The Gift of Private Confession
I’m thankful for private confession. If I had to confess my sins publicly, in front of my own community, I probably wouldn’t seek out God’s mercy. Instead, the Sacrament draws me in. I can go to God directly, ask for His forgiveness, and gain the graces to do better. It respects my dignity and allows me to work through my weaknesses without bearing a heavy burden of public shame. We’re lucky to have private confession!
Private confession fosters openness. When you enter into the Sacrament, you don’t have to hold anything back. The priest isn’t judging you as he stands in the Person of Christ. The Seal of the Sacrament is permanent and binding, meaning no one will ever know what you disclose. It’s perhaps one of the last places on Earth where you can bear your soul and not worry about reading about it later on the Internet. That’s the genius of the Sacrament in the digital age; when you’re in the confessional, you’re off the grid. What’s said there literally stays there.
It’s precisely because of private confession that we’re able to make a full disclosure of our faults and failings. We can name any sin that we’ve committed and truly be able to hold a mirror up to ourselves. You may share some of your faults and failings with your wife, and others she just knows. Yet, when we confess our weaknesses to others, we tend to hedge our bets. We leave something out that we think will be perceived as too evil. In confession, there’s no need to hold back. It’s in the Sacrament that we see ourselves for who we really are, where we stand in relationship to God, and how we are truly, wholly, dependent on His grace and mercy.
Finally, there’s no fear in the Sacrament. I think we give our priests a little too much credit. I seriously doubt that they’re as gifted in voice identification as we’d like to think, especially when you’re simply one penitent in a line. We think that they hold all of our secrets and carry around that valuable information, but really, they’ve got other things going on in their lives. They hear hundreds (if not thousands) of confessions every month and I’d bet that most of them sound the same. Plus, what kind of life would it be if you were oppressed with the burden of the evil everyone else has done? There’s something miraculous about the priest in the Sacrament. He’s present, but he’s not really present. He speaks, but he doesn’t really speak. Instead, standing in the place of Christ, he’s almost like a telephone, passing messages, yet retaining none. We have the option of going to confession behind the screen, meaning we can have complete anonymity and secrecy if we desire. There’s nothing to fear.
When you think about it, we have an awesome gift in the Sacrament of Reconciliation because we’re able to receive it privately. It’s a gift we should use more often.
Keep the Fires Burning
As Catholics, there are many things that we too easily take for granted. Our regular encounters with the Risen Christ begin to wash over us as something totally commonplace. Sunday Mass, the cornerstone of our week, is just another appointment on our calendar. Many of us struggle to keep the flame of faith alive.
I think this very real part of our human nature applies to almost every other aspect of our lives. We have an attention span that ebbs and flows. We long for Christmas morning to open our presents and to give gifts to our loved ones, but by Christmas afternoon, the excitement has faded. By March, it can be hard to remember what gifts we received. The further we get from Lent, Easter, or even our last Confession, the easier it is to commit sin. We stop thinking about the very real harm sin does to us and, more egregiously, the suffering it inflicts on our innocent and loving God. Married couples struggle with keeping the flame of their love alive. As the married life moves from the joy, pomp, and circumstance of their wedding day, life becomes quite ordinary. How do marriages endure the common and live a life wholly uncommon?
Two things must happen in order for us to fully embrace the life that we were made to live. First, we have to remove ourselves from the economy of emotion. Emotions are a double edged sword. They protect us, and at the same time, they’re complete tyrants. If we base our feelings of self-worth on the shifting sands of emotions, we’ll end up lost. The gauge of your faith life, your marital love, your friendships, or your dignity as a person cannot be built upon how you “feel” on a particular day. Instead, we must focus on growing in humility. It’s only in serving that we’re most alive. By focusing on others instead of ourselves, we can know that we’re living a full life.
Second, we must give much more than we get. This is, in essence, the basis of marriage. You give 100% for your wife, and her needs are met. She gives 100% for you and your needs are met. This goes way beyond mutual back-scratching. This is an intense and enduring desire to be fully in the service of your wife, carrying her burdens on your shoulders and easing her pain. This is the love of Christ, who gave everything He had: His name, His reputation, His home, and His life so that we might live.
As we turn outward and live lives of stewardship and service, we’ll become better people, our family will grow stronger, and our interactions with Christ in the Mass, Sacraments, Church, and the people that we meet will no longer be commonplace. Instead, they’ll be rejuvenating encounters that will encourage us to seek constant renewal.
The Speed of A Year
The speed of time never ceases to amaze me. It seems like every time I blink a day, week, month, season, or year is over. Perhaps no season travels faster than Summer. When it comes to big units of time (months, years), I seem to be intentional in how I spend my time, but in the days and hours, I tend to be more carefree. If I want to make those months and years mean something, I need to keep focused and live each day with purpose.
There’s truth in the mantra, “Seize the day!” Since days are the building blocks of weeks, months, and years, how we spend our days is vitally important. There should be time for work, play, rest, and recreation. A balanced day ensures that I move forward as a whole person, not just as parts of a person. A balanced day also ensures peace as I lay down at night, knowing that all that could be accomplished has been accomplished.
Although we’re past the halfway mark for this year, 2015 is far from over. In a singular year, we all go through many changes and transformations. There are new experiences, new ideas, and new challenges that we encounter. Declare now, starting today, a year of growth. Identify those areas where you want to improve, go out, and get it done! Don’t wait for a calendar or January 1st. Start now!
Enjoy your time with your kids today. Relish in spending time alone with your wife. Move beyond laziness, get out there, and do something amazing today!
Believe in Yourself
There’s a direct correlation between how successful you are and how diligently you work. The hardest workers get promoted the fastest, get the biggest raises, and are given the most freedom. You can be the top performer in your company if you show up every day and bring your A game.
The path to becoming the best starts with a belief that you can do anything that you apply yourself to. Far too many people have a terrible work ethic. They didn’t set out to be poor employees, but they find themselves overwhelmed by the stresses in their lives. This creates a golden opportunity for you to shine when you show up every day with a serious work ethic that gets stuff done. If you’re going to win, you’re going to need to start believing that you’re smart enough and good enough to be the best.
Be a serious team player and seek advice on how to improve your own performance. Do nice things for your coworkers, lend a hand whenever possible, and always keep an eye on the team’s goals while you’re pushing on your own.
If you bring it every day, your annual review is going to be very different at the end of this year. Start believing that you can be the best, deliver a strong performance daily, and don’t let anything get in your way.
Cherish Your Father
Benedict has started behaving like a two year old just a few months early. He’s usually loads of fun, but he can also test my patience. He’ll be cute and cuddly at one moment and melting down in the next. It’s all part of the deal when it comes to being a father. This experience of fatherhood has helped me to better recognize a great blessing that I had growing up and still have today: a great dad.
We all have the desire to do something great. We want to be the best, to be esteemed, and to give our wife, our friends, and our family the best version of ourselves. Though this desire burns hotly within us, it’s the difficult path. Life happens, work happens, stress happens, conflict happens and soon we see how far from our goal we’ve fallen. Being a great dad requires tremendous effort and laser-like intentionality.
The life of a father is not one of privilege, but one of sacrifice. Although our sense of self-preservation starts to cringe when the “s” word is mentioned, sacrifice is incredibly freeing. There’s no better feeling than the dozens of times each day that we help meet our children’s needs. We give up that cookie so that they might smile, we refill their cup because they can’t, we endure watching the same episode of Sesame Street for the 18th time, and we “help" clean up their toys in the evening. The life of a father is a front row seat to the miracle of life and it comes with great demands.
Sadly, many children today grow up without the gift of knowing their father. They grow up not knowing the love of the man who helped bring them into the world. You can choose to give the gift of yourself to your children. More importantly, if you’ve been blessed with the gift of a father who tried his best to be a good dad for you, thank him.
A Culture that Respects Life
We find ourselves, yet again, as Americans doing some serious soul-searching after last week’s incident of gun violence. Two young journalists gunned down on live TV in a chilling video clip that’s been seen by millions the world over. The assailant, hours later, taking his own life.
Several times a year, individuals commit callous acts of violence and catapult the issue of gun violence back to center stage. Within hours of the attack, Twitter was alive with people calling for more gun control, including many from the international community. Political leaders, too, entered into the fray. I hate the specter of gun violence and the devastation that it causes in mere seconds. I don’t want any person or family to suffer at the hands of a criminal armed with a gun. So how do we stop this?
I invite us to take this opportunity to stop talking about gun control as a political issue. We’ve seen in shooting after shooting that it’s all talk, and no action. In essence, I don’t believe that guns are the problem, just as cars aren’t the problem in DUI deaths. People using these tools irresponsibly are the problem. We hear about mass shootings, but we don’t hear about the millions of Americans who own guns legally and responsibly. In many cases, as in this most recent one, the firearms were purchased legally. Logic tells me that gun control isn’t the problem.
Gun violence is symptomatic of a larger societal problem. We’ve devolved into a society that has started deciding which life has value and which life doesn’t. We pick who deserves to be protected and cherished, and who doesn’t.
We’re a society that doesn’t value the lives of the young or the old. Babies are subject to abortion at the sole “choice" of the mother, and the old are increasingly given legal options to prematurely end their lives. That kind of power exerts tremendous pressure on those involved. Scared mothers are pressured by lowlife boyfriends, the elderly feel pressure, intended or otherwise, to not be a “burden.”
We’re a society that doesn’t honor women. We don’t respect them and the station that they hold as protectors and bearers of life. Contraception and abortion were meant to be the great liberators of women, and instead it has completely subjugated them. Women are now sexual objects whose sole purpose is to satisfy the desires of men, without the man having to worry about creating a child or the responsibility of raising that child. In turn, this has led to the plague-like spread of online pornography accessible in an instant, by anyone, anonymously.
We’re a society that uses the legality of the death penalty far too loosely. We have the ability to safely protect society from those who commit violent crime, yet, we still routinely execute inmates. These executions are based on past behavior, often decades in the past, and not out of a necessity to defend ourselves. If an inmate continued to pursue escape attempts or habitually committed violent acts against fellow inmates or guards while incarcerated, there could be a logical argument for using the death penalty for self-defense purposes. Yet, it isn’t just those on Death Row who are marginalized. Criminals, once having paid their debt to society, find it nearly impossible to turn their lives around on the outside and find themselves incarcerated again.
These things are all tied together. Children aren’t precious, the elderly aren’t precious, women aren’t precious, actors in pornography aren’t precious, convicted inmates aren’t precious. Life is not precious.
This isn’t the Gospel that we claim to believe. This isn’t the people we imagine ourselves to be. This isn’t a just society. One cannot condemn gun violence and then demand unrestricted access to abortion. The logic isn’t sound.
Change in society takes time, and it takes a massive group of people making a concerted effort to raise the consciousness of society to effect real change. Instead of condemning the devaluing of some human life, let’s start celebrating all human life. Let’s be kind to our neighbors, be merciful in our speech and teach our children the value of loving others and building them up as opposed to tearing them down.
Let’s live the life that Christ called us to live. Only then can we truly be free.**
Do the Essentials
Daily schedules fluctuate a lot. Between work, appointments, shopping, and after-school activities, every day looks a little different. In fact, this fluctuation isn’t restricted to day by day comparison. In the evening, you may find that your day ended up looking remarkably different than it did when it started. These fluctuations mean that things that you planned on doing may not have gotten done. When I’m pressed for time, I often cut my essentials - reading, prayer, and exercise. This approach is all wrong. Instead of seeking to save a few minutes from the things that you consider to be essential each day, look instead at your to-do list and defer a few tasks for another time.
The essentials are those things that you need to do each day in order to feel that a particular day was a success. As I previously mentioned, my essentials are getting some recreational reading done, praying, and exercising, typically in the form of walking. Whatever your essentials may be, these are the things that should be assigned the highest priority when time is tight, not cut the moment things get difficult. In fact, when you look at the activities that you consider to be essential, you might notice that they’re the things that keep you balanced, motivated, and calm.
No matter what your day brings, do your essentials. They may not happen at the time or in the order that you planned, but they need to get done. When you look back on your weeks, months, and years, these essentials will be the things that move you forward as a human person, something that your to-do list won’t be able to do. You may have to sacrifice some sleep, some project, or some chore in order to do them, but do the essentials no matter what.
The idea that a to-do list should get completely finished defeats the idea of a to-do list. The to-do list should be a compilation of every single task that you need to get done so that your list is in charge of maintaining that running list instead of your brain. You’ll always have something that will need to get done. With that in mind, be comfortable deferring tasks for another day or skipping a few to-dos in order to make sure that you’ve got the essentials covered.
The temptation in time management is when things get tough to cut out the big stuff. Instead of going after your essentials, those things that contribute to a successful day, look at your to-do list and push a few non-essentials off to another time when you can give them the full attention that they deserve.
Listen to Your Body
I hate to admit it, but I’m losing ground to my migraines. Since they started in 2006, we’ve had an on again, off again relationship. At times, they have more control over my life than I do. At other times, they are virtually nonexistent. I’ve been doing all of the right things: solid sleep schedule, good eating, regular exercise, and plenty of water. Yet, from time to time, I get out of orbit. I’ve been in denial about my need for corrective treatment until two things happened. I started keeping a diary, as I should’ve the whole time, and frankly, the diary doesn’t lie. Second, I became irritated that my daily choices had to conform to a rigorous daily regimen of preventative habits. Most days, it’s fine, but what about when I’m on vacation and I want to sleep in or stay up late?
I think that my most recent experience with migraines mirrors our spiritual wellbeing. There are certain things that we should do each day in order to maintain our spiritual balance. While sin is attractive and may even be exciting, we all know the desolation that waits for us on the other side. We know the joy and happiness that comes with a life well lived and the peace that can only be found when we’re living the way we ought to. So, to keep our defenses up against temptation, we pray at various points during the day, we go to Mass on Sunday, and we occasionally go to Confession.
When we slack off on our prayer life, or when we haven’t gone to confession in a while, sin starts piling up on us. We get busy and move prayer down the priority list. Or we get complacent or feel invincible and stop actively working against our principal sin. It’s in those times that we fall into sin. Correcting these failures requires more effort to get back into our prayer routine. That friction may even discourage us and keep us out of orbit for even longer. It’s a cycle that we continue to face every day.
The same is true for our physical health. We know we should eat right, drink water, and exercise. When we’re in the routine, there’s little friction and it’s easier to persevere. Yet, when we fall out of the habit and skip a few days, it easily becomes a week, or a few months. Getting back into the routine requires tremendous effort that often fizzles out by week two. Your body needs good food to energize it, it needs water to cleanse, it needs exercise to maintain healthy levels of activity, and it needs prayer to relieve stress and connect with the spiritual dimension of our personhood. When we neglect any one area, our body sends us alerts, and if we ignore enough of them, we end up somewhere we don’t want to be.
Living a happy and healthy life yields tremendous benefits, but it can only be achieved when healthy choices are backed up with discipline. Only when we’re willing to do the work will we reap the rewards. Listen to your body, meet its needs, and enjoy the fruits of your work.
The Two Most Important Times of Day
There are two critical times of interaction with your wife each day. They are the times are when you say goodbye in the morning and hello in the evening. While both take only moments, I consider them to be real tone-setters for the day.
Mornings are typically characterized by frantic preparations. We wake up from a dead sleep, rush to shower, shave, eat, and get out the door on time. During the school year, our morning routine includes herding our children through the same process, often while facing resistance.
I find it to be incredibly important to take even just a few moments before Alison leaves the house to stop what I’m doing and say goodbye for the day. While we’re awake for 15 or even 18 hours, most of those hours are spent apart. In order to keep my day moving in the right direction, I want to press pause, and make sure Alison and I have a proper goodbye.
I read an article once about the importance of a parent stopping everything to greet their spouse when they come home. The article wanted parents to show their children, through this simple act, that nothing was more important or valued than one’s spouse. I think the premise is a good one. Just as taking a moment or two in the morning is important, greeting each other at the end of the day can be just as precious. It’s a nice reminder of the importance of one another. We are made for work, but more importantly, we’re made for each other. Now that Benedict’s walking, sometimes I even open the safety gate and let him toddle over to greet Alison when she comes in the door.
Schedules shift and we all have deadlines for getting out the door and on our way. I hope that you’ll make time at the beginning and end of each day to properly say goodbye and hello, and in that way, reaffirm your importance to one another.
Cutting Your Schedule
It’s said that the worst boss that you’ll ever work for is yourself. At one time or another, you may take on a side job in addition to the work at your main employer. When you take on additional work, there’s little opportunity for you to take on additional hours in the day. Instead, hours have to be reallocated from activities such as watching TV, surfing the Internet, or sleep. At the same time, a fast paced life is kind of fun. The American Dream compels us to get out of bed at 5am and stay up late into the night toiling so that we can have it all.
We all wish we could spend hours every day with our family. In fact, family time is perhaps the single highest priority that we have in our daily schedules. No matter how hard we have to work or how long our to-do list is, we yearn to have downtime to play in the yard with our kids or at the very least to share a meal together. There’s no doubt that our schedules are pushed to the limit in an attempt to wring out every last moment of productivity. When you do find yourself in a place where you need more time during the day, cut television and internet first, then choose wisely.
Full schedules demand precise scheduling and sincere sacrifice. Sleep can only be trimmed so far before it starts working against you, but when your schedule demands more time, you can be certain that your days of sleeping in are over. That’s why it’s so important for us to be time management surgeons. We need to cut the right things, we need to trim other things back, and we need to act with deadly precision. There are some activities that can be cut out entirely, but there are others that will need to be aggressively curtailed. Take, for example, the time you spend reading daily. Reading is a very good thing and it helps you grow as a person. While reading the right books may be wildly stimulating, if you need more time, you might have to place limits on your reading, perhaps cutting back to 30 minutes a day. An hour or two a day of reading might get you further, faster, but when your schedule is tight, those extra minutes are a luxury that can be traded in for the sake of family time.
When it comes to cutting critical activities, it can be helpful to create a prioritized list. Prayer, work, play, and relaxation are all a part of a healthy lifestyle, but when cuts have to be made, everything is on the table. By prioritizing the importance of each activity in your daily life, you can save the most important while sacrificing the least important. In this way, you maintain the integrity of those things that are most essential to your routine. As always, when trying new systems and time management ideas, it’s best to experiment for a few days and see how things work out. You can always add things back in or make further cuts based on your experience.
Now, let’s briefly put these ideas into action. My web design business has really been taking off and I’ve needed to find more time during the day to work so that I can take on more clients and grow my business. I’ve determined that my maximum number of work hours during the day is around 7 hours. That gives me time in the evening to spend with Alison, time during the day to care for Benedict, and time in the morning for prayer, reading, and exercise. From my leisure time, I’ve had to cut reading the newspaper as it took almost two hours a day for me to get through it. I could have simply pushed newspaper reading into the evening, but that would take away from time with Alison, so the cut had to be made. With those 7 hours for work, I’ve allocated five hours to client web design work and two hours to Catholic Husband and other activities. Of those two hours, one is dedicated to the blog, so that leaves me with 60 short minutes a day to work on other projects, like books and iOS app development.
Would I like to read the newspaper daily? Absolutely. Would I prefer to release new products throughout the year? Definitely. Yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that there simply isn’t enough time. So, I focus on the activities that will generate the most revenue for the business and income for my family. At the same time, I made cuts in order to preserve my family time, and I’ve maintained focus on a project that I really love, the blog.
Time management is truly a skill that we must learn and master, and it demands that we make difficult cuts. Yet, to save the things that we love, we must sacrifice. I encourage you to go through a similar process and ensure that you’re doing the things that you want and cutting what needs to be cut.