baking bread is a long process

So I was home yesterday, all day. what a difference it makes when you stay home instead of being gone all day. I had breakfast with j., baked a pie, learned how to use my bread machine to make sour cream and rosemary bread, took out the trash, cleaned the car, did the laundry, had dinner with K, and started a new book. (i sound like such the typical homemaker... i really enjoyed the day.)

I’m reading “the power of a praying wife”. Which sounds so cheesy and uber-christian… but I think will help bring my perspective to where it should be. I’m really going to try to pray more. It’s like marriage has shown me how completely incapable I am of changing myself. I try again and again to react differently to the same circumstances—to have different automatic responses. But I can’t do it on my own. this is not a sentence I say, but here goes: I think I need some sort of holy spirit, because otherwise I will fail over and over and will just slip into a despair that I can’t come back from.

The thing is, I have no faith. As soon as a part of me allows Hope to enter (that this holy spirit could transform me into a better person and give me the strength to face my life with joy, patience, etc) the skeptic in me starts berating that idea.

How to you gain faith? Do you pray for faith? Don’t you need faith to pray? Can one instigate the other? What if nothing happens? does that mean I didn’t have enough faith? Does that mean there is no holy spirit? Or that the holy spirit just isn’t in me??? these are things I don’t know about.

My praying wife book starts out by saying that we have to pray for change in us before we can pray for change in a husband. It really focuses on how we have to be willing for god to change us, because we can’t force the husband to change. When I asked j. how I could pray for him, he seemed so pleased and I was surprised that the things he asked for (discipline, follow-through, patience) were qualities that I most often am critical of him for not displaying. maybe my willingness to be loving, uncritical, prayerful, accepting, and to give it to god to change instead of trying to change it myself will bring about the changes in a way that I could never accomplish with criticism, demands, and to-do lists.