Preserve Your Energy
Negativity is the biggest drain on our energy. Every day we encounter plenty of rabbit holes to go down; negative news stories, clickbait links, and even entertainment programs. I’ve just decided that it’s not worth it to waste my time and energy on things that I have no control over and that are just going to bum me out.
We need to be conscious of how we spend our time and energy, two of the most precious and finite resources that we have. If we waste them away on things that will create anxiety, we lose more than we could have ever hoped to gain. Prioritizing our time and consciously choosing to spend our energy on positive thoughts and activities are the best things we can do for ourselves.
I like to have a running list of the things that I need to do each day in order to be successful. My list includes reading, eating well, exercising and a certain amount of work. I limit my unscheduled time in order to help me stay on track with things that I know yield positive results. For example, if I had three hours of free time each day, I might waste them binge watching Netflix. Instead, if I take those same three hours and give 1 hour to exercise, 1 hour to work, 30 minutes to reading, and 30 minutes to free time, I can relax knowing that watching Netflix isn’t going to hurt me somewhere else. I’ve never finished a book and said to myself, “I wish I’d spent that time watching TV.”
We only have so much energy each day. Spend it on things worth doing so that tomorrow you’ll wake up a better person for your wife, your family, and yourself.
The Daily Struggle for Goodness
When you’re trying to live a better life, a holier life, don’t expect evil to just roll over and take it. The struggle between God and the Devil is a zero sum game. For every person that lives a holy life, there’s that much less capacity for evil in the world. When seeking renewal or change, be prepared for the onslaught.
Evil wants power, absolute control, and absolute corruption. Like a disease, evil from one person can spread to another. A person who’s fallen victim to sin can easily pull someone else into sin with them. In the same way, holiness in one person can spread to another.
Being tempted isn’t a bad thing. In fact, sometimes it can be a sign that you’re doing the right thing. That doesn’t make it easier to endure, but it does give you more leverage to resist. The more momentum you have in your quest for holiness, the more successful you’ll be. We can’t reasonably expect for temptation to go away, but we can expect it to subside. Like lifting weights, the more frequently we resist temptation, the stronger we become.
Sin and evil are a fact of life, but participating in them doesn’t have to be. Through the Sacraments, grace, prayer, and diligence, you can live a holy life. Millions of Saints have done just that, so why not be the next one?
Setting Your Goals for 2016
I think that the most interesting aspect of goal setting is looking at them in hindsight. As I sit here looking at the goals that I set for myself, I have to laugh at how much things have changed over the past 12 months. Some goals I beat by huge margins, and others I completely abandoned. It’s the nature of the year and the nature of change. The real secret to having goals that get accomplished is to start planning, in detail, right now.
The time to set goals is not January. Goals, given their long-range nature, require lots of contemplation. First, you have to consider where you want to go. What are the projects that you want to complete? What are the passions that you want to pursue? How do they fit into the schedule of your life? You have a finite amount of time to dedicate to pursuits, so what should you spend that time on? If you’re panicked in January because you’re losing time, you’ll make different decisions than if you completed the same exercise in November or December.
There are perennial goals that end up on all of our lists, the most common one being weight loss. We’re likely to pick up a few pounds over the holidays, but [we still struggle to keep momentum moving past January] (https://www.catholichusband.org/files/why-resolutions-fail.php). It can take up to 12 weeks to start seeing the results of your increased physical activity, which means if you quit before April, you did something wrong. If weight loss is on your list, start working towards the goal now, not January 1st. It’s a worthy goal and one that’ll pay dividends in your quality of life. Keep in mind that maintaining a healthy weight is more than reaching a goal and checking off a box, it’s a lifestyle.
In addition to health, financial, and career goals, I like to add in one extra goal for something that I’ve always wanted to do. It may be a skill that you want to learn or a lifelong dream. Have something fun in your goals so that it’s not all boring.
Once you’ve set your goals, spend time planning, in detail, how you’re going to accomplish them. What’s your plan? What does your daily and weekly calendar look like? What are the milestones and how are you going to reach them? How will you track your progress and remain accountable?
Now is the time to think about, write down, and plan your goals. Use the last few days of December and first few days of January to clean out everything in your workspace and get everything set-up. Then, charge!
A Christmas List
Although Christmas is just a few days away, I wanted to share an idea with you that might make next year’s Christmas season a little bit less stressful. While the focus of the Christmas season should be on preparing our hearts to receive Christ, there’s also an element of gifting. Gift giving is a wonderful and generous practice that allows us to show, in a material way, the internal feelings we have for one another. At its heart, gift giving is one person seeking to bring joy or help into the life of another. We give the gift of money to charities to ease the pains and sufferings of others. We give gifts to our spouses and children to meet some need or to bring them joy. We give gifts to our coworkers to thank them for their diligent work. Gift giving only becomes a negative when it takes our focus off of Christ and puts it on to materialism.
A perennial problem with gift giving is figuring out what to give a particular person. We all have those “hard to shop for” people, or even just people that we want to knock it out of the park for. Oftentimes, those people are our children, our siblings, or our parents. The more people that you have on this nebulous list, the easier it is to lose focus on preparing for Christmas.
Thankfully, Alison has a solution for you. Since last year, she’s put together a list of 20-30 prompts that she asks her siblings and I to fill out. The list covers all of the bases when it comes to gift giving. There are prompts for big gifts and small gifts, charitable gifts, homemade gifts, disposable gifts, and of course, those “must have gifts.”
Although she changes it each year, I wanted to share it with you as a way to help bring some clarity to your life. I’ll share it earlier next year, but for now, this list makes a great prompt for gift shopping. In fact, it might even make a great list for birthday presents. We hope it helps!
2015: The Year of the Gazelle
I absolutely love this time of year. The anticipation of Advent, the joy of sharing Christmas morning with my own little family, and a chance for all of us to breathe a little easier and take stock of our year. It’s been a big one in the Collins household and I hope that you’ve had a fun year as well.
Many of my posts this month have us looking towards 2015 and considering how we can do it even better in the New Year. Certainly I want us both to move beyond flippant resolutions and instead implement long-term strategic goals. More importantly, I want us to meet back up here on the blog next December and celebrate the fruits of the work that we’ve done this month.
I want to focus today on something that’s very near and dear to my heart, and that’s also something that I haven’t been the best at this year. Finances make our world move, that’s something that none of us would dispute. While money shouldn’t be our god, it is the means to provide food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and comfort to both us and our family. We’re all money managers and, as such, we have the duty to do it well.
Unlike other types of goals, we all have financial related goals, whether we acknowledge them or not. We want to go on vacation, buy a new computer, get our kids that outdoor swing set or get out of debt. For Alison and I, our #1 goal right now is getting out of debt.
Like other goals, we wisely recognize that we can’t do it alone. We knew that we needed to get some outside counsel to help us figure out the best way to reach this goal. We’ve got a big hole, and an ever growing shovel, but we know that if we aren’t good money managers, that money will disappear and not help us pay down debt. We turned to Dave Ramsey who has an extensive line-up of products, classes, and services to help us.
One of Dave’s teaching tools is what he calls “Gazelle Intensity.” The gazelle is the prey of the fastest animal on land, the cheetah. Yet, despite their frequent interactions, the gazelle escapes the majority of the time. It does so by outmaneuvering the cheetah. In the illustration, it’s reveled that if we want to get out of debt, we need to be the gazelle. The cheetah represents many different enemies of financial stability: immaturity, credit marketing, impatience, reckless spending, and whatever that “next big thing” is. If we want to be successful, we have to outmaneuver those wants and focus on the goal.
I don’t know what your financial goal is, but I do know that if you want to reach it, you’ll need to be disciplined and it will take time. Why not make next year the Year of the Gazelle?
What if, for just 1 year, you poured all of your focus into reaching your financial goal? You’d have to eat at home more, spend less, and maybe even postpone that vacation. It would be hard, that’s for sure. You’d not only face the battle of wants, you’d face the battle of attrition. January would be easy, but by September, you’d be fatigued.
Right there, in that scenario, is the secret to success. Yes, in the short term, it would be hard to save money to buy a new TV as opposed to putting it on your credit card. But, if you save your money and pay cash, it will only take you 12 months. If you put it on your credit card, you could be paying for it for 3 years!
The secret is realizing that, while more painful on the front end, you’ll spend less time overall dealing with the goal. If Alison and I pay off her student loans in 5 years, that will save us 15 years of paying on them on the back end!
It takes maturity, it takes discipline, and more than anything, it takes wisdom. It takes the wisdom to understand that the pain will be less if you just rip the bandaid off instead of a slow pull.
That’s my challenge to you for today. You know what financial goal you want to hit, so sit down, talk to your wife, and decide to make 2015 the Year of the Gazelle.
Turning Your Thoughts Back to God
We have a lot of mentally idle time. Folding laundry, cleaning the kitchen, running errands, and even doing work that requires low levels of mental resources, and we oftentimes fill those spaces with day dreams, list making, or anxiety. What if instead, we took those times and turned our thoughts back to God?
I think there’s a lot of benefit in using our downtime to thinking about the things of God. Too often we’re tempted to focus on the negative, and so spending our resources and energies on contemplating good things can help us have brighter days. The more time you spend thinking about the things of God, the happier you’ll be, the more energy you’ll have, and the less anxiety you’ll experience.
What kinds of things should you ponder while thinking about the things of God? Thinking about how generous God has been towards you, how amazing the Sacraments are, and the blessings He’s given you can be a tremendous boost to your day. You could also spend the time thinking about ways in which things seemed to work out poorly in the moment, but in hindsight you can see how they were for the best. Of course, you could also have a simple dialogue with God about your thoughts, ideas, and emotions.
I find that contemplating the mind of God helps me to remain grounded. There are many things that impact my attitude on a daily basis, and by keeping my perspective focused upwards, I’m able to remain better grounded. That means less time being impatient or frustrated, and more time being joyful and energized.
Spend less time focusing on the negative and more time focusing on the things of God. You’ll be glad you did.
Food Diaries Are A Pain
The tactic in weight management that I’ve found to be the most effective and also the most cumbersome is keeping a food diary. The concept is simple: record and monitor your intake. The data you record will help you to better understand the needs of your body, what foods should be cut out of your diet, and ultimately help you balance your calorie count in order to achieve your weight goal. While the concept is simple, the execution is not.
Keeping a food diary is tedious. We eat all of the time, and oftentimes there’s no nutritional information available. Even if it is available, you might have to do some digging to find it. There’s also the sticker shock of going out to eat and realizing that the meager sandwich you just ate was 85% of your daily calorie goal. Bummer.
I prefer to do everything digitally, so finding a food diary app was a problem for me. Thankfully many have a scanning feature that allow you to scan a barcode on the food packaging and the app will do the rest. The limitation of this feature is whether or not the food you just ate is in the system. Digital food diaries can take away the friction of recording intake, but there are still real challenges.
Perhaps the most difficult part of keeping a food diary is that they make us admit reality. Yes, I really ate those cookies. Yes, I really ate two lunches. Yes, I had too much to eat at dinner. Reality is uncomfortable, but that was likely the reason you started keeping a food diary in the first place.
Using a food diary is the single most effective tool in achieving weight loss. Take your time to select the method or app that’s right for you, and be disciplined enough to record your intake consistently. Make eating decisions based on your intake and, over time, harvest the benefits of success.
Hell Isn’t For Me
While I was in Drivers Ed, I learned a valuable lesson. Where your eyes go, the car goes. We’re playing the long game here on Earth. In the routine of our daily lives, thinking about where we’ll be in the life after this one can be easily overlooked. Yet, at the same time, our actions and choices within our daily routine point to where we’re oriented. I’ve never once been happy as a result of committing a sin, yet sometimes I find myself in a cycle of decisions leading me further away from the life that God has planned for me.
The design of the human mind is intriguing. Although intellectually we can grasp that sin is harmful and doesn’t lead to happiness, we still choose it on a regular basis. There are many theological explanations, but isn’t it interesting in and of itself that the human mind, without morals or guidance, will tend toward making decisions based on impulsive wants.
The challenge of the Christian life is to overcome this self-centeredness. The challenge is to respond with love when your wife is annoying you, to respond with love when you’re tired but your children need something from you, and to respond with love when another person deeply offends you.
Heaven is real, and so is Hell. When standing in the Confession line it’s easy to say where we want to end up. Yet, in the moment, when we’re out in the world confronted by temptation, our decision making process can become much more cloudy.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that in order for us to have true happiness, we have to reject things that present themselves as something good or beneficial for us. Sin always dresses itself in the robes of goodness, yet when unmasked its true destruction is revealed. By saying no to sin and denying ourself a passing pleasure, we choose to embrace and accept the lasting happiness that following God’s Will brings.
In the routine of our daily lives, we need to do things that keep us oriented to our destination of choice. Like our eyes in the car, if we look towards Hell, we’ll end up there. But if we keep our eyes fixed on the eternal good, on the fruits of Heaven, we’ll surely end up there, right where we belong.
Raising Wholesome Kids
My goal in raising Benedict is that he grow into a wholesome, mature man worthy of a great woman. The path to this ideal is filled with challenges, especially as he will face pressure from his peers and the temptations to make poor choices. I want him to preserve his honor, and the honor of those whom he associates with, so that he can present himself as a worthy gift to his wife should he be called to the married life.
There are so many messages being thrown at all of us today, that even I sometimes can find it difficult to wade through them to find the truth and I’m an adult. I know that Benedict and his peers will increasingly face more and more messages that are just wrong. As a sad result, kids will make bad choices based on those wrong messages and the consequences will be lasting.
In order to raise a wholesome child, parents have to do the difficult things. We have to put reasonable restrictions on them and help them to understand why those restrictions are there in the first place. We have to be parents, not friends with our kids. Even more importantly, we have to have difficult discussions on topics such as sexuality and drug use with our children before they get bad information from others. That may be uncomfortable, and it’ll have to happen sooner than we’d like, but it’s a fact of life.
The goal is for us to help our children mature into functioning, healthy adults who aren’t saddled with the regret and consequences of youthful indiscretions. It’s a true challenge, but a worthy pursuit nonetheless.
Raising wholesome kids has never been easy, the nature of the threats are simply changing and becoming more aggressive. Our job is to help Benedict grow into a well-adjusted, mature adult capable of making reasoned and logical choices. I’m also praying for the parents of Benedict’s future spouse, that they will be as successful as we are.
Drive Safely This Season
As the cool fall air moved into the region, I made a concerted effort to get Benedict outside more. We ran around in the yard, cleaned up our garden, and put away flower pots. He’s a determined little guy who loves his freedom, so we’d also walk the 50 yards or so of sidewalk in front of our house. Since I regularly take him on my walk with me (he rides in the stroller), he’s had plenty of opportunity to see cars drive by. During our walks on the sidewalk, he’d stop for every car, yell “HI!” and wave as they passed by. Many drivers looked and waved back, most did not.
Are we really so distracted that we miss a 3ft child waving at us as we drive by?
Driving is one of the most dangerous things that you and I do on a daily basis. Although we’ve grown complacent in our surroundings and confident in our abilities, the fact remains that driving is an activity that demands total focus. Even a momentary lapse of judgement could result in serious bodily injury or death. The complacency is what’s really getting to us. We’re too comfortable. We’re comfortable enough to text, to talk on the phone, and even to develop tunnel vision.
The result of this complacency and comfort is experienced by each of us every time we drive. Motorcyclists drive near the centerline, changing lanes without signaling, and rapidly accelerating and decelerating. Vans drive slower than expected, drift, and make sudden corrections. Motorists unfamiliar with a particular area drive erratically as they seek to balance finding their destination and not crashing. Drivers text while traveling at speed on highways, or even in dense congestion.
While this is partly a warning about the dangers of complacency while driving, it’s also a warning against tunnel vision. We often only look out the window to glare at someone whose driving habits displease us. We can’t be complacent, we can’t be comfortable, but we also can’t be solely focused on what’s ahead.
Drive safely, drive defensively, but also be aware enough of your surroundings that you can anticipate changing situations and keep your passengers safe. We need to bring safety and courtesy back to the road, and it begins when you and I get behind the wheel.