Everything is Grace

I realize I have been away from this quite some time, so I figure it's time to finally post an update on here. As many of you who read this know, I am spending the summer working for a machine shop in Minneapolis, Kansas, which has been quite a blessing for me. Currently I am reading a book entitled "Everything is Grace" about the life and way of Therese of Lisieux. I have found that the title of this book and life of St. Therese captures the philosophy by which I have been trying to lead my life in the last few years.

From my earlier posts it is pretty easy to see that I look up to people like St. Josemaria Escriva and Mother Teresa who were both big advocates of obtaining holiness in the ordinary ways of life. St. Therese states, "Holiness is not necessarily a matter of great actions, but of letting the Lord work in us and through us in the ordinary experiences of life." I suppose I am drawn to this track of spirituality because I'm just an ordinary guy myself. I've never stood out in anything I've done;never been the smartest guy, never been the best athlete, far from being the holiest guy, don't pray as much as I should, ect. Despite all of this however, I have had one thing going for me...heart. I don't give up. You can knock me down in sports, in life, in my walk with Christ, but I'm going to get up and keep striving. It gives me great hope then to know that ordinary people like me obtained sainthood, and more importantly holiness through ordinary means. This has really opened up my eyes to the simple things in life that we all too often take for granted.

I hear people say that they look out into the world and see all the greed and crime and evil and find it hard to see God. But I ask how you can look out into the world and not see God. Just the other night I was blessed to spend some time with some of my best friends sitting on in the bed of a truck on a dirt road watching the sunset. It is artist Gina de Gorna who states that, "To watch a sunset is to connect with the Divine." I couldn't agree more. There's just something so peaceful about watching the streaks of pink, orange, yellow, and purple progress across the sky until they slowly fade to black as the stars begin to show up. It is there if we but slow down long enough to see it, to recognize that everything is grace. It serves as a reminder to me that no matter what, God has and will always love me.

To answer the people who ask how God can let good people suffer let me propose the following analogy. One of the blessings I have living in a small town this summer is free time. After 3 years as an engineering major, I didn't know the word existed, but I have discovered that indeed it does. I have decided to use much of this free time lifting weights and working out again. The irony of weight lifting is that as you lift the weights, your muscle fibers are torn apart, weakened. It is only after your muscles fibers have been made weak that they can be built up stronger than they were before. So it is in life and our faith journey. Only after enduring trials and being driven to our knees are we able to once again stand, stronger than before. Once we are able to accept the trials, we can begin to offer them up and obtain the graces from redepmtive suffering. It is at this moment that we can imitate Christ by turning our instrument of tortue and suffering into a tool of love and life and grace. I once read the following on suffering, "He who would excercise his power of redeeming to the utmost limit, as Christ did, must not shink from that which awaits all saviors, the cross. Souls are won by words, they are won by example, but above all they are won by sacrifice."

Lastly, I would like to briefly touch upon the topic of happiness, as I feel it is something that we all strive for, but is a concept that our society has twisted that we no longer know how to obtain it. Many people equate success with happiness. Therefore a good definition for happiness could be found in John Wooden's definition of success. ""Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming." This would explain why you see happiness in owners of large companies, or parents of large families, or those who have accomplished great feats. Yet there are many people with the same accomplishments that are not happy. And the reason for that is they are lacking God. Therefore I would propose a slight change to that definition to read, "Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the person God has intended you to be." I was talking to a very good friend about life and the paths we had traveled to reach the point where we are today. The subject came up that at various points along the way things had gone completely unaccording to plan. All the plans we had made were dashed as God led us down a completely different path. Being the sports nerd that I am, I made the analogy that living life was like batting in baseball, and sometimes God just through curveballs our way. My friend proceeded to tell me that if I ever learned how to hit curveballs, to let her know. Well, I don't that I've entirely figured that out yet, but driving home to Minneapolis, Kansas a theory began to form in my head. And it should come as no surprise to many of you that the inspiration came from a country song, "Roll With It" by Easton Corbin.

Roll with it. The line continued to play through my head long after the song had finished. I was instantly reminded of my conservation with my good friend and my analogy. Roll with it I thought; There's something to that.  I started thinking back about my curveball statement and began to think first of all about baseball. Why do batters miss curveballs? Well that's easy I thought, they are expecting something else. I repeated that again in mind. They are expecting something else. Expectations. That's it! Now I'm just as guilty as anyone about this, but we all have a tendency to make plans for our lives. For example the summer before my junior year I made all of these plans in my head. I was going to work really hard getting in shape and lead our soccer team to a winning season and get post season honors along the way. I was gonna work hard in school and in my clubs and qualify for nationals and get lots of scholarships. The plans was there, and I was prepared to put all the work and effort into it that was necessary. But God had different plans. Better plans. Sure I still achieved some of the things I had planned, but God helped me to achieve so much more. I developed a much stronger relationship with Christ and grew in leaps and bounds in my life. I was brought into contact with some of the people I know call my best friends...friends I probably would never have met if I hadn't gotten involved in things like TEC and Steubenville. These friends in turn helped and are still helping to shape me into a better man. We make all these plans and do all the work to make it happen and we EXPECT things to turn out just like we planned. We get tunnel vision and so set on this track we have constructed for ourselves that we are completely oblivious to the path that God has already constructed for us. We are like horses with blinders on, so set on only that which is before us. Now I'm not saying we can't have dreams and work hard to reach those dreams. But there is a big difference between dreams and expectations; of preparing for the future and planning the future.  If we are preparing ourselves for the future, we will be ready to react to that curveball when it is thrown our way. We will be able to set aside our dreams and the path we were following and set out on the new course God has laid before us. But if we are planning the future, we are going to strikeout on that curveball as we take a hack at the fastball we were expecting to come our way. So to conclude this train of thought I would just ask all of you to try and become more aware of those little graces God has placed throughout your life: sunsets, thunderstorms, wheat fields, that kind word from a friend to say I understand, whatever it is that God uses to speak to you. Most importantly, make a concious effort to PREPARE for the future and not plan for it. God Bless.

Trust in You

For this past month or so I have for spiritual reading been pouring through the pages of "Come Be My Light", the private writings of the "Saint of Calcutta" (Mother Teresa). It is a tremendous read and I highly recommend it no matter how far you are in your walk of faith. As I have read and reflected upon the thoughts and life expressed in these pages, one thing continues to pour forth from the pages and greatly humble me: Mother Teresa's never wavering trust in God's plan for her life.

For example the book goes into "the call" Mother Teresa receives to start the Missionaries of Charity. She originally receives this call in September 1946. However, it is not until August 8, 1948 that Mother is granted permission to begin this endeavor after having to convince her spiritual director, archbishop, Mother Superior, and Rome of the divine nature of the call. Yet, as in each setup she encounters in life, she does not doubt the plan God has for her. Rather than viewing those people as "setbacks" to the plan, she sees that God's will is being made known through them. They are not disabling her from carrying out God's plan, but serving as tools of God to enable her to see the plan. She accepts all these things, regardless of how different it might be from the way she expected things to work.

I am greatly humbled by this ability to trust because it is a virtue that I am lacking. In fact, I still remember the first time I began to question God's plan in my life (you all should get a kick out of this and how shallow I use to be). It was the summer after my 8th grade year at St. Mary's School. It had been a fun year, but challenging as well. I had lost my grandmother to cancer, and it was the first big loss I had experienced in life. After having made the decision to attend high school at Mulvane High School over Kapaun Mount Caramel, I began making big plans for high school. I was going to get really good grades and be involved in a lot of clubs so I could get scholarships for college. I was going to come in and be a force on the soccer team and lead the team in assists (I played midfield at that time) and go on and play in college. You see, my dad had played basketball in college so I wanted to play a sport in college too as I knew that would make him proud and that is how I planned to pay for college. Plus soccer wasn't as popular in Kansas, so it wouldn't be too hard to land a scholarship. Well, then "it" happened. The first or second day of soccer camp I broke my foot, stress fracture to my 5th metatarsal. Without putting a screw in, it was going to be 9 months to rehab (3 months on crutches, 3 additional months of no running, and then 3 months to rebuild my leg muscles and get back to where I was at). So on top of missing soccer my freshmen year I had to miss basketball as well, and I was going to have to work really hard to be ready in time for spring soccer with my club team. How could this happen. I mean, didn't God know this was going to really set me back and hurt my chances for playing in college? Haha, why yes I think he did, and I think that was the plan. Because I suddenly had some spare time on my hands, I changed around some of my classes for the second semester and got into "Automotive for Everyone" my first class in the shop part of the school. I got along with the teacher really well and he talked me into signing up for some more shop classes and really got me interested in engineering as a possible career choice and perhaps giving up my dreams of playing soccer in college to pursue engineering. In the words of Eric Church, "I thank God I ain't what I almost was."

Yet, trust is still something I struggle with. To borrow a term from Andy Grigg's song "She's More", I think I along with most people fall into the trap of creating our own "paint by number fantasies."

You know what I'm talking about. We come up with these "conditions" that if met we think will make us "happy." For example, for myself I would like for nothing more than to end up back around Wichita with a good engineering job with a company like Spirit or Cessna or Koch; get married start a family, pass on all the family traditions, pass on the family name. But I can't let my plans get in the way of me following the path God has laid before me. Mother Teresa once again holds the key here: devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Mother was adament that the Blessed Sacrament was held in the chapel of the newly formed Missionaries of Charity so that the sisters could visit Christ every day. She knew that if Christ was there, they could fact any difficulties, any "setbacks" that might come their way. We would be wise if we realized just how true this is.

To end with I'd just like to leave you with the following quote I found.

"When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer."

Lock In Talk

I guess I should begin by saying that when I told April and Sara that I would help plan out this lockin, I didn't imagine that would require me to be giving a talk. I should preface this talk by warning you that I have no original thoughts of my own, so the majority of this material is borrowed. Not only that, but a large chunk of this material is borrowed from Fr. Bernie Gorges, who also never has an original thought of his own, so much of this material is double borrowed. The great thing about being Catholic is that we can call this "Tradition" which sounds so much better than plagerism.

To begin I would like to focus on a Bible quote from Proverbs 27:17 "As iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man." This simple quote holds what I believe to be the key on the journey to becominga more Catholic man. Men need other men to look up to, other men to hold them accountable and continue shaping them into the man God has called them to be.

One man making headlines recenty is Tim Tebow, quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Now people have come up with all sorts of reasons to dislike Tim Tebow: the way he throws a ball, the fact he plays for the Denver Broncos, his popularity, or the fact that he prays while on the football field. The truth is the reason people dislike Tebow goes much deeper than that. Tebow's actions make others feel uncomfortable because he raises the bar on what is means to be a man in today's society and exposes the shortcomings of those around him. Our society is in need of more men like this to step up and challenge this social norm. In America the divorce rate hovers around 50 percent for first-time marriages. 22 percent of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. 26 percent of children under the age of 21 are being raised in single-parent households. Our economy is weak, but our families are weaker. Just the other day I was watching an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. They were rebuilding a house for a family who had lost their song....a sixth grader who had hung himself because of bullying. Our society is desperate for men to rise up and become leaders. To quote Casting Crowns song Couragoues: "We were warriors on the front lines standing, unafraid; but now we are watchers on the sidelines while our families slip away. Where are you menof courage, you were made for so much more.!"

So I began to reflect on how we as men can embrace true masculinity and through prayer and perseverance, become the men God has called us ot be. During that reflection I came up with four main themes we should seek to live out in our lives: men of prayer, men of sacrifice, men of accountability, and men of hope.

men of prayer
First and foremost we must be meno f prayer, and seek to build a healthy prayer life. In particular there are three aspects of prayer I believe we must focus on: devtion to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to our Blessed Mother, and developing a daily prayer routine.

We as Catholics are blessed to have the opportunity to visit our Lord each and every day through daily mass and adoration. Yet I find we often take this blessing for granted and fail to make time to receive the grace God freely gives us through the Eucharist. Concerning the devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Adoration, Mothre Teresa, says, "The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in Heaven, and will help bring about everlasting peace on earth." This devotion will not only strengthen your relationship with Christ but grant you the wisdom and grace to make important decisions in our life. As some of you may know, I live in a Catholic men's household at Kansas State called Chi Rho. As part of our spiritual development there, we have priests from around the state visit each week to give us talks to further our faith formation. One of the priests who frequently visits, Fr. Bernie Gorges, challenged all of us men ot make an effor tto make it to mass at least one other time a week besides Sunday Mass, and it's a challenge I entend to all of you. As a priest, he realizes the grace available to us in the Eucharist. I'd like to show you a little demonstration illustrating grace (Fr. John grace demonstration).

We must also hold a devotion to our Blessed Mother Mary. Devotion to the Blessed Mother draws us into a deeper relationship with her Son. The rosary in particular holds as a powerful weapon to combat the evils present in today's world, especially for men. Frequent praying of the rosary is commonly used as tools for pro-life movements, vocational discernment, and obtaining a greater purity in one's life. More so, reflection upon the mysteries of the rosary can lead us to a greater understanding of our purpose in life and which roads to take in life. In particular, I would like to reflect briefly on the Joyful Mysteries.

1. The first joyful mystery is the Annunciation. (Read Luke 1:26-38) (reflect upon verse 29, "She was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.") This is very similar to our own experience with God's plans and events that happen in our lives. We are troubled, worried about how things will work out. We would be wise to follow Mary's example here in the first mystery by pondering, praying for wisdom and then having the courage to match Mary's Fiat, her yes to God's plan for her life.
2. The second joyful mystery is the Visitation. (Read Luke 1:39-56) As soon as Mary says yes to God's will, she immediately departs to serve others. Likewise, we too should seek out opportunities to serve those around us.
3. The third joyful mystery is hte nativity. After saying yes to God, Mary has the courage to allow God's plan to come to fulfillment. We have to be able to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.
4. The fourth joyful mystery is the presentation in the temple. After God's plan has come to fulfillment, Mary and Joseph give time ot thank God for the gift he has bestowed upon and them and place their child into God's hands to receive the gracesHe bestowes on all people. How often does something good happen for us and we forget to give thanks to God for his gift to us?
5. The fifth joyful mystery is the finding of the child Jesus in the temple. What I believe this mystery shows is that while we are instruments in the hands of God, we always have move to learn, more room to grow into holier men and women.

Finally I belive we must strive to develop a daily prayer life. As men we are called to be spiritual leaders, whether in the family, as priests, or in consecrated single life. As the spirituality chair for the Catholic Household of Chi Rho at K-State, I can personally tell you that you cannot hope to direct or lead a group of individuals along their spiritual journey if you yourself don't have a solid relationship with Christ. This means developing a set routine reach day to spend growing in friendship with Christ and seeking Him in your life. This can be accomplished in numerous ways: daily Mass, frequent Confession, Liturgy of the Hours, prayer points, a set time to pray each day, Adoration, and much more.

men of sacrifice

• As men we will be called to sacrifice in life, whether in our families, as priests, or in religious communities.
• Begin with small sacrifices such as fasting from food, alcohol, television, ect. By mastering themselves in small things, men will have greater control of themselves in serious matters and will be better prepared to combat the temptations around them.
• "For by the constant practice of repeated self-denial in little things, with God's grace you will increase in strength and manliness of character. In that way you'll first become master of yourself and then a guide and a leader; to compel, to urge, to draw others with your example and with your word and with your knowledge and with you power."-St. Josemaria Escriva
• not of our nature, developed through discipline.
• will aid us in our purity
• power of redemptive suffering as a sacrifice
• sacrificing for others brings us closer to our brothers and sisters
• example-Maximilian Kolbe

men of accountability

• "as iron sharpens iron, so man sharpens his fellow man"
• mission of Chi Rho
• Our goal must not be simply to reach heaven, but to bring others with us.
• invite others to mass
• courage to call people out when they slip up
• love the sinner, hate the sin
• "What finally counts is not just that there are good spiritual men and women in this very chaotic world, but that there are communities of Christians who together listen with great care and sensitivity to the one who wants to ake his healing presence known to all people."-Henri Nouwen

men of hope

• if down the road we expect our families or parishes to have in God's plan for their own lives, we must first have open in God's plan for our own life.
• As men I would say one of our greatest struggles is in feelings of inadequacy. This can often transform into feelings of despair when we fall short. We must have hope in God's plan for our lives and faith that God has given us the gifts to accomplish all he has lain before us.
• Must have hope in trials. Many of us are arriving at the point in life when we realize that live is difficult and full of trials, but must continue to hope in our future.
• "Life is a storm. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, and be shattered upon the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes."-Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo

"If"-Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep you head when all about you are losing their and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired of waiting; or being lied to, don't deal in lies; or being hated, don't give way ot hating, and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

If you can dream and not make dreams your master; if you can think and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with triumph and diaster and treat those two imposters just the same; if you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools; or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss; if you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, 'hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue; or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch; if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; if all men count with you, but none too much; if you cna fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run; Yours is the Earth and everthing that's in it, and-which is more-you'll be a Man, my son!"

and as an added bonus as promised, the official Chi Rho wedding song.