See for Yourself - The familiar phrase, "Seventy is the sum of our years or 80 if we are strong" from Psalm 90 echoes in my head as a look at the life-size standing cardboard Pope Francis in a corner in my office.

"All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases."

Sr. Leonir de Fátima Fabris is a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who is originally from Brazil. She is a psychologist, a nurse and a naturopath who works in the Hakumana center in Maputo, Mozambique, where a high percentage of the population lives with HIV/AIDS.

When Notre Dame de Namur Sr. Kathleen O'Hagan and St. Joseph Sr. Gretchen Shaffer arrived in Mingo County in 1976, nearly everyone was economically poor. Though four decades have passed since the pastoral letter by the Appalachian bishops, the region's underlying problem has not changed. Standards of living are higher, regulations have made coal mining cleaner, and unions have turned coal mining into safer, well-paying jobs, but the people still have little voice.

It is doubtful that we feel "made for these times." We may well wish that we had been born at another time, one more settled and secure.

"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."

GSR Today - Wouldn't it be great to take out all our old cracked and chipped "stuff" — like old hurts, unresolved differences, a thoughtless word not forgotten — to the trash heap and start over?

"Encounter invites us to come outside of ourselves. It encourages us to meet one another as equals and sisters and brothers. It is not standing on one side of the river bank, waiting while the other party builds a bridge clear from the distant shore. No, it is gathering our tools and hammering away as well, as best we know how, to hopefully meet in a graced space on a bridge we build together."

From a Nun's Life podcasts - If you wear ashes, is that like parading around your holiness? In this Random Nun Clip, a listener asks if people who wear ashes on Ash Wednesday are showing off their holiness.