My Two-Week Prayer Journey

Have you ever been on a pilgrimage? A pilgrimage is a journey that impacts your life. I am going on a journey of 14 days of intensive prayer. These prayer journeys are also called novenas which are nine days. My intention is to build my life vocation and strengthen my journey and direction that God has instilled in my heart. This journey is to build confidence and assurance that God is leading me in the direction that he feels best.
Often times it is easy to lose hope in Gods' plan and feel that we are lost or we've been forgotten.  But God is always listening and always watching over us. It is important for us not to lose hope when we feel forgotten but to strive for a closer relationship through prayer. That is why I would strongly recommend a prayer journey. This journey's intention can be anything: marriage, good grades, moving success, a successful exam or first day back at work. Whatever your intention this journey can be a life-changing experience.

"Be Yourself Everyone Else is Taken"

This quote written by Oscar Wilde is true inspiration for the conformist in most of us. If everyone were to conform to everyone else this life would be no more than many of one person. How boring, am I right? Living life as yourself is so important in today's thriving culture, which is so alive and full of lots of different thoughts and opinions. As if we didn't conform to someone else's thoughts we would be unapproved or downgraded in a sense of honor.
Inspiration is what feeds the human mind to do the unordinary. If you express yourself through the unordinary you can create new life, new ideas, new buzzing thoughts, your future. The world is yours for conquering.

So today, I dare you, be YOURSELF everyone else is taken.

I Write to Discover What I Know

This quote, came from one the better known female Catholic writers of the 20th century, Flannery O'Connor. Some of her more prominent works are, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Revelation and Good Country People. These books reflect the fallen goodness of human nature and reflect on the choices we're given in this life. How Flannery shows the good through an overwhelming amount of bad is amazing. Her work is chalk full of satire and underlying meanings that are both witty and all-knowing. She has been compared to William Blake in her prestige and delivery.

A woman who taught a chicken to walk backwards and later developed her mascot as a peacock. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as an only child she quickly developed a creative mind. When she was six, living at home she experienced her first brush with celebrity status. Her trained chicken broke headlines and she was featured on Pathetic News as "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken. She later claimed that that was the climax of her life and everything thereafter was anti-climatic. She attended the Women's College of Georgia before going on to receive her master's in fine arts from the Georgia State University. In 1946, after her graduation she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Their she developed several of her short stories including Wise Blood. This workshop also helped her develop a Southern Gothic style for her writing. As later mentioned her work has a somewhat brutal unrefined finish that relates to Christian realism. She felt moved by the Thomist notion that the world is created by God and her sacramental upbringings. With her morally flawed characters in a Southern grotesque setting she portrayed them as touched by divine grace. She later wrote, "Grace changes us and the change is painful." 
Flannery has been an inspiration to many of my fictional works and the simplicity of her life has contributed to my writing schema. I hope this has been an informative little ditty for you to learn a little about the fantastic Southern author, Flannery O'Connor.