You Are What You Eat
The old saying goes, “You are what you eat.”
It’s true.
But I’m not just talking about food.
The movies and TV shows you watch, the songs you listen to on the radio, all of these things added together makes you the man you are. They shape your worldview.
Think about it. We spend how many hours a week in the car listening to the radio. Radio stations play the same songs ad nauseam, especially if they’re hot at the time. The lyrics get stuck in your head and you can’t stop thinking about them.
What are they saying? How does that affect where your thoughts go or your mood?
I’m not saying that you should listen to nothing but Catholic Talk Radio (although SirusXM’s The Catholic Channel is excellent) or Praise and Worship Music all the time, but every once in a while doesn’t hurt.
We all get there. We’re not sure how. It just kind of creeps up on us. We eat a little junk food here and there. One day, BAM! We step on the scale and it’s worse than we thought.
When you get a bit flabby, it gets you motivated to start working out. You want to get cut.
There isn’t such as easy bellwether for your thoughts.
The next time you’re in the car listening to the radio, listen to the lyrics and see what your brain is learning.
Let’s talk TV. The shows you watch, even absentmindedly, have a similar effect. If you’re not watching something wholesome, you’re basically eating junk food.
We don’t have time for that crap.
We’re men. We’ve got hoodrat things to do. Well, maybe not hoodrat, but we’ve only got so many hours in the day. So why would we waste them on garbage?
You are what you eat, what you listen to, what you watch. Time to step your game up.
Contentment
Of all the virtues in the human race, today, contentment seems the furtherest off. We are consumers and that is what we do. We consume things. We consume people. A lack of contentment is a society illness.
The thing about contentment is that it runs with happiness. You cannot find a person who is both content and unhappy. Contentment leads to a natural peace, a serenity.
But what is it?
Contentment is being satisfied with what you have. It is a lack of want. Not a lack of desire or passion, but a spiritual recognition that you have the right things for where you are right now.
If you chose your spouse correctly, you should have a degree of contentment. You didn’t settle, you chose the right mate for life. Members of the opposite sex didn’t suddenly become unattractive to you. They still have natural beauty. But they do not have the things in life that you need. Your wife is attractive, there’s no doubt. But she also has a personality that mirrors yours. She has the knowledge of you to call you on to holiness and correct your wrongs. The compatibility between you cannot be matched.
This is just the beginning on contentment.
When I challenge you to be content, I’m asking you to move away from a consumer mentality. I’m asking you to consider that the things you have, the people in your life, and your personality are the right tools that you need, today, to build the Kingdom of God.
A Rhythm of Prayer
We have a lot on our plates.
We balance work, family life, and leisure activities.
It sounds simple enough, but it’s really not.
One of the easiest ways to include more things into our daily lives is to get up earlier. If we are up before work, we can get a lot more done in our day. We can take care of the things we need to in our day (exercise, reading, etc) before the workday begins.
When you really think about it, you give half of your day to work and half of it is for you to keep. Sure, the 8 hours for you is really broken up into smaller pieces so it may not seem that way, but that’s how the math works out.
What we need to do, to reach the next level in our relationship, is to permeate our entire waking day with prayer. Our day needs to have that rhythm to it.
Prayer is something that we plan to do, yet it gets skipped over. If we oversleep, we choose to skip prayer over skipping our shower or breakfast. Those are valid activities, but we lose a chance to refocus ourselves on what is really important in life.
Maybe missing that time can be enough to get us to get out of bed a little earlier.
Whatever your schedule, prayer needs to be the cornerstone. We need to take time to orient ourselves back to the source of life.
The Joy of Weddings
Now that I have been married for almost a year, I have had the pleasure of experiencing several weddings of family and friends.
There is such a rejuvenating energy that comes from experiencing a wedding. You get to be an observer to that which you undertook. The great memories from your own wedding day come back into your mind.
You get to share in the joy of two more people starting the journey of a lifetime.
Going to a wedding provides you the chance to reflect back on what your goals were for your marriage, the goals you set for yourself as a husband. It gets you back on track.
Society has become jaded to weddings. We’ve made them about extravagance and showmanship. There have been a slew of articles recently that have discussed the fact that people pay ridiculous amounts of money for their wedding and spend the next ten years paying it off.
Dumb.
When my wife and I were planning our Wedding, we took special care to make sure that our day was about the Sacrament, not how big a party we could throw. All (well, most) of our favorite people were in the room. They witnessed our Covenant and then took time to celebrate with us.
When you go to someone else’s wedding, take the time to reflect on what Marriage is and how the Sacrament has impacted your life.
You’re Not A Punk
You’re not a punk.
Believe me, we’ve both met a lot of punks out there.
A punk is a guy who cares more about himself than his wife. He’s the one women are always complaining about.
A punk doesn’t get it that there’s something great about being a man.
There is great pride in being a man.
We engage in our family life, we’re proactive about doing acts of service. We (almost) always put our wives first.
We’re men. We cook, we clean, we take care of the kids, we watch movies that our wife wants to watch.
We have a special calling, one that highlights our inherent strengths. We are called to lead, protect, and provide for our families. Whoa.
We aren’t called to bear children, and so we are not able to experience the advantages or struggles of that calling.
But we weren’t made for that.
Punks are naturally dumb or disengaged. They allow themselves to become that way.
We’re smart, we’re noble. We continue to pray, learn, grow, and play with our families.
How critical is your role as a man? The statistics on the outcomes of fatherless homes are amazing. With no father, the children suffer greatly.
So let’s step up to the plate and carry out the task we were called to. Let’s lead with greater passion, protect with greater intensity and provide the finest fruits for our families. It’s what we were made to do.
Forget the punks.
Make Evenings Count
My job frequently results in me working evenings. It isn’t particularly fun, it is just a fact of life. Of course, I make up for my hours by starting work later in the day.
However, during the slow seasons, I’m often home around 5 (I live fairly close to the office). It is then that I have a five hour time block to do whatever I’d like.
So, each evening, I have five hours to decide what I’d like to do. Some of that time will be given to preparing, eating, and cleaning up after dinner. Other parts of that time will be dedicated to getting ready for bed and reading.
But what about the rest?
I used to be of the opinion that there “wasn’t enough time” so I’d just squander it on the internet or watching TV. After a few weeks, I came to recognize it as a relaxing part of my day. It is a necessary wind down period where you can process your day. Watching TV may be satisfying in the moment, but perhaps you want to go do something that will have longer lasting effects. I get up, exercise, go labor in the fields, and then come home to a place of refuge.
I like to spend some of the time with my wife. We both have things that we need to get done in the evening, but there is still some of those minutes that we can spend together.
Basically, I want to spend the time in a way that reflects my values. I want to have quality time with my wife, time for self-improvement, and time for finishing off my to-do list for the day.
It’s an important lesson in not neglecting evening the small periods of time that you have complete control over. Make choices that reflect what you value. Make evenings count.
Live the Life You Want to Model
We are a culture of complainers.
We complain about work. We complain about family. We complain about our parents. We complain about our Bishops and Priests.
It’s as if we’ve created a Utopia in our minds and we are repeatedly shocked when the real world doesn’t measure up.
It’s not that I don’t think a Utopia is a good theory. In fact, I think it can be incredibly telling about what we truly value. The only real use for it, however, is measuring things in our lives that we can control.
When you create the ideal life that you would like to model in the following Utopia experiment, you actually discover some of your deepest desires and aspirations.
Stop.
Imagine how you want people to perceive you. What characteristics would instantly come to mind when someone thinks of you? What values do you put into action?
Now measure how you’re doing.
Like me, you’re probably way off the mark.
What we just did was figure out what is important to you. If you want people to think of you as a man of integrity, but you do nothing but lie to your boss, you know where you need to make some changes.
Stepping back from our place in the world can give us an overview of where we are, where we’d like to be, and how to get there.
Remember, with any major change, there are going to be some shortcomings. You aren’t going to bat .1000. Don’t let a short term failure short circuit your goals. Make the changes, stick to the program, and live the life you want to model.
Children Are A Reward
Each year, the Church celebrates Natural Family Planning (NFP) Awareness Week. We should all take time to learn more about this ethical method of responsible Family Planning. I’d like to share some thoughts with you.
Sadly, our culture has come to view children as a burden. Individuals, both young and old, male and female, married and unmarried, take unethical, unnatural, and excessive steps to prevent the conception of a child. The abortion industry, and those in healthcare who advocate for abortions, have convinced the world that pregnancy is a disease, not a gift.
Being a father, and having lived with a pregnant wife, I know that pregnancy can seem like a curse with all of its unfortunate side effects. But that illusion is selfish.
Children are a fruit of a marriage, they are a blessing! Psalm 127:3 states this clearly when the Psalmist writes, “Children are a gift from God, the fruit of the womb, a reward.”
We’ve gotten away from God’s plan for families and moved towards man’s plan for his own fulfillment.
If you’re new to NFP, no sweat. Here is NFP in a nutshell. Your wife is only capable of achieving pregnancy on a few days during her cycle. These fertile days can be scientifically approximated by observing certain fertility signs, such as her Basal Body Temperature. By observing and charting these signs, you can either know when to have sex to achieve pregnancy or when to abstain to avoid pregnancy for serious, valid, moral reasons.
Now, how is NFP different from commonly prescribed contraceptives? Easy. NFP is you and your wife, together, working in parallel with the natural fertility cycle of her body. Think of it as sanding with the grain. Nice and smooth. Contraceptives act perpendicular to your wife’s natural fertility cycle. They seek to disrupt her cycle and trick her body into releasing hormones that prevent her from achieving pregnancy. This is like sanding against the grain. You must actively work against her body to achieve the end.
NFP respects your wife and is 100% organic. No drugs, no shots, no pills to take, no medical procedures to endure, no man-made substances. It’s as clean as a fresh spring air. Contraceptives are 100% artificial. They’re hormones (which you probably try to avoid in what you’re eating), they’re chemicals, and they have deadly side effects.
My wife and I use Natural Family Planning and it has been incredibly effective. It is actually pretty fun to know exactly where she is. It can save you from asking, in an argument, “Are you mad because you’re on your period?” They say knowledge is power…
My favorite part about NFP is having a better understanding of how her body works. I’m no longer grossed out by her reproductive processes and I actually have a greater appreciation for the grand design of the human body.
Don’t take my word for it. Do your homework, dig into the facts (like the incredibly low divorce rate among NFP couples), and work with your wife, not against her.
Reflecting Christ’s Love to the World
When you get married, you take on two responsibilities. First, you take responsibility for the care of your wife and any children you may be given. Second, you take on the responsibility for reflecting Christ’s love for the Church.
The first one is challenging enough, but the second? Whoa, that’s a task! After all, Christ laid down His life for the Church.
As husbands, we are called to lay down our lives for our wives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean physical death. We must daily live a death to self.
What is more important is how we model marital love to those around us.
We should first be concerned with how we model to our family.
The odds are high that there are a few broken marriages in your family. We aren’t called to be critical of another, but we do know that if children do not have a good example of marriage, they may end up divorced later in life as well. We must take great care to reflect our inner affinity for our spouses externally in appropriate ways.
Next, we must model marital love to those we are friends with.
You probably have a broad cross-section of friends in terms of state of life. You have some single friends, some married friends, some friends with children, etc. Again, it is your responsibility to show them the Divine Plan through your own healthy and stable marriage.
Lastly, we must model marital love to the world.
We interact with a huge number of individuals on a daily basis that we have no relationship with. To these people, we must show the true love we have for our wives.
This is a giant task, but it is an essential one. We are called to influence the culture. The more positive examples of marriage that a person has, the more credibility it is lent. When enough people hold marriage in the right esteem, the culture is changed.
Now, it’s time to get to work.
Marriage is Not Committed Friendship
Marriage is a lot of things. It is painful, it is difficult, it is challenging. It is joyful, it is fulfilling, it is complete. Marriage is enduring, it is final.
Marriage is not committed friendship.
When a man and a woman, enter into the Marital Covenant, they are doing more than telling their friends that they kinda think they’ll be BFF. They are fully and completely giving themselves to their spouse. They are sacrificing their individual identities for a new identity.
The myth of today is that Marriage isn’t anything special, it is just committed friendship. A committed friendship that can be broken at any time for any reason. In the United States, our legal code calls that “no fault divorce.” Lazy. Immature.
Marriage is, of course, based on a relationship, on a friendship of sorts. However, calling Marriage a different kind of friendship cheapens it. It is an indissoluble bond. Nothing can ever break it. Not even changing your mind (sarcasm)!
Marriage is the bedrock of the family. The children find their safety, nourishment, and strength in the marital relationship. It is because of the marriage that they have this place of safety. Marriage frees a husband and wife to be themselves and to sacrifice for their family. It is a life-giving relationship.
Committed friendship can’t be life-giving. The reason is simple. In a friendship, no matter how committed or deep, at the end of the day, you are still an individual. You are still looking out for your best interests. In a Marriage, you guard the interests of your spouse and children. If your wife is happy, odds are you will be too!
Marriage is a mystery.
How a man and woman can be joined together, for life, is something that is beyond our human intellect. People change over time, personalities shift, and yet, marriages endure.
That is something worth thinking about.