Month: May 2020

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Meditation

What Does It Mean To Love Your Brother As Yourself?

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning gentlemen. My insight for this week has proved to be very troublesome for me and this is because I was reading the words of our Lord about how we must forgive one another basically in the way in which we hope to be forgiven. And of course, we’re supposed to love one another in the way that our Lord loves us.

And I realize that this means we must sacrifice for others, we must do penance for others, we must suffer and perhaps even die for other people, and not just the people that we love, not just the people who we get along with, that we enjoy, not just our family and friends, but even the people who hate us. We’re called to literally imitate Christ in this way. And the degree to which we love others is basically the degree to which we’re hoping that God would love us. And if we fail at that, what is the message that we’re sending to Christ?

So, this is my insight for the week, something that I’m going to be thinking about and applying to my own life, and I hope it’s helpful to you.

Categories
Meditation

What Happens When You Move Away From a Fire On a Cold Night?

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning, Jeff here with some insights for the week. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this holy hour and all the things that Christopher’s been sharing with us about mental prayer and spending that time every day- first thing in our day- showing God that we want to give Him those first minutes of our day, the very best that we can, before our minds are cluttered with everything else in the world.

And it occurred to me that this holy hour, this time of mental prayer that we do every day is really us opening up our souls to allow Christ to fill them with the fire of His divine love and grace. And whenever we stray away from that, if we take the day off for a so-called ‘vacation’ from our prayers and if we make it a habit of delaying our prayers or abandoning them all together, it’s kind of like when we stray away from the bonfire. You know, you’re at a great bonfire in the fall and it’s cold outside and you stay close to that fire to stay warm, and the further you get away, the colder you become. And to the extent that this analogy applies to our spiritual life, what we’re really talking about is that the more often we stray from that fire of mental prayer in the holy hour, the less we resemble the saint that God created us to be, the less of the divine life that He’s given us we have within us to the point where we get completely cold. We’re totally unrecognizable to God when we abandon these things.

I hope this analogy has proven fruitful to you. We need to think in terms of our prayer and our fasting being as important to us as our sleep is, as our food is; most of us probably never go a day without sleep or without food. We need to have that same approach to prayer. I hope this meditation has been helpful. This insight has been helpful to you. I look forward to your feedback.

Categories
Meditation

Know Your Enemy and When You Must Flee

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey gentlemen, Jeff here, and my insight for the week is this: Habits that we have acquired slowly and over a long period of time can be quickly lost if we abandon them. I thought about this when I was giving a talk to some fellow men about the problem of sexual temptation and lust and dealing with pornography and sexual sins. And one of the things that I told the men that I think is critical when dealing with this kind of temptation is just to flee from it immediately. As soon as that thought comes into your mind, as soon as that temptation, that illicit desire, pops up- as soon as you recognize it, that very instant- you have to flee from it.

And we have the example of the saints who have run outside and thrown themselves into the snow or the saints who ran and threw themselves into a great big bush of thorns as a way of combating the sins of the flesh. But after I gave this talk and I was reflecting on some of those principles, it occurred to me that we need to have the same kind of revulsion and the same kind of instant rejection of any temptation, whether it’s pride or laziness or a lack of charity or intemperance towards food or drink or greed (and greed doesn’t mean that we’re a billionaire trying to acquire more greed, it could be just the desire for anything that’s really not necessary for our state), or it can be jealousy or envy or anger.

So, whatever our prominent faults are, whatever those vices are that we struggle with, we really need to develop this instant revulsion so that as soon as we see that gossip pop up or we’re talking about someone and we don’t need to be- and the person we’re talking to has no  legitimate need for that information- as soon as that happens, you need to flee from that. And so this is something I’ve been thinking about and trying to develop this sensitivity to it in my own life- this immediate revulsion for our vices.

I hope that sharing this with you has been helpful in some way, and I hope you have a great day.

Categories
Meditation

There Is No Accidental Greatness

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi gentlemen,

This morning we had a great call, and I wanted to share with you this insight that Christopher was so kind to share with us. It was the idea that greatness does not come by accident. It comes by intentionality, and oftentimes the repeated intentionality of making wise choices every day instead of the decisions that we could make that are possibly more attractive in that moment, whether it’s choosing not to have seconds at dinner because we need to lose weight, whether it’s choosing to do that holy hour first thing in the morning so that we give our first and best to God, or whether it’s treating our marriage with the same intentionality, planning, and commitment that we do our business life with scheduling, with preparation, and with sacrifice to achieve the goals.

I found that to be very profound- that making sure we are evaluating our investment in our personal relationships as much as we do perhaps business or personal development. I hope that this has been helpful for you, I know it has been for me to reorient my priorities.

God bless you.