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.
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.
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.
Good morning, guys. I had a great call, and I wanted to share with you this insight that I got from the call that was really extraordinary.
So, one of the men on the call told this story of a guy who had a really interesting habit. He would frequently travel, and when he would go to the airport, he would leave his car in the parking lot, as many of us do. But, unlike many of us, he would be so engrossed in what was going on in his head and in his heart and what was on his soul that he would actually leave the car running and then presumably take the bus into the terminal and then make his flight and go about his day.
And it occurred to me that obviously, there could be only one thing that would be on his mind and in his heart that would be so engrossing that he would completely forget his surroundings; that he would leave his keys, that he would leave his car running.
Obviously, this was a man who was deeply in love with our Lord, who was meditating on the mysteries of our Lord and His Passion, and had so detached himself from his worldly surroundings that he didn’t even care about his keys, about leaving his car behind.He didn’t care that it might be a stolen, that it might run out of gas. None of that was on his mind because of the things that were so important to him.
And it occurs to me that all of us need to have this kind of attachment to God, that we literally have what some of the Saints have called ‘the gift of forgetfulness’. Now, I think they often talk about being forgetful when it comes to the injuries we’ve suffered from other people, whether it’s being called names, whether they’ve done things to hurt our reputation, or whatever.
But I think that there’s also something to be learned from this example; that if we go about our lives with the same forgetfulness that that man had, the same passion for following the will of our Lord, for serving others, for loving one another, and we let the things of the world just kind of pass us by, there might be little inconveniences along the way- there might be times where we have to call somebody to bring us a gallon of gas or jump start our car or bring us an extra set of keys whatever the case may be- but those are minor things compared to giving ourselves over completely to the will of God.
I hope this reflection has been helpful for you. Have a great day.
Good morning gentlemen. So, my insight video for this week is talking about what we really mean when we are rating our activities. What really is a ‘3’ when we’re evaluating our efforts towards something? And one of the things that we talked about on our call today was that my ‘3’ is not someone else’s ‘3’.
So, when I look at the lives of the saints and I see them bilocating or levitating, well, that that’s probably not where I am in my spiritual life. So, I need to make an honest, humble evaluation of where I am.
What does the soil of my soul look like? If my soul is the soil in which God the Sower is going to work, what does that soil look like? A gardener is focused on aerating his soil and fertilizing it and making sure it’s the best possible quality and that it’s fresh and that it’s ready for that seed to do what it’s supposed to do.
So, what is the condition of my soul, the soil? What have I done to it that might make it uninhabitable for the seed? What have I done to it that would make it not be as productive and as fertile as it should be? So, evaluating the ‘3’ of any given activity- have I really done my very best? Am I pursuing that kind of accountability and measurability with the same zeal that I would in business, where many of us are accustomed to measuring? We have metrics, we have goals, and we’re very precise with those things.
So, how am I really doing there? And what score really is appropriate for my activities and where I really am? Taking that same kind of approach to my spiritual life that I might to my health or my business. That’s my reflection for today, and I hope that it was helpful for you.