family member or friend who is an educator knows that profession involves A LOT of time—investing in lesson planning, parent meetings, professional development sessions, and staying up to do on current curriculum. Additionally, two of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Autism is a social communication disorder. We have weekly adaptive aquatics lessons for our six year old. We have also had to invest an incalculable amount of hours into research, therapy, and home reinforcement over the past several years.

Bottom line is I understand that life presents you many challenges that take up the vast majority of the day. It is not impossible, nor even merely improbable to start writing and creating content.

Martin Luther King Jr. once declared, “If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then , but by all means keep moving.” While you may not be able to soar now you can take action. Move towards your goal of being a writer! The tips in this article come from my experience and have proven to have worked for my impossibly busy schedule. Let’s now jump into these five actionable and simple strategies to help you write now!

Be prepared to sacrifice

“Wait! I thought you said these were actionable and simple steps. Right away you are asking me to give up something,” you might be thinking now. As much as this fact hurts to hear, it is necessary to learn. To love something [and someone] it involves a sacrifice. Foregoing the latest Netflix original series, shopping spree, or having to say “no” to one of your kids activities will be painful. I struggled mightily with watching just one episode of the latest series so I could have time to write daily.

Since my decision to leave my full-time job to pursue writing as a career, I have made several sacrifices: our family gave up eating fast food, limited television time, and I will be working a night job to help the bills until I can write full-time from home. This decision was not made lightly. Writing proved to be healing and therapeutic as reached a low point in my life in 2015. If after some deliberation you realize your gift to the world is to write, realize this tremendous joy does come with a price—sacrifice. But it is well worth it.

Narrow and Nest into a Niche

A second tactic to help you write now is to find a niche topic to write about. Ask yourself the following questions: What topic can I talk about for 30 minutes without needing any preparation? What subjects am I already an expert on? Select your writing niche based on either or both of the answers to those questions. My expertise is Catholic theology. I have also developed an interest in writing about anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. Finding a niche does not always happen overnight. Yet, you can still start the process of discovering your writing niche now!

Find Five Minutes

Finding time in the day to write can be challenging. I get it! Parenting is incredibly tough. Kids require physical, emotional, intellectual supports to grow and thrive. We all want our kids to grow up into mature and productive citizens. Some days all hell breaks loose. The children turn into frenzied creatures—especially during a full moon! Other times, the children coordinate an executed staggered schedule attack to ensure that you and your spouse never get more than 2 hours consecutive that night.

Don’t let that deter you from your dream to write. Find just 5 minutes per day to write. Schedule it at the exact same time and place in your house to journal or type out your thoughts. If your life is a bit more hectic, allow for flexibility of that 5 minutes to occur at various times. Always make sure you write for an absolute minimum of 5 minutes. When your routine is set, up your time to 10, 15, 30 minutes, or to 1 hour. Consistency is absolutely necessary for traction towards your goal. Move towards your goal of writing a bit each every.

Consume Content Daily

Another simple strategy to develop your writing skills is to consume content from your writing niche daily. Doctors prescribe patients to eat a and balanced nutrition. That same is true for content creators. Creativity does not occur in isolation. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch videos, connect with experts in your desired field of study on LinkedIn.

Use those short drives dropping the kids off at school, running errands, or returning home to listen to podcast episodes or an audio book about your niche subject. During those rare occasions when the kids actually nap or go to bed on time read a book for a few minutes. I have been starting to take a book to the park—even reading just a page or two daily will help build your knowledge in the long run!

Repeat—Key is Consistency

If you made it to this point of the article without interruption I want to congratulate you! Thank you for taking take out of your busy schedule to further your desire to write. My final strategy to help you write right now is simple—repeat strategies 1-4 daily! If you are running low on energy or motivation please message me on LinkedIn or email me at chicoine.matt@live.com. I would love to help you through any scheduling obstacles and mental roadblocks.

Related Links

The Origin Story of The Simple Catholic

3 Ways to Stay Relevant as a Catholic Blogger

Thank you for sharing!

When I Had an Encounter with Divine Reality

/ chicoinematt

Editor’s Note: Post originally published on January 13, 2019.

The legendary Italian artist Michelangelo once purported, “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” I once traveled overseas on a college trip around Europe. One of the stops our tour group was in Rome. Seeing Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel certainly allowed me to encounter the mysterious and awesome presence of God.  My sublime experience in Rome lasted only a few minutes and occurred over a decade ago. I am extremely grateful to have seen with my own eyes one of the greatest and most beautiful works of art in all of human history.

sistine chapel.jpg

Fast-forward ten years and a lot has changed in my life: I am married with four children, and in the workforce. While life brought me many struggles since that moment in Italy, my Catholic faith is stronger and more real because of those trials. Throughout much of 2018 I wrote frequently about my wife and I’s struggle with despair, loneliness, and sadness at the loss of our unborn children. Losing a child, you never could hold takes an indescribable toll on a person’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.

A Christmas Miracle Child

This Christmas season our family was blessed with the healthy birth of our daughter. From the onset of the pregnancy complications developed. God interceded and saved our daughter from being miscarried. He accomplished it through the power of prayer and healing graces of the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. Our parish priest administered this sacrament to my wife. In my post, Containing Joy—Rainbow Baby After Miscarriage Maelstroms – The Simple Catholic, I talk about the struggle be joyous throughout the pregnancy. Hope always permeated our thoughts, but we tempered our joy just in case our daughter did not make it to term.

rainbow baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

God’s Peace in the Pain

After my wife’s contractions got frequent enough for the delivery doctor and nurses to arrive, a calming presence overcame me as I gazed into my wife’s eyes between her painful contractions. An otherworldly peace entered that delivery room. Joy, peace, and confidence radiated from my wife’s eyes in the moments before our daughter was born.

Skeptics may doubt Divine Providence had anything to do with our experience in the delivery room. All I can speak of is my experience and that was an encounter with a reality, call it what you will, whose origin is not of this earthly existence. Long anticipation of seeing, hearing, and holding our daughter seemed to have time at a standstill those short minutes before the arrival of Avila.

robert barron.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bishop Robert Barron once stated, “Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth.” Our joy-filled yet anxious laden pregnancy delivery began with the beautiful―the news of the conception of our daughter. That beautiful news led to the good. Good through the form of good friends, family, and priests praying for us on this 9-month journey.

Finally, the good of fellowship and prayer led my wife and I to the truth― this reality is not the sole mode of existence. The God who is above humanity’s total and complete comprehension decided to reveal himself in the material world. God became man in the person of Jesus Christ on Christmas Day in Bethlehem, and I had the privilege of encountering the peace of the Holy Spirit that early morn in the hospital room before and during the birth of my daughter!

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

 

Thank you for sharing!

The Miracle of the Boy and the Wooden Letters

/ chicoinematt

Wooden letters

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on October 28, 2019.

According to C.S. Lewis, “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” Recently, my faith has been lacking so I was missing the miniature and miraculous letters forming a story before my own eyes. I have previously written about my family’s journey of finding out our youngest son, Josiah, has autism spectrum disorder, but I will provide a short recap for any new readers.

Josiah’s Journey [So Far]

In the summer of 2017, my wife and I noticed our son struggled to make sounds and form words. Because Josiah could not communicate with us he started to  bang his head on the ground when he got frustrated. This habit became so bad that we were basically homebound unless both my wife and I were off work at the same time. On good days we could only take our son out for one errand as any transition proved too overwhelming for him.

We knew something had to change—he had to get better help then what we could offer at the time. In December 2017, Josiah was evaluated and diagnosed with autism. We enrolled him in a birth to three program offered by the city. He received speech, occupational, and development therapy. Eventually, his speech therapy was increased to weekly hour long sessions. It took a lot of time, focus, and diligence, but with consistent therapy with professionals and reinforced at home Josiah made tremendous gains. He was able to learn to talk and show us his needs for water, food, a preferred toy, and diaper changes. This summer he said his first 10+ word sentence!

Hello My Name is

Power of Words

Over the weekend, Josiah hit another milestone goal—telling me his full name and recognizing the letters to his first name. As I was in the playroom getting him dressed, Josiah pointed at the letters on the wall. For each kid, my wife and I hung their names in wooden letters in their rooms. We recently moved Josiah into the older kids room so the wooden letters remained in the “new playroom” (formerly Josiah’s room). Our exchange centered around those letters:

Me: “Yes, Josiah that is your name on the wall. What letter is that [pointing to the ‘J’]?”

Josiah:  “J, O, S, I, A, H!”

Me:  “And what is your name?”

Josiah: “Jo-sia-ah, Fabian, Sha-qin [Chicoine]!”

Practice Makes Progress

Some people have told my wife, “Aren’t you hoping that scientists find a cure for autism? Then you won’t have to waste all the time doing therapy.” This is the wrong thing to say to a parent of children with autism. Thankfully, my wife is quite professional and always tactful otherwise a vicious verbal exchange may have ensued. Autism is not something to be cured. Instead, it is something to be explored. Different does not mean diseased. Unfortunately, people naturally fear the unknown and sometimes treat it with disdain.

The reason I continue writing daily and sharing my thoughts is because I want to provide hope, perspective, and joy to families and individuals going through similar situations. Our world does not readily accept differences. I want to be a help change that. I want to bring tangibility and reality as to how autism looks in our little boy.

The Gift of Healing

Rainbow Baby

Before he was born, I struggled mightily with depression. Our previous pregnancy due to miscarriage. We named our unborn child Jeremiah. Josiah proved to be God’s healing gift to us. His name literally means “healer”.  All our triumphs are intricately tied to our struggles, doubts, fears, and worries parenting Josiah. We all have a cross to bear. Our cross is not more difficult than most people’s. It is merely different. Josiah’s smile and giggles are infectious.  Hearing him tell me his name meant everything in during that moment in the playroom.

Do you have special needs or have a family member with special needs? I would love to hear your story. Please feel free to share in the comments.

Miracles do happen we just are too busy to see them sometimes. Our son’s special needs forces me to slow down and view the world differently. I am thankful that I embraced that change of pace this past Sunday. I pray for the strength and humility to be more willing and ready to learn from my son in the future!

Related Articles

Miscarriage and the Sacrament of Time

A Humble Hue: My Story about Autism

Thank you for sharing!

3 Ways You Can Actually Get Rest through Play

/ chicoinematt / 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on September 24, 2019.

According to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” This weekend I found a temporary fountain of youth—at a pumpkin patch!  Celebrating the birthdays of two of my nieces and my daughter, we visited a small-town Nebraskan pumpkin patch on Saturday.  This experience was what I needed to infuse live into me.

Rest and play

 

 

 

 

 

My overnight work schedule has been challenging.  Getting naps throughout the day are hit or miss depending on how fussy or not my teething 8 month old daughter is on a a particular day. Balancing work and life has like trying to battle 16 monkey ninjas on your own. Our three year old has regressed over the past few weeks, meltdowns are on the rise, I only get to see my wife about 30 minutes most days, and the list of struggles goes on and on.

The purpose of this post is not to complain, but rather give a bit of context as to why my content has been irregular recently. I am thankfully for people providing guest posts in the midst of my chaotic schedule. I will be publishing more guest posts to help give me a break during this season. Rest. I did not appreciate sleep until I lacked it. This post will focus on a few ways I have been able to discover how to get rest during a grueling schedule. If you are in a similar or more serious situation than my family I hope you find value in these tips.

Play and Positivity

A common factoid you may have learned in school is that it takes less muscles to smile than it does to frown. If you never heard this amazing fact, please check out the link in the related resources section at the end of this post to read about the science behind smiling. This weekend I smiled.

Traveling on a zip line, sliding down the barn slide, pedaling a cart, and chasing my kids on the pumpkin patch playground incited smiles. We need playtime help reset our mindset. Going into work on Monday I was much more motivated and cheery. Playtime leads to positivity.

Observational Play is Still Fun

According to Angela Schwindt, “While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” During the breaks between pumpkin patch activities I got the chance to watch my children caper with their cousins. The joy and excitement in their faces caused me to beam with gratitude. I rarely have the opportunity to simply rest and observe them in the middle of play.

Overcoming from a recent sinus infection and my continual job hunt for work from home opportunities has drained much of my energy the past few weeks. This weekend provided me the chance to pause and have fun watching my kids play!

Recapping the Day is Restful

Another way to fit in play during a busy schedule is to reflect on the revelry throughout the day. We had a three hour drive back home so I spent some time replaying the fun our family had in my mind. Next, my wife and I talked about our favorite moments. I asked each of my children which activity they enjoyed the best. “Pumpkin, I have a pumpkin daddy!” my three year old exclaimed from his car seat. Looking back, I saw a wide grin on his face and the orange vegetable proudly held in his hand.

Pumpkin Patch

Memory gave me the ability to play again while sitting down in the car. As I recapped the day, I regained my energy that was completely drained during the week.

Make it a priority to get daily playtime. It is necessary for a healthy body and mind. Play renewed my endurance. Rediscover joy in life by embracing playtime. A work and life balance is important. How do you plan on resting and playing this week?

Related Links

How Playing Paper Football Led to Prayer

Finding the Creative Spirit of God in Play!

Why Being Funny Helps You Seriously Practice the Catholic Faith

 

Thank you for sharing!