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Tag: prayer
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God As Father
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Don’t Say THIS Prayer
TRANSCRIPT:
So, this is the worst prayer you can ever pray: the Litany of Humility. So, I prayed this prayer because I’m trying to work on pride, which is the root of all sins, and the other day, I had a significant Zoom meeting scheduled with a business prospect. I always take my time to make sure I’m in place, I’m prepared, I’ve done my research, my lighting is decent, sometimes I even try and brush my hair, that sort of thing. And moments before the Zoom call began, there was a fire right here on my desk. What had happened was the little space heater that I have here in my basement office that I use when it’s particularly cold outside caught fire. And so as my Zoom call began, you know, when they let you into that waiting room on a Zoom call? Right as that happened, there was smoke wafting up in front of the camera, and I could see the fire right in front of me.
And of course, I had no option but to try and deal with it right there on camera. That was how I began that call. And as embarrassing as that was, as difficult as that was, that was only just the beginning. Because as I kind of tried to explain to my prospective client what was happening, I heard what sounded like a waterfall in my office. And the truth is that there was, in fact, a waterfall in my office. There was a plumbing catastrophe with my aquaponics system. I have a great big fish tank, and the water from the fish tank is pumped into a container where we grow spinach and lettuce and thyme and basil and those kinds of things, and then the water recycles between the plants and the fish. That all sounds really good, and for the last three years it’s worked fantastically. Until that day.
Somehow, the drainage pipe had clogged up, and the water, instead of flowing back to the fish, was just- it was a waterfall right onto the floor of the basement. That was how I started out the most significant meeting of the week. And so I took that as a message from Our Lord that I need to maybe not take myself so seriously, trust in Him some more, and embrace this whole idea of humiliation, because that was pretty embarrassing.
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Why Your Holy Hour Should Come First
TRANSCRIPT:
I have a great insight from this morning’s phone call with Men Living For Greatness, and Chris shared something that I thought was very simple but very profound. And I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to share with you. And that is that when we put our holy hour first in the day- the very first thing- and we have that sense, maybe, if you’re like me, that “I’ve got so many things to do, maybe I’ll push it to later in the day when it’s more convenient.”
But if we resist that temptation and we make that holy hour first, it’s an act of faith, right? It’s an act of trust that we’re making in God to give him the first moments of our day. And that act of faith that everything else in the rest of the day will fall into place and be taken care of is a great opportunity for us to learn and to grow and to enter into that area where maybe (in secular thought) we feel like is a risk, but it’s actually faith in God.
And if you’re the kind of business person who maybe thinks about ‘ROI’ like I do, I think you can also rationalize it. “Hey, if I give God the first moments of my day and I delay everything else and I trust in him, He’s probably going to take care of me and solve things that I couldn’t solve on my own.”
I hope this has been helpful for you. I know it’s a simple thing, but it’s a meaningful thing. And it might be a way for us to help share with other men who have not yet made that commitment to a morning holy hour of why they should. Have a great day.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon. Today I want to chat about diabolical disorientation. Now, I first heard this term when I was very young, probably 30 years ago, and it was used by Sister Lúcia of Fátima fame and some of her writings.
I never really understood what ‘diabolical disorientation’ might mean until very recently. I was thinking about our world that we live in today in 2020 with the Wuhan virus, with the economic collapse, with the shutdowns that have affected everything from school to work to church, the situation of our Church with poor leadership and mass apostasy. Even now, churches are shut down, in some places communion is not available or people are even banned from kneeling. So there’s enormous suffering, confusion, and an overwhelming sense of fear in our world. It seems to me that this is diabolical disorientation.
So what do we do when we are disoriented? Well, I think the first thing we do is ask for help. We ask for help from someone near us, someone we trust. “Help me out, I’m disoriented.” And so in a spiritual sense, we’ve got to go to our guardian angels first, we’ve got to go to our patron saints, to Saint Joseph and, of course, to Our Lady and ask for help constantly throughout the day as we’re feeling the effects of this disorientation.
Secondly, when we’re disoriented, we flee to safety. We want to go back to some place that we are comfortable and we know is safe. We might need help getting back there. So in our spiritual life, what does this mean? We’ve got to flee from sin and temptation- even of the most minor kind- and we’ve got to get back to the basics of our prayer life and to fasting and those disciplines.
And the final thing, it seems to me- if we’re truly disoriented, if you’ve ever been sick, if you’ve ever been nauseous and you get dizzy and so forth, what do you do? You go find that favorite chair that you’re comfortable in, and you just want to sit still and just regain your senses. And it seems to me that in this time where we might be tempted all sorts of new and exotic things, especially if we’re trying to grow in our spiritual life, if we’re dealing with that anxiety and fear, we’re starting to feel that pressure, then maybe it’s just time to get really simple go back to our mental prayer. Perhaps even just meditate on the words of the Our Father one word at a time, like St. Therese did, and spend that time in that simplistic, quiet prayer, opening ourselves up to the grace and influence of our Lord. We’ve got a double down on the simple stuff during these difficult times, and let’s regain that piece of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in our souls and our lives so that we can be a good example to others.
Have a great day.
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.
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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.
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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.