The  new guidebook by Ronda Chervin charting  
The Journey from Grief to Hope  
​is now available.

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I might need to let God turn me around and change my way of doing things not conquest and moving forward which has lots of pride and ego in it but, instead -
Humility: not trying to control everyone. Become smaller…retreat into the Lord who is God ALONE.  Let the Lord build the house, like God telling David that David would not build the house of God but God would…as in 2 Samuel 7 verses 8-17. 
​He shakes us up….

I can prepare for the future in the interior, not exterior and God will protect me! 
​St. Alphonsus and St. Faustina taught that the more we trust in the Lord, the more He does for us.
How can He reach us if we are all stuffed with plans and schemes?  

2 AM text message from United Airlines telling me my connecting flight was delayed in such a way I wouldn’t make it to the 2nd connecting flight.
​I couldn’t fall back to sleep so just prayed quietly and worked.

6:30 AM leave for Hartford airport.  The wheel chair man takes me through security.
​He grabs the lap-top I point at and sticks it in my little suitcase. He leaves me at Dunkin Donuts for my ritual cappuchino. 

Announcement:  “Ronda, come back to security…you took the wrong lap-top.” 
On the way back to security I meet a frantic young couple yelling “Are you Ronda?  You have our lap-top!”
There’s was black and mine is dark blue but I never noticed that my 3 year old lap top was dark blue since I am Mrs. Magoo!
I felt like an idiot.

What if I had gotten onto the plane with the wrong lap-top?
​
​The flight from Hartford to Chicago is uneventful.

12:30 in plane from Chicago to Houston:  plane is turned around on the runway due to some mechanical problem. “Stick around near the gate to see what is happening, but you have ½ hour to grab a bite.”

I’m am getting upset but then I see a Mexican teen with a fat rosary around his neck. I pull out mine and chat with him. He smiles.
I meet later sitting around waiting a non-Catholic Christian home-schooler who is working on self-sustaining living. We talk for ½ hour with profit. A Pope Francis moment, I think. (That is, moving out of my comfort zone to talk to non-Catholics).
3:30 another plane goes on the run-way, but doesn’t leave until 4:30 because it takes a whole hour to load the baggage from the defunct plane to this one.

I’m am getting upset, but then I see a Mexican teen with a fat rosary around his neck. I pull out mine and chat with him. He smiles.
I meet later sitting around waiting a non-Catholic Christian home-schooler who is working on self-sustaining living. We talk for ½ hour with profit. A Pope Francis moment, I think. (That is, moving out of my comfort zone to talk to non-Catholics).
3:30 another plane goes on the run-way, but doesn’t leave until 4:30 because it takes a whole hour to load the baggage from the defunct plane to this one.
I realize I will miss my flight from Houston to Corpus Christi. 

A good conversation with a young adult who is studying to be a United attendant. I tell him I am never flying United again.  He calms me down by helping me in many ways. He leave his seat next to me and persuades the attendant serving boxed superior snacks not to charge me even though he took my debit card.
Due to Sister Act  I actually enjoy  watching players throwing basketballs into a hoop on the TV that automatically turned on to this.  I got a sense that all this kind of thing is good and loved by God that humans do, as long as we don’t make them into idols – I mean sports.
The attendant assures me that my troubles are over because when I get to Houston I will have the wheel-chair I requested and they will take me to customer service where they will arrange a motel for the night and a voucher for dinner.

Now, I walk fine and can even run. I need the wheel chair because I can’t stand for long periods of time. With the wheel-chair I don’t have to stand at the long security lines or the long line for customer service.
Now is when “all hell breaks loose” sigh!  I get off the plane and there is no wheel chair. I wait 15 minutes and one comes but an old gent who looks like 90 to my mere 79 is put in the chair instead of me even though he came out of the plane later. I accept that because he is so old looking. The airport person at that gate tells me a cart can take me. 

Just as I am about the call out: “I am suing United Airlines,” I notice a managerial looking type man at the counter.
​I walk up through the line and start my spiel. 
He walked out the back door and around out to me and gestures me far away from the line. 
The upshot of my expostulations is that he somehow gets me onto the 9 PM flight that was presumably totally booked with standby’s waiting.
“But, I don’t want to take some other person’s place who was on stand-by for hours, Sir?”
“Look lady, you are now confirmed.”
He sends for a cart which takes me to the foot of the escalator to the mono-rail to the next part of the airport. 
I run up the escalator to the mono-rail. Just as the door is about to close the cart drive runs in. I had left my suitcase on the cart!
I feel as if senility has totally won and my life is over.
I get to the gate for the flight from Houston to Corpus Christi.
“Where is your boarding pass?”
I pull out the one for the 5 PM flight.
I see the other stand-by’s are going through the gate.
5 minutes before they close, they shove me through!
I spend my time wondering if it qualifies as confessional matter that I made this scene with my large cross so visible so that people could think that Catholics are hysterics?

This summer, starting June 21, I will be for a whole month in Corpus Christi Texas very near the goodbooksmedia.com web-site family, the Ridley’s! 

 I am already imagining a photo of some of us together who are regularly on the web-site, maybe invisibly, and authors of goodbooksmedia publications that all you dear readers will get to see at least on a photo.

However, there may be a little hiatus on RondaView while I travel and set up my lap-top there.

I like to make a sort of score-card in my head of the favorite word or phrase people use such as: “I’m worried,” or “It’s gonna be fine!”   My favorite word is “old” as in “I’m too old to carry that – you carry it for me.” 

I also obsess about perfect futures on earth, especially in the form of ideal retirement colonies I might one day live in where everyone prefers Bach to Lawrence Welk. 

Of course, I don’t mean that I can’t wish to be in my ideal retirement home, but I need not be scheming about it all the time and trying to force others to devise it for me!

From Treasure in Clay, the autobiography of Fulton Sheen:
 About missionaries in Africa:  “I went to a leper colony in Africa where there were 500 lepers. I brought with me 500 silver crucifixes, intending to give on to each of the lepers…The first one who came to meet me had his left arm eaten off at the elbow by the disease. He put out his right hand and it was the most foul mass of corruption I ever saw. I held the silver crucifix above it and dropped it. It was swallowed up in that volcano of leprosy.  All of a sudden there were 501 lepers in that camp; I was the 501st because I had taken that symbol of God’s identification with mean and refused to identify myself with someone who was a thousand times better on the inside than I.  Then it came over me the awful thing I had done. I dug my fingers into his leprosy, took out the crucifix and pressed it into his hand. And so on, for all the other 499 lepers. From that moment on I learned to love them.”

A cute phrase from an author I was reading, Susan Hicks Beach. She describes certain friendships as embodying “sardonic intimacy.”   I have quite a few like that!  Thanks be to God!

Maybe so, in some cases, but this biography comes right out of the letters of De Las Casas to the King and Queen in Spain, and it is hair-raising in the descriptions of the lust for gold that blinded so many Catholic colonialists to the evils of enslaving the natives to get them to do the mining for the gold.