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Last Sunday I was driving through the city of Reseda on my way home to Santa Monica and suddenly I started noticing all the beautiful churches I kept passing by! As I passed one in particular, with shiny stained glass windows and a beautiful mural painted on the front I couldn't help but feel a little sad.
Although I had instilled the power of faith and God in my children since they were tiny, the churches brought back memories. I couldn't help but remember the time before we had become entertainers when we went to church every Sunday and to morning mass every day!
JUST LIKE PRAYING
Now with all the traveling we do we only get to mass maybe twice a year and I wondered if perhaps the family had forgotten God just a little bit or if they were missing out oh something. Then, almost as if God knew what I was wondering about, I recalled the words Barry had said to me just the other day! 4 "You know, Mom," he told me. "When I play my guitar it's just like as if I were praying!" Amazingly enough it sometimes takes our children themselves to prove what we've tried to teach them about faith and God.
I remembered back to the days we lived in Rhode Island and we couldn't afford to pay the telephone bill or the heating bill! I was so upset and felt completely defeated. I used to look up to the heavens and cry out, "When will all this end?"
But somehow even cold and hunger weren't so important to the kids. They would laugh at me and they thought it was the funniest thing, all of us freezing inside with a blizzard going on outside! They never lost faith. "Mom, in three months it'll all be over," they'd tell me. "Spring will be here and everything will work out alright, you'll see!"
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SQUEEZE MY HAND
Then there was the time the loan company decided to repossess our car because we couldn't make the payments! I just didn't know what to do, but the boys would pat me lovingly on the back or squeeze my hand and tell me "everything's in God's hands, isn't it? That's what you've always told us."
The older boys devised a plan so that when the loan company representative would pull into the front driveway, one of them would drive our car out the back way! Then everyone would keep real still inside and soon the man would go away thinking we weren't home!
This worried me a little at first, but Bob would smile and tell me that God gave them the idea in the first place because He knew we were trying as hard as we could!
There was a time when I used to worry an awful lot about Susan because she had to stop going to church at an earlier age than the boys did. When she was smaller this would upset her because she thought God would think she had forgotten Him.
I would explain to her that when you can't go, it's not your fault. As long as you still love God and you can still pray, that's just like going to church itself. Church has to be inside where it really counts!
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MORTAL SIN
During my childhood, when I was growing up, I was taught to believe that if you didn't go to church every Sunday it was a mortal sin and you would die and go to Hell. But God isn't that severe. He really isn't!
He lives everywhere, not only in a Catholic church. He's outdoors everywhere you look—in the sunshine, in the cornfield, in the pounding of the
surf. He's in the flight of a bird across the blue sky and he's in the laughter of small children. These are the things I tried to teach my children, that you can find God anywhere if you only look around!
Sometimes people ask us about the many jokes we make on stage about
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