Since moving away from Hays, I haven't had a "regular" adoration hour here in town. I really miss it, but with my schedule all over the place, it seems difficult to find a good time.
WELL, the Catholic high school in town started Adoration (prayer hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament/Eucharist/Jesus' Body for the non-Catholic readers in the bunch) on Fridays at the school. I signed right up!
The real perk to doing it at a school is the timing. You get summers, holidays and spring break OFF! Now, don't tisk me for being lazy .... summers tend to get insane, as do holidays, so it's nice to not have to contend with an extra item. Especially not feeling guilty about skipping or trying to find someone else to take it for me.
I know, I know .... when schedules get busy, God will provide and all of that. Evidently I don't have enough trust in my ability to trust fully that my head won't explode, so for the time being, this is a really good solution for me.
The one thing that is vastly different than my collegiate or Hays adoration hours is the time of day. Previously, I had middle of the night hours. 2 a.m. Sunday, 3 a.m. Thursday and maybe a Wednesday hour in college. I can't quite remember. The hours worked well for me because I KNEW I wouldn't be doing anything else at those times. Taking an hour in the daytime was a bit of a shock to my system. The stunning thing is that the hour seems to go by so much more quickly when I'm not thinking "Please God, let C come early so I can go home and go back to sleep." I've been fairly surprised.
The only "difficulty" if you could call it that is the students. Some of the teachers bring kids in for prayer time. It's school. It's expected. It's GOOD that their teachers bring them in.
On Friday, though, there were some girls making faces at each other behind their teacher's back. In the pew in front of me. I wanted to throttle them. Seriously. This is prayer time. Amazingly, I refrained. I decided since I was in the school to pray for the students, I should do just that, not be irritated at their extremely poor manners in front of the exposed Blessed Sacrament.
The amusing thing is I was telling Padre about it on Sunday before Mass, and he quipped, "No, don't smack them in Adoration, wait until you get in the hall before doing that."
I'm still giggling about his response.
