When Worrying is for Naught

I'm a worry wort by nature.  I have been since I was at least four years old.  Worrying...it's what I do.  My worrying used to be a lot worse when I was a kid, which is odd when you consider that I should probably be the reverse.  There are days when I'm amazed at how little I worry by comparison to my younger years.  Perhaps it's because what would have been flat out worrying back then has been parlayed into prayer.  That's probably the difference.  Anyway, I still worry.

Something that I took on for Lent is going to daily Mass 2-3 times a week.  So far I've been able to get to Mass three times during the week while Bryan works from home.  I've got the routine down.  The two older girls hop on their busses and a few minutes later I hop in the car and head to Mass while Katie hangs out with Bryan before he heads to his basement office to work.  It's working out really well.  So well, in fact, that I hope to keep up the trend after Lent.  My stumbling block and source of recent worry came when I discovered that Ellie's opthamologist appointment was this morning at 8am, the same time as Mass.  Bryan is the one who takes the girls to this particular doctor.  So my most recent worry revolved around whether or not I could take Katie with me to Mass without causing a major disturbance.  When you have the only toddler at Mass those cries and shrieks really carry, and one thing I really try to avoid is attention in those situations.  I probably spent way too much time worrying about it.  Then I decided that I'd find a way to go to the 6:30PM Mass instead, but then that means that I have a major time crunch with the girls choir practice and dinner.  So I worried about possibly creating an unnecessary disruption to our evening.

So this morning when Bryan woke me up at 6:45 I had a few minutes of going back and forth over whether or not to go to take Katie with me.  Ultimately I decided to go and hope for the best.  I figured we could sit closer to the back which would allow me to scurry her out of the church if needed.  Then I figured in a worst case scenario I could take her upstairs to the crying room, which to me amounts to total defeat.  So we went to Mass and Katie snuggled with me, and played with my car keys and made not a single peep.  All that worrying was for nothing.  Who knows, maybe I really could take her to Mass with me the two days a week that Bryan goes into the office.

And while I went into the church assuming that at one point or another I'd get scowled at for brining my screaming toddler, instead the older woman at the other end of my pew walked over to us during the sign of peace to say hello to Katie and kind words to me.  What an awesome morning!  It's amazing how different the reality was from what I was afraid it might be.  And it was so nice to turn around to find friends in the pews behind me.  So even if she did cry, we would have met friendly faces and not scowls.  All the more reason for me to take Padro Pio's exhortation to "pray, hope and don't worry" to heart.