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Tag: sacrifice
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It’s Time For Me to Decrease
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, gentlemen. I’ve been reading St. John the Baptist’s words lately- like maybe you have this time of year- and how he talked about the need for him to decrease so that Christ could increase. And you know, it occurred to me that this is not just a catchy saying about John the Baptist, he’s not virtue signaling. This is actually a way of life, and it’s one that we are all called to adopt. Our abandonment of our attachment to things of this world, and that includes our own thoughts and our own feelings to the extent that they’re not perfectly in alignment with the will of God.
So, I must grow smaller in my thoughts, in my words, in my prayers, in my conscious thinking about things, my recollection, my memories, my goals, and my planning for the rest of my life. There needs to be less of me in all of that. In fact, I serve as the primary obstacle to grace in my own life. So, in every possible way, I’m obliged to try and grow smaller, to decrease, because just like when you put something- an object- inside of a box or a can, that object takes up space by its very existence. It’s precluding something else from occupying that space. It’s hard to think about for those of us who have probably spent our entire lives saying, “I want to do this. I want to achieve this. I want to accomplish this. I want to be like this when I grow up. I want to be known for this. I want to have children. I want to have grandchildren. I want to be a good husband.”
Well, sometimes those things are properly ordered, but oftentimes they’re not or at least they’re ordered to a lesser good than what God desires for us. I’m committed to trying to live anew, like John the Baptist talked about, becoming lesser so that God can become greater. And by that method, I have the hope of reaching eternal life.
TRANSCRIPT:
Every week I reach out to other Catholic men on LinkedIn- men who are professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs- and we talk about life, faith, family, business, whatever’s on their mind. It’s just a kind of personal apostolate that I’ve done to get to know other men who are like me, who share things in common with me, who have a similar world view.
And this week I had an extraordinary phone call. The man I was talking to was a founding member of the Medellín Cartel in 1976. He, along with Pablo Escobar, made a million, two million dollars per month moving cocaine in the United States. And of course, eventually, he was caught and arrested, convicted, did 10 years in federal prison. He got out, returned to the same life, got caught all over again doing the same thing, and he got another five years in prison.
Imagine doing fifteen years in prison by the time you’re forty, and the only thing you’ve ever done and been successful at was being a drug kingpin. This guy got out of prison, turned his life around, went and got a master’s degree, then got a PhD from Loyola and devoted his life to prayer and evangelism. He wrote books, he did speaking, he was a best-selling author, he was an in-demand speaker; he built a business, raised six children, and returned to the Catholic faith.
And as he was telling me this story, I was just blown away not just at the depths of the sin, but at the degree of redemption and how far he had climbed out of that pit of sin. And you know, it got me to thinking about how God permits our sin because of free will. He permits it, but He also can use that, and we are to work through that sin to achieve an even greater good than otherwise we would have. And we can look at the Life of Saint Paul as an example of this. We can look at a life like that of the man I spoke to this week, Jorge, who had done so much so wrong for so long and yet had then grown through that to achieve even greater things.
So sometimes I think it’s helpful for us to get outside of ourselves. We spend so much time kind of navel-gazing everyday, thinking about ourselves, thinking about our interior life. Sometimes I think it’s helpful to step back and talk to other men and learn from them about their failures, how they’ve overcome things, and the things that they’ve gone on to achieve in their life, both in the material world as well as the spiritual. I hope this has been helpful to you. God bless you.
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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.