by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

When I was a little girl growing up in a rabidly catholic family of seven, my mother had a standard response to anything bad that happened to her children (like even just stubbing a toe on the coffee table leg as we skipped across the living room floor):

“See? God punishes bad children!”

Under her tutelage, my siblings and I learned a couple of important life lessons:

1.  that we were basically bad children (this fits right in with the catholic church’s doctrine of original sin, so likely made perfect sense to us at the time), and

2. that God must be very, very busy keeping track of every opportunity to personally administer the punishment that my sibs and I so richly deserved.

When children like us grow up and get diagnosed with, oh, let’s say –  heart disease, it’s proof positive that we’re just getting what we had coming.   Continue reading ““God punishes bad children!” – or, why you have heart disease” →