I never delve lightly into anything that interests me.  I don’t take passing fancies to things, skimming the surface before moving along to the next thing that catches my eye.  No, I’m one who immerses herself up to her elbows in the things that fascinates her. Because of my fervor for what matters to me, I’m in the process of downloading pretty much every talk ever given at General Conference by Thomas Monson, Jeffrey Holland, and Henry Eyring.  I’ve been listening to them for weeks now (since the October GC) and they accompany me every night on my drive home from work.  One of Monson’s talks, called “Mrs. Patton – The Story Continues” had me in tears on Friday night.  For one, he retold of events of the World War II era, which anyone who reads my blog knows is my obsession.  Two, his story retold of something that was no less than a miracle.

And that’s the thing that I’m hearing in talk after talk after talk – the way God is working in the ways of these men to bring about change and love and hope and acceptance and undeniable faith in the lives of others.  I’m bolstered by these stories.  I’m routinely moved to tears and it makes me love these men and their strong, unshakable faith.  And I’ve found that, over the last month, my own faith, which has been a withered as a vine in winter, has been reawakened.

Years ago, when I was a new Catholic, I had an ongoing dialogue with God.  It was like the channels of communication were open and flowing and I felt His hand on my shoulder at all times.  That “still, small voice”? I felt it, heard it, lived every moment with it welling inside me like a stream.  And then, inexplicably, that connection stopped.  No amount of Eucharistic Adoration, praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and sending up pleading prayers brought it back.  It was like my direct line into Heaven shorted out.  Just…ZAP! One day it was gone, and it left me adrift.  Over the years, I’ve tried to get those communication lines open again, but all I’ve really heard when I’ve reached out is either something akin to a heavenly busy signal, or worse still, utter silence.  A long time ago, I stopped trying.  We still went to church, fist as Catholics and later as Protestants, but I truly haven’t felt the Lord listening, let alone working in my life at all, in a long time.  And since God wasn’t listening, I wasn’t even going to bother to ask. If there was one thing I could recognize in life, it was that of a lost cause.

But now, I feel it again.  It’s almost imperceptible, but yet it’s there.  It’s alive, living and breathing and flowing through me like the blood in my veins, and I feel it – like a warm quilt surrounding me in the cold of night.  I feel less alone and much more able to cope with all that is being lobbed my way.  I’m so thankful for that.  As I’ve said on many blog entries over the past month, I don’t know what compelled me to watch General Conference, considering neither it nor the LDS church was even on my radar at the time.  All I know is that, after years of communication lines knocked down by the storms of life, the Lord is answering my calls again.  Or perhaps He was answering all along,  but before now, I just wasn’t able to hear Him…