Worrying or Faith? I Choose Faith
by Mia Cronan
http://MainStreetMom.com 

My husband tells me on a regular basis to quit worrying about so much. I am a natural worry wart and have been for as long as I can remember. Being a worrier, at least in my case, can go hand-in-hand with being a control freak.

In recent weeks we have been preparing ourselves for a move out of state, due to my husband's job change. In doing so, I have been busying myself with tweaking the various features of our home to make it more appealing to potential buyers. Our real estate agent has held two open houses, and a few other agents have shown it, too. When the house does finally sell, my children and I will pack and jump in the van and go to our new home to be with my husband, who has been away from us and in his new job for four long weeks.

Now the tradition of burying the statue of St. Joseph upside down in a home-seller's front yard may or may not be familiar to most people. Being Catholic, I grew up knowing that was part of the selling routine; however, as an adult I recently paused and wondered why we do that!? It seems so strange, but more to the point, it seems like superstition, which is not an appropriate Catholic practice. So I decided to research it on some of the more orthodox Catholic web sites. There was one that said, "Some people think of the practice of burying the statue of St. Joseph to be superstitious..." Ah ha. I'm in the right place now. The article went on to say that the practice is not superstition, but rather it is an outward demonstration of faith.

Being more mature than I was years ago, or so I like to think, I stopped to consider that statement. An outward show of faith would just be a show, without the faith. I have to back that up. I have to have faith that, not by my burying the statue will my house sell, but rather by my believing that St. Joseph will intercede and pray to God with me that my family will be reunited under one roof, soon will it come to fruition. Now there's a leap of faith. It involves me realizing that, yes, I need to keep the house in top-notch shape for a drop-of-the-hat potential buyer. But more importantly, I must know in my heart that God has a plan that may or may not include my immediate goals. It was a burden off my shoulders when all this came to me. In other words, I cannot control this. But I can have faith, which takes up a lot less energy. And what an amazing sense of peace it is that accompanies faith.

So I buried the statue, upside down as the instructions say to do, and my children and I have been saying the novena that goes along with it. They are probably too young to understand that this is not magical like Cinderella, where the fairy godmother waves her wand and turns a pumpkin into a horse-drawn carriage. This is our faith in action. We are laying our burden at the feet of God and remembering that we're always in good hands.

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