Catholic Husband

Life is definitely not always easy. In the human experience we each have times of extreme joy and of extreme sadness. How we deal with the problems in our lives says a lot about who we are as people. One of the people that we often don’t seek out for assistance is God.

This year has been all about change. As my time at work winds down and Alison gets closer to graduation, we’re preparing to move our family and start really a whole new life. We’ve been sick, there’s been stress, and lots of curve balls. As I’ve gone through these challenges, I’ve been considering what it really means to trust in God. In all of the difficulties, I found myself not taking the issues up in prayer. It was quite foolish of me.

There’s a balance that we must find in our spiritual walk. On the one hand, we’re supposed to trust that God will provide for all that we need. He will and He does. On the other hand, we’re not supposed to sit around and wait for God to fix our lives. We are God’s hands and feet in this world. The things we do can cause Him to be felt in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Trust is just a hard concept all around. We want to maintain as much control as we can over the things in our lives, but it’s also healthy to accept that we can’t control everything. Carrying around the stresses and burdens of our lives solely by ourselves is not only bad for us, it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. As children, our parents carried the load for us frequently. We should rely on God the same way.

Each day, in good times and in bad, we should be constantly repeating the phrase “Jesus, I trust in you.” We should say it with conviction and with belief. Because while we are players in God’s plan, we’re not the designer of the universe. We should pray that we are the instruments that God needs us to be today.

God is bigger than your illness. God is bigger than your problems at work. God is bigger than your marital struggle. He has conquered it all. So turn to Him in humility and in trust and let His Will, not yours be done.

Yesterday we talked about giving each day to God at the moment you wake up. But what about at the end of the day?

When it comes to my powers of estimation, I’m usually fairly good at recognizing the early warning signs of temptation and sin. During the day, I can be vigilant. At night, while asleep, it can be hard to ward off temptation, even in my dreams. Our dreams, much like the media we watch, can shape our attitudes and decision making. So if in my dreams I’m really mean to someone, when I encounter them during the waking hours, I can be predisposed to really unloading on them. Prayers before bed can be helping in defeating this nocturnal temptation.

The whole idea of prayers sporadically throughout the day and creating a rhythm of prayer in your life is to help you live a balanced life. We need to be regularly praying throughout the day and communicating with a God who loves us, who created us. By having this rhythm of prayer, you can really start to experience a balanced life that will bring you greater peace, satisfaction, and a greater degree of charity.

Praying right before you fall asleep, offering your last words of the day to God, can be the perfect way to both close out your day and protect your mind from dreams that will lead you into temptation. On top of which, I’ve found it can be a great way to ease into sleep!

Your last words close out your day and can help you to reflect on your actions. The goal is to love and serve God better tomorrow than you did today. Through reflection and prayer, you can hope to achieve that goal.

Deciding on your last words can be reflective of your spirituality. I have a devotion to the Divine Mercy, so I pray a few prayers from the Divine Mercy chaplet. I also freestyle a little bit and am usually very close to sleep at the end of the day.

Giving God your last words of the day is a great spiritual exercise. Not only does it perfectly end your day, it reorients your mind towards God.

There’s a curious phenomena in driving that involves your eyes. When you look in a direction other than straight ahead, you will start to drift in that direction. So, if you look for too long at the side of the road, you’ll soon find yourself there. This occurrence is intriguing because the same thing happens with your thoughts. If you think about things that are good, just, holy, and worthy, you’ll find that your days seem to go a little bit better. If you think about things that are near occasions of sin, you’ll find it’s really quite easy to fall into that sin.

Office morale is a major driving force in job satisfaction. Like all workers, I’ve found myself in environments when morale was high and I’ve also experienced the desolation of a low office morale. In the cases when morale was low, I redoubled my efforts to stay positive on the things I could control. What I found is that I was still able to be successful in spite of the negativity around me. During the times that I participated in the low morale, I too slipped into the darkness.

The first moments of the day can really shape the outcome of the next 12 to 16 hours. So if your alarm goes off and you experience nothing but dread, you’re not setting yourself up for success today. Attitude is everything and if you loathe your alarm clock and waking up, your day is really off to a bad start, too.

One of the spiritual habits that I’m hoping to adopt in the next few weeks is giving my first words to God. In those minutes after turning off my alarm clock and slowly waking up, I want to turn that into a prayer. I’m not very good at starting my day immediately with prayer, but I’d like to get better.

The reason that I want to adopt this practice is two-fold. First, each day is a gift and I’m terrible about taking that for granted. Second, I want to start the day by denying my pride. I only exist because God has chosen to hold me in being. I need as much of His help as I can get!

I plan to start with a simple greeting and then perhaps pray a Morning Offering. Of course, I’ll need to memorize the words first, but I’ve always liked how beautiful the words of the prayer are.

Starting our day by giving it first to God is a brilliant idea.

Every year, it seems to go the exact same way. Just a few days before Ash Wednesday and I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do for Lent. I know that Lent is coming, I know that I need to take time to consider what changes to make in my life, and I still don’t give it the time it deserves. This year, I went with something really special.

I once heard a priest describe Lent as a beginning of a life change as opposed to 40 days without something. He suggested that we decide our Lenten sacrifices based on things that we wanted to change in our lives. So instead of giving up sweets, we would work on something enduring, something life-changing.

This year, I really tried to embrace that idea by giving up working on Sundays. My goal is to embrace the call to Honor the Sabbath.

For the past four years I’ve been working for the Boy Scouts of America. At the end of this month, I’ll be leaving the BSA to work on ChetComm, LLC (the media and publishing firm that’s behind Catholic Husband) and be full time caregiver to Benedict as Alison goes to work with her healing hands. Working for the Scouts is a pretty good job with flexible hours. So my schedule looked like this: Monday through Friday I blog in the early morning before work. Then for the rest of the day I go to work. I spend Saturday and Sunday working on cleaning and ChetComm business. There’s a fair amount of work to be done for ChetComm each week. I have blog post goals, book writing goals, social media planning, new product development, and strategic planning. All told, it’s several hours of intense work.

Before this Lent, it wasn’t too much of an issue since I had 48 hours each weekend to work on it. When I decided to give Sunday it’s proper place, I saw that time shrink. Incredibly, it’s been a great change! I’ve been able to more guiltlessly spend time with Alison and Benedict, I’ve been able to actually relax, and it’s given us the flexibility to go on weekend trips. I’ve noticed many other benefits.

• I’m more productive. When your available time window shrinks, you gain the ability to better focus. With just Saturday to work on cleaning and ChetComm, I’m more resilient to laziness.

• I’m less anxious. Sunday can be a double edge sword. It’s nice to have a slow day once a week, but it’s also dangerously close to Monday. That means that the dread of the week ahead and creep into your serenity. I’ve found that when Sunday is a designated family day, I’m less anxious about everything. The day ticking away doesn’t bother me. The unpleasant things that I have to do in the week ahead don’t bother me. I’m just totally present.

• I’m more relaxed. It’s almost as if God had a bigger purpose when He asked us to rest on Sundays. I’ve found that I’m more relaxed during the whole week. I know that if I keep working and pushing for a few more days, I’ll have the down time I need on Sunday. That’s a beautiful thing.

We’re called to not work on Sundays, yet it’s something that we haven’t put much of a priority on. Maybe it’s time we go back to basics.

Secrecy is the enemy of love. Secrecy drives us to lie, obscure facts, and not be true to ourselves. In fact, it’s one of the greatest tools of the Devil. I’ve been really encouraged lately with the outpouring of publications and discourse on the true nature of pornography in our culture. Pornography feeds on secrecy. It’s a private act that has very public effects. The fact that we’re able to start bringing it to the light is extremely encouraging. While my intention today isn’t to discuss pornography, I do want to tackle the issues that can easily lead to it.

As a man, I have an idea of the type of man that I want to be. I know what kind of husband that I want to be to Alison and I know the steps that I need to take in order to get there. Admittedly, I do a poor job reaching the standards that I set for myself. Sure, on paper it looks easy, but when baby Benedict is insisting that we hold him at 1:30 in the morning, too many times I’ve let Alison take the lead on that one.

A major barrier to me becoming the husband that I want to be is integration. Our culture pushes us into living segmented lives. We’re one person at work, a different person at home, and still another when out with our friends. You can really tell just how segmented you are when you notice how differently you respond to situations in each of these environments. It’s not healthily and it’s really quite tiring. We need to be the integrated men that Atticus Finch models to his children in “To Kill A Mockingbird."

Sin is terribly destructive. There’s no private sin. There is no victimless sin. That’s because sin attacks who we are and our capacity for love. Sin makes us self-centered. So, when I sin, I hurt Alison because I’ve allowed evil to take a little more hold in my life.

Pope Benedict, in his fantastic 2nd Volume of “Jesus of Nazareth,” discusses sin as allowing evil to have power over us. He more specifically lays out this principle in discussing the betrayal of Judas. Bishop Paul Loverade, the Bishop of Arlington, VA, in his pastoral letter “Bought with a Price” talks about how each moral decision either brings us closer to integrity or closer to moral corruption.

Sin is like a chain. On the far right, the first link, is the venial sin. The more you sin, the more severe the sins become. You reach the last link when you commit a mortal sin. Flirting with a coworker might be the first link in the chain: wrong, but venial. As time goes on, and the flirting leads to more, without direct intervention, the chain ends in marital infidelity.

The thing about a chain though, is that it can be broken at any time. We know sin escalates. We know that we should avoid sin. But how?

Stop a mortal sin before it starts.

Sounds simple enough, yet practicing Catholics commit mortal sins every day.

In order to become the men we want to be, we’ve got to break the chain at the first possible point. The way we can do that is by cleaning up our lives. The movies we watch, the music we listen to, the books we read, and the conversations we partake in all have a direct effect on us. Again, as Bishop Loverade says, each choice is getting us closer to Heaven or closer to Hell.

By taking a look at the man we want to be (St. Joseph would be a great example), we can figure out what changes need to be made. It’s going to be hard, believe me. When I did this exercise, I determined that I should stop watching “Family Guy.” There are some parts of “Family Guy” that really disgust me, but by and large, I find the satire to be hilarious. Yet, I know that it’s pushing me in the opposite direction that I want to be going. When I want to watch the show, I ask this simple question, “Would I rather be the husband to Alison that she deserves or watch ‘Family Guy'?”

If you’ve fallen into mortal sin, remember the words of Jesus: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mk 2:14)

Persistence is a virtue that is lost among many today. We see something we want, we try to get it, and when we fail on our first attempt, we walk away. This attitude towards life is wholly inconsistent with the kind of virtues we need in the married life.

In January 2011, six months after graduating from college, I weighed 197 lbs. Being 5’9”, that was way too much. I knew that I had an issue and I knew that getting back to a healthy weight would be difficult and would require persistence. So, I started weighing myself daily. Then I started exercising daily. Now, I keep a diligent food diary. Two years after that fateful January morning, I’m happy to report that I was down to 165 lbs.

It wasn’t easy. There were days (weeks, months) when I was gaining weight. I’d drop to 180 lbs, and then a few days later be back to 185 lbs. But I kept fighting and I kept pushing. I made better choices. Persistence allowed me to do something more. Not only did I lose the weight, I learned more about my body. I found out which foods made me feel better and how subtlety my body changes from day to day. I still have a few more pounds to go to my goal, but I know that I’ll make it.

In the United States, in all 50 states, you can get a no-fault divorce. It used to be that the law required more than mere inconvenience to substantiate a divorce. The legal system would make multiple attempts to resolve the differences between spouses before granting a divorce decree. Those safeguards are now gone. We even seem to encourage spouses to quit when the going gets tough.

In the spiritual life, we can be incredibly persistent. In fact, we’re encouraged to be. If your wife is sick, you don’t just throw out a Hail Mary and move on. You pray a rosary. You pray multiple rosaries. You pray until she’s better. That’s persistence. We need that.

Time and time again in the Bible, the virtue of persistence is lifted up as something that is good. It’s not nagging, it’s placing our trust in God and reminding ourselves constantly that we are. We know in our own lived experience that persistence pays off. When we work hard on the job over time, we are rewarded. When we work on a personal goal, though it may be difficult, it pays off.

When we’re persistent, we accomplish things. When we’re persistent at work, we are given more responsibility. When we’re persistent in prayer, we come to better know the heart of God. When we’re persistent in our marriages, we become better husbands. When we persist in our goals, we reach them.

Persistence requires overcoming resistance. In those moments of challenge, it becomes more about the destination than the journey. We can persist in any challenge when the goal is worthy.

We tend to think of generosity as costing us something.

Generosity fills us more deeply than anything else can. It brings a level of fulfillment and completeness that no selfish act could ever hope to achieve. It’s in generosity that we find completeness as human persons.

So be generous with your time.

Be generous with your talents.

Be generous with your resources.

Be generous with your wife.