Elaine Payne.....

What God Has Done For Me and My Life: Anyone who knows me well knows that I have created an e-mail address for God. It offers me the opportunity to sit down and honestly and openly write whatever is on my heart - and then I get the immeasurable satisfaction of hitting "Send" when I am done - and off my message goes!

Then, a couple hours - or even days later, I go into God's e-mail and open what I sent and I sit and start typing away at a response. On occasion, I've gotten a ways into an reply and thought, "This isn't what I need to hear!" and had to keep myself from hitting the delete key. When I went back and read God's response weeks later - I was surprised to see that it was EXACTLY what I needed to hear!

The nice thing is - no matter how hard I am on myself - He is always kind and gentle with me...even the times when he's had to be a little firm.

All this is to say that God hears a lot from me - probably 3-4 times a week this way (and at other times too!) - and I get to hear back from Him, too. It kind of reminds me of the way Tevye "chats" with God in "Fiddler on the Roof" - casual and comfortable - loving and familiar. Sometimes He hears the bad, sometimes the good, sometimes praise and other times lamentation.

He is the one I bring all of it to. And He in turn, brings me peace. I think He sort of has begun to look forward to the e-mails...at least, I feel as if we have grown very close.

What St. Joseph the Worker Parish Means to Me: I was baptized at SJTW as a little baby and attended 8 years of grade school here as a child.

I made my First Holy Communion in the church when I was 7 - and was confirmed here by Archbishop Power - so it is feels as much like home to me as my own home.

Now my kids are growing up in the parish - receiving the sacraments and serving in different ministries. (We represent three generations: My Mom, Mary Fromwiller, myself, and my kids, Kate and Brian. How cool is that!)

I love that there are so many things still present in the church from the early days - statues, the tabernacle, the pews - but mostly - I love that the community is still comprised of people who were going here when I was a tot - and that my kids know them and are being loved by them. And I love that those who have come in recent years have been welcomed into the community and have so readily become members of the parish family.

But mostly, SJTW is where I come to be nourished - first by the Word of God and then by the Eucharist. Without those - the community would fade and we'd all find reasons to go our separate ways.

I think that we at SJTW celebrate the sacraments better than almost any other people - and I think it's because we are a people of prayer and of faith and we live it and breathe it and take it with us out into the streets.

URLVD