Category: Daily Post
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I started reading Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility this week, mostly because I wanted language for something I already suspected about my own marriage. He calls it the sincere gift of self, the idea that love only becomes real when a person stops being used and starts being given. Not given partly. Given. That phrase…
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For a long time I thought of marriage as basically a serious promise between two people. A really important one, but still just between us. Something we worked out together, and if we worked hard enough, kept. I had the shape of it backwards. Marriage isn’t a private arrangement with God somewhere in the background,…
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This week I’m turning to marriage, and I want to start somewhere practical instead of somewhere lofty. For a long time I thought a good marriage was just two people getting good at being married to each other. Communicating better. Fighting less. Showing up more. All of that matters, but Ecclesiastes puts something next to…
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St. John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century about how a husband and wife should run their home, said something plain that has stayed with me all week. “A house is a little Church,” he wrote. He was not reaching for a nice way to describe family life. He meant it as fact. I have…
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There’s a moment near the end of Joshua where the whole story turns personal. Joshua has led the nation for years, through the whole sweep of the conquest, and now he’s an old man gathering everyone together one more time. He lays out the choice plainly: serve whatever gods you want, the old ones from…
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I used to treat Sunday like a slower version of every other day. Sleep in a little, maybe make it to Mass, then get back to the list: laundry, errands, whatever didn’t get done Friday. Quieter, maybe. Not actually different. God didn’t ask Moses to hand the people a slower day. He told him to…
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This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to actually lead my family spiritually. Saying grace out loud instead of waiting for someone else to start it. Leaving little markers of the faith around the house so a kid eventually notices and asks about them. All of it has felt like effort,…
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I’ve been thinking about Joshua 4 this week, the twelve stones pulled up from the middle of the Jordan and stacked on the riverbank, not to look nice, but so that someday a kid would point at them and ask what they meant. That was the whole plan from the start. Build something that gets…
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For a while, I thought my job when it came to my kids’ faith was mostly logistics. Get them to religious ed on Wednesdays. Get them to Mass on Sunday. Let the people with actual training handle the teaching part, I would just handle getting everyone there on time. I had it backwards. The Catechism…
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For a long time, grace before dinner at our house meant waiting to see who would say something first. Usually it was quick, heads down for a few seconds, a few words, done before anyone really noticed we had prayed at all. I told myself that was enough. It was not that I did not…
