I sense that you have a great desire for spiritual growth. You want a stronger relationship with God that brings meaning and significance to your life. You want a lifecentered on love. But you struggle. You can't bring yourself to pray as you know you should. You want God to be the main priority in your life, but you can't seem to order your life that way. You are frustrated, and perhaps (I sense) even fearful for your soul.

How close did I get?

OK, confession time. I wasn't really reading your mind. I was actually telling you the frustration that I am facing. And I am guessing that I am pretty darn typical. If you are reading this article, then I know that you have a great desire for spiritual growth. If you're a fallen human person, then I am going to guess that you are facing the same frustrating roadblocks to that spiritual growth that I am.

The good news is that I think I have discovered the source of our problem - and the solution. It all comes down to developing certain virtues that we have been trained by our culture to pretty much ignore.

So, I am going to describe the main obstacles to Catholic Spirituality as I see them, and discuss solutions to each one. Then we'll see how all of these solutions can be summarized into two virtues - prudence and charity.

The Main Obstacles to Catholic Spirituality

No time (distraction from prayer)

Let's start by facing the top excuse on all of our minds. "I just don't have time to pray." Father Larry Richards is fond of telling us that if we can find time for other things - television, hobbies, golf, fishing, going out with friends, or anything else - but we don't have time for prayer, then we love those things more than we love God. Sound harsh? Listen to what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say:

"It expresses itself less by declared incredulity than by our actual preferences. When we begin to pray, a thousand labors or cares thought to be urgent vie for priority; once again, it is the moment of truth for the heart: what is its real love?" (CCC 2732)

Sure, our desire for spiritual growth shows that we have a love for God. What is missing is the translation of our love for him into real-life priorities. I'm not convinced that the problem is 100% lack of love. I think it's lack of the discipline we need to order our lives according to our priorities. That's why I created the Planning for Graceprogram. This program takes you through a step-by-step process for reclaiming control over your life, ordering your life according to your priorities (which means making God our top priority), and discovering ways to cooperate with grace by shaping our lives according to how we are created and what we are destined to be. Planning for Grace will (among other things) help you to dedicate yourself to time in conversation with God every day.

No habit

Once we get control of our lives and make prayer a priority, we will still find it difficult to actually enter into prayer unless we have done the hard work of making it a habit. A habit is a tendency to perform some action readily and easily because we have done it over and over again until the act has become second nature to us. I have done a pretty good job of ordering my life around my priorities. I have scheduled specific time for prayer into my day, and I can no longer claim that I don't have time to pray. But I still struggle. Why? Because I find disciplined focus really hard.

So I'm at the point where I need to work at it. And that's OK. I just need to recognize that it's going to be difficult at first. And I need to be disciplined enough to just do it anyway. The more you pray, the easier it will get. Practice really does make perfect. Once you reach the point of establishing the habit, taking the time to pray will become much easier and natural to you.

Then, not only will you be able to attend to the time of prayer that you set aside each day, you will find it much easier to "pray always" - continuing your conversation with God throughout your day and going through your day connected to him.

Distraction in prayer

Your trials don't end there, though. Once you break through your distractions from prayer, you will run into the obstacles faced by most of the spiritual masters in Catholic tradition. The first of those is distraction within prayer. Even though you have made your relationship with God your top priority, even though you have carved out the time each day, even though you have established the habit, you will still find the concerns of the world breaking into your communion with him and drawing your mind away. The solution to these distractions is not to follow some formula for hunting them down and overcoming them.

"To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve" (CCC 2729).

Focus on God. When you lose your focus, bring it back. If stray thoughts enter your mind, draw them into your prayer or just expel them from your mind and refocus. This is a simple solution, but far from easy. If you find yourself at this stage of spiritual growth and need some help, you might want to sign up for my "Spiritual Path" course. This course takes you step by step through the process of spiritual growth is great detail. It shows you how conversion and prayer are closely related, how to advance on the spiritual path, and how to enter into prayer with your whole mind and heart (thus defeating these distractions).

Dryness

The final major obstacle is "dryness." Dryness describes a lack of emotional connection with God. There are times that he will bless you with "consolations" - unmistakable signs of his presence. The most common consolation is an emotional sense of his presence and love. Other consolations may include more miraculous signs of his presence

• praying in tongues (the heart and mind are absorbed in prayer and you begin praying in a language you don't know because the Holy Spirit completely takes over your prayer)
• spiritual rest (an overwhelming sense of peace)
• locutions (actually hearing Jesus speak)
• levitation (floating in the air).

These consolations are meant to help our faith - to show us that he is truly present.

But these consolations do not happen for all people. And when they do happen, they don't last. God knows that if he let you, you would become addicted to these consolations. Your Catholic spirituality would become about what you get out of it rather than about a true relationship with him. That's why God also causes us to experience dryness. Dryness can be seen as learning us how to "walk" - with our Father taking a step back from us and encouraging us to walk toward him without his support. As we grow in our Catholic spirituality, we may even experience more intense dryness known as the "Dark Night of the Soul." This is a period of time when God allows us to experience his complete absence, to see if we will trust him through it.

We handle dryness by focusing on our love for him, and by trusting that he will give us what we need to bring us to him. That love and trust will keep us connected to God. Even if our dryness or Dark Night should last our entire life (as it did for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta), love and trust in God will keep you connected to him and eventually - even if that 'eventually' is in Heaven - all dryness will end and we will life in the glory of God's love without end.

My course on the "Spiritual Masters" covers consolations and the Dark Night of the Soul in great detail and shows you how great saints dealt with them through their spiritual journey. Click here to learn more about this course.

So, those are the four greatest obstacles I see us facing in our spiritual growth.

1. Distractions from Prayer
2. No Habit
3. Distractions in Prayer
4. Dryness

The good news is that we don't face all four at the same time. We tend to face them in order as we grow in our spiritual life. What obstacles do you face in developing a strong Catholic spirituality? Do you face the same obstacles I describe here, or are there others that I haven't mentioned? Please let me know in the discussion forum below!

This article is part of a series on Catholic spiritual growth. In our next article, we'll get dig more deeply into how to establish the habit of prayer in our life, especially through the virtues of prudence and charity.

Back to the Tutorial

Catholic spirituality begins with a personal relationship with God

All principles of Catholic spirituality begin with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It seems obvious, but when you begin to ask Catholics what Catholic spirituality is, the myriad of answers you receive reveal that we perhaps don’t remember our starting point as well as we ought to.

What is Prayer?

All Catholic spirituality is first and foremost a heart-to-heart connection with God. It is as much a part of our relationship with him as it is any other relationship. Friends and lovers grow in trust, intimacy, commitment and love by communicating with each other, spending time with each other, and sharing their hearts with each other.

I want to invite you to examine your current state of Catholic spirituality. I won’t start with how often you pray. My guess is that you’re a lot like me. You have good intentions to pray every day, but somehow you just don’t manage to do it. I want to get beyond the excuses (for you and for me), and get to the core of why we don’t make our Catholic spirituality the priority we know it should be. Here’s my thought. I don’t make Catholic spirituality a priority because I still see it as “something to do” rather than seeing it as time spent with the One who loves me and who could fulfill my life more perfectly than anyone else has the power to. My proof is that when I do pray, most of my prayer tends to be petition, followed by intercession, and then (once I run out of things to ask for) I fill the rest of my time with formal prayers (the Rosary or theLiturgy of the Hours). In other words, when I pray, I tend to do it as a duty to put in some time, maybe so God doesn’t “forget about me.” And, hey, if I can get some favors granted in the meantime, great!

If you’re really honest with yourself does this sound like you? If not, then great! I’m sure you can still benefit from this article, even though you're doing better than I am! But if your attitude sounds like mine, I invite you to pay special attention to the rest of this article and to try really hard to apply these suggestions. I am in the midst of doing this now, and it is really making a difference to the way I approach prayer and Catholic spirituality in general!

See all Prayer as Heart-to-Heart Connection

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that there are four main forms of prayer. The problem in the way I pray doesn’t lie in the forms I am using. The problem lies in my attitude and perception of those forms. So let’s work on changing that attitude. How can we look at each form of prayer to remind us that it’s all about a relationship?

Contemplation

Contemplation is all about relationship. A heart-to-heart connection with God is the very definition of contemplation. The way most spiritual masters define contemplation, it is something that you can prepare your heart to do, but only the Spirit can really make it happen. We might say that contemplation is the goal of all prayer, but that might be a bit presumptuous. After all, the Spirit blows as the Spirit will. One thing is sure. If you are drawn into contemplation, you are doing something right. Your heart is prepared to accept the special grace of a heart-to-heart connection with the Lord. If you’re not drawn into contemplation, don’t sweat it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not “in.” It might just mean that the Holy Spirit is working on your heart in other ways.

Meditation

Meditation is sadly either a neglected or misused form of prayer. I think it’s neglected and misused because it’s misunderstood. But I’m an optimist that way. Meditation is an intellectual reflection on a truth of our faith. Why the heck would you want to do that? Oh yeah, the overall purpose of Catholic spirituality. The purpose of meditation is to get to know God - to grow in intimacy with him! Meditation is the “magic” of taking what you know about God into prayer and asking him to translate your knowledge about him into an intimate knowing of him. Have you ever heard, “I don't care how much you know about Jesus. Do you really know him?” Phooey, I say. What you know about God leads to knowing him. And that happens through meditation. That’s why the Catholic Learning Plan and any other course I create encourages you to spend some time after a lesson taking what you learned into prayer. Just ask, “OK, God, here’s what I learned. Show me how this knowledge can help me know you better.” By the way, don’t think that you have to have some mystical experience to be meditating. We’re not talking about humming a mantra here. We’re just talking about humbly asking the Lord to reveal himself to you through the vehicle of your knowledge. It’s not that hard.

Worship & Adoration

Lots of people like worship as a form of prayer because it’s fun. There are all kinds of happy, feel-good songs out there that are labeled “praise and worship.” Many non-Catholic ecclesial communities make this music the center of their Sunday services. But if we’re worshiping because it’s fun, we’re missing the main point. Worship is all about love. Worship (also called adoration) as a form of prayer is simply lifting your heart in love for no other reason than you love him. It’s the faith version of “I just called to say I love you.” My wife loves it when I do that. It’s just good for a relationship. Including your relationship with God. And - hey - nothing against Praise & Worship music! Anything that raises your mind and heart in love is a pathway to worship. You can worship just by thinking or saying “sweet nothings” like “I love you, Jesus. I want to be with you forever, my God, etc.” or by reading the psalms (at least the ones that aren’t lamenting the Exile) or by any other method that expresses love. Praise & worship music is great at lifting your heart in love. It’s a good thing. Just remember, it’s not about you. It’s about the One who loves you.

Praise & Thanks

You know, God doesn’t need your thanks. He doesn’t have a human ego that needs to be stroked by gratitude. But recalling the goodness of the Father is yet another way to receive his love. You see, your heavenly Father intended for all Creation to be a sacrament of his love for us (an outward sign of a spiritual reality that brings about what it signifies). Not only does every good thing you have come from the Father, but every good thing that comes from him is an expression of his love for you. Now that’s enough to make me want to hit my knees in prayer right there. How about you? 

Praise is similar to thanksgiving prayer, but it is also similar to worship. Prayers of praise are expressions of love for God because of his goodness (remember - you worship just because you love him). So prayers of praise often focus on attributes of God - his faithfulness, his love for us, his beauty, his power, etc. - and express love for him because of these attributes. Thanksgiving and praise form a ladder to worship. “Thank you for this good thing (thanksgiving). You are so generous in your love to me even when I don’t deserve it (praise). I love you, Lord (worship).” See how that works?

Petition and Intercession

Prayer of petition and intercession are both asking for stuff. Petition usually means asking for things for yourself. Intercession means praying on behalf of someone else. In my selfish little world, both forms of prayer tend to be quite the opposite of reaching out in love. In fact, I often take the embarrassing attitude of a spoiled child wondering if God really cares about me and my needs. But that doesn’t mean that these forms of prayer are bad, or opposed to love. They just need to be approached correctly. At its heart, asking God for stuff is the recognition that he is the source of all goodness, and the loving Father who cares for his Family. Prayers of petition are an expression of trust. Trust is the foundation of any relationship. It is something that should always be strengthened and never neglected. That’s why fidelity is always an issue in marriage, no matter how long you’ve been married. My wife is still hurt if she catches my eye wandering to another woman, even though I have been faithful to her for 12 years at the writing of this article. Why? Because trust must always be nurtured.

What about intercession? Again, intercession is the acknowledgment of God as the source of all goodness. But there is something even cooler going on with intercession. I have heard protestants ask the question why we pray, since prayer won’t change the mind of God. Why would we pray for someone’s healing? If he is going to heal that person as a sign of his love and power, he is going to do it. My laying hands on the person and praying for healing won’t change God’s mind. But it does show that I trust that Jesus could do it if he wanted to. It may also be a good witness to the sick person who may be lacking trust to ask for herself. This is a good line of thought. But it doesn’t quite go far enough. You see, we also believe (know) that not only is God the source of all goodness, but in his love for us he has invited us to participate in his divine life. That means he wants us to be part of his bestowing goodness on the world. So when we pray for others, we aren’t changing God's mind. We’re not manipulating him into granting our wish (by the way, that’s what paganism does). But we are participating in any blessing, grace or actual healing that he chooses to give to the person we’re praying for. God wants us to be part of the gift giving. Now is that awesomeness itself or what?

So here’s your homework. Schedule 3-5 periods of prayer and use whatever forms of prayer you are most comfortable with. But go into your prayer keeping in mind how whatever forms you use lead you to a heart-to-heart connection with God. Focus on the relationship. Then - please, please, please - comment below and share with me if this actually made a difference in your prayer!

This article is part of a series on Growth in Prayer. In the next article, we’re going to explore why Catholic spiritual growth is so difficult. We’re not just going to kvetch, though. We’ll take a look at some solutions to the most common problems. 

Back to the Tutorial

What is Catholic spirituality?

The term “spirituality” has become so vague. It has almost lost its meaning in our culture. But we cannot let it lose its meaning in our faith. So what is Catholic spirituality?

The aspect of our life with Christ that deals most directly with having a relationship with God

• Constituted of conversion (an so it overlaps with morality) and prayer.
• Centered on the Divine Person of Jesus, aided by the Holy Spirit

But from these common roots of spirituality spring a variety of “flowers.”Spirituality has many forms.

• Meditation & contemplation in isolation from the world, but also intercession for the world
• Private prayer, but also public liturgy
• Quiet reflection, but also active love within the world (part of evangelization & acts of charity that focuses on unity with Jesus)
• Formula set by the Church and the saints, but also creative and personal expressions of love
• Recognition of created goods as signs of God's love, but also giving up those goods for the sake of loving God

So what was it that attracted me so much to Catholic spirituality as I went through the master’s program?

An overwhelming sense of centeredness and peace

The learning community was firmly centered on Christ. There was a shared sense of purpose mixed with a great humility. Teachers and students alike recognized that they were participating in the work and teachings of Jesus, not in our own glory. Therefore we were free to peacefully cooperate and to build each other up rather than competing against each other.

A joyful celebration of the truth

You might expect a master’s degree to have an intellectual atmosphere. However, the atmosphere of a learning community centered on Jesus cannot be compared to any other intellectual community. Curiosity turned into awe. Academic success turned into joy. There was a sense that we were coming to know God while we were learning more about him. Anti-intellectualism (which even pops up in secular advanced degree programs) didn’t stand a chance in the face of the overwhelming sense of joy and fulfillment.

A great community of love

Like any group of people, this group was filled with individuals. Some of us really liked each other. Some of us annoyed each other. But through it all, we loved each other. The love of Christ permeated our group and helped us to overcome (not just overlook) our differences. Each person in the community came to consider the needs of others more important than than their own needs. We looked for ways to serve each other and to build community.

A sense of excitement for living the adventure of faith

Most strongly felt by all of us was the sense of excitement for living the adventure of faith. Our teachers saw their mission of teaching and their vocations (most were married lay teachers, some were ordained priests) as an exciting adventure. This was not just something they told us in the context of the classroom. It was evident from their very lives. And it was contagious. A number of students discerned their vocation - some to marriage (that was me!), some to raising larger families, some to religious life. Even ten years later, most of us are still living the adventure within our vocation. We are excited and active. We are constantly awaiting what God has in store for us next.

An Awesome Life Available to All of Us!

Now, before you come to the conclusion that I am just describing an experience in a really good advanced Catholic degree program, let me explain the source of this joy. First of all, I have to say that the Institute for Pastoral Theology is an excellent Catholic degree program. I highly recommend it. But the source of the wonderful qualities I described above was not unique to the program. The reason the program had these qualities was because it was firmly grounded in Catholic spirituality.

And that means that these qualities could be part of anyone’s life.

These are elements of Catholic spirituality.

• Grounded in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ
• A joyful celebration of the truth
• A community of love
• A sense of excitement for the adventure of faith.

And these are elements of life that are available to all of us not matter what vocation God calls us to. They are not just for contemplatives. They are not just for master’s degree students. They are for you.

In this series of articles, we will explore how to grow in Catholic spirituality. In the next article in this series we’ll begin with the most foundational habit of spirituality - prayer.

Back to the Tutorial

Did you realize that in the nine articles in this series that you’ve read so far that you have actually been learning some really deep theology? Surprise!

Prudence and Fulfilling Your Human Potential

What you have been learning is part of the natural moral law. This is the arm of the moral law that helps us to live according to the plan that God placed within human nature so you can fulfill your human potential. Cool, huh?

Don’t worry. I’m not going to get all academic on you. Though I could. I really love this stuff!

But the point I want to make here is that prudence (and all virtue) is part of God’s plan for us as human beings. Busyness and overload are not. How do I know? Well, let’s think about it.

What does it mean to live our human potential? Saint Thomas Aquinas, following the works of Aristotle, tells us that to be a human being means that we

1. Have an intellect so that we can know the truth

2. Have free will so that we can choose goodness and ultimately so that we can love

3. Have bodily senses and bodily appetites so that we can interact with Creation

We live according to God’s plan for our human potential when we engage all of these “faculties” of human nature. This is our happiness.

Find Your Happiness by Living Deliberately

What this means for you is that you will find more happiness when you live deliberately. You will be miserable if you allow the world to take control of your life so that all you are doing is reacting to the various demands imposed on you.

So, beyond what you have already learned in this tutorial series, let’s talk about what it means to live prudently and deliberately in a general way so that you can apply these principles to other areas of your life.

1. Living deliberately and exercising prudence means thinking about your life.

Thinking about your life requires first creating the habit of quiet reflection. A great time for me to do this is over my morning cup(s) of coffee. I am in the habit of lingering over that first cup of coffee and thinking and praying. Choose a time of the day to get into the habit of quiet reflection. It also means learning how to think critically. Critical thinking is about questioning your assumptions, testing your theories and discovering what is really true. Thinking about your life also means asking the question “why.” Why am I doing this? Why am I going about it this way? Why did I think this was the best for me right now?

2. Living deliberately and exercising prudence means planning your life

We already talked about planning so much, what more can I say about it here? Just to apply what we did with priorities, goals and objectives to various areas of your life. Be proactive with your time and energy and other personal resources. If you find yourself getting overloaded, it probably means that you have fallen back into the habit of reacting to demands on your life rather than planning.

3. Living deliberately and exercising prudence means making choices about achieving your goals. Fortified with a premeditated plan, you now have the freedom to exercise the human will and choose how you use your time. No, the demands don’t automatically go away. They’re still there. But now you can filter every demand on your personal resources through the frame of your priorities and goals. You can choose which demands you give into and which ones you respectfully decline.

4. Living deliberately and exercising prudence means having the freedom (margin) to respond thoughtfully and carefully to the unexpected. Now, as a good Catholic you might be a little uncomfortable by now. Isn’t the life of Christ all about giving up control, not seizing control? Absolutely. But the question is who you give control to. Jesus tells us, “take my yolk on your shoulders and find that my yolk is easy, my burden is light.” When the world seizes control from us, it makes us overloaded and oppressed. In order to be free to give our control to Jesus, we really need first to take control back away from the world. Then we are free to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit whenever they come. We are free to handle the unexpected curve balls in life. We are also free to follow the unexpected promptings of God. Keep that margin in your life.

The Purpose of a Deliberate Life: Love God

Ultimately, Catholic time management is really about living a full human life. It’s about activating your full potential, living according to God’s plan for you. It is not God’s plan for us to be swept along by the currents of the world, reacting to one demand on your time after another. God’s will is for you to make a free gift of yourself to others - and that means that you first have to be free. Ultimately, God wants you to know him, love him, and serve him in this world so you can become eternally happy with him in the next. That means you need to free up your time to

Know him

Study - get to know about him

Pray - move from knowing about him to knowing him intimately

Love him

Pray - establish a heart-to-heart connection to God

“Stop and smell the daisies” - Recognize his love in Creation

Serve him

Liturgy - the Liturgy (the “work” of the Church) is the way God has given us to serve him directly

Serve others - means serving God’s Family within the Covenant

Catholic time management isn’t just a practical exercise in productivity. It’s a transformation of your life through virtue that sets you up to cooperate with God’s grace in your life. 

Back to the Tutorial

This is the last article in this series on Catholic Time Management. If you haven't read the other articles, fill out the form below to get the series delivered to your mailbox!

In this series on Catholic Time Management, we have taken a look at the challenge most Catholics face finding time to grow in their faith

• The reason that being too "busy" is the wrong way to look at time challenges
• Why we are so overwhelmed and the need to establish margin
• Areas in our life where we can work to establish margin
• Why prudence is the main virtue to develop in order to get control o four time - and our life
• How to begin exercising prudence by setting priorities, goals and objectives

In this article, we're going to explore why relationships need to be very, very high on our priority list.

People seek happiness in all sorts of ways. Some seek happiness through physical pleasures and possessions. Others through self-fulfillment, self-improvement and self-esteem. But these sources of happiness are fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling. They leave us wanting for more, never satisfied. On the other hand, relationships bring us happiness on a number of very fulfilling levels:

• We are made for communion with each other. People seeking self-fulfillment will never achieve it alone
• Relationships open our lives to transcendent goods - things like truth, beauty and justice - that we can only truly enjoy in relationship with others
• Giving ourselves as gifts to others maximizes our desire and motivation to be the best we can be - for their sake rather than for our own
• Relationships motivate us to use physical pleasure and possessions responsibly so we can be the best for those we love and share the goods of creation with others.

In short, relationships fulfill more of our human nature, are (usually) longer lasting than any other source of happiness, and inspire us to attain all other sources of happiness for good, balanced, healthy reasons.

The Challenge of Relationships

If this is true, then why are our families and our friends the first things that we sacrifice when the going gets rough? Well, let's think about it. While relationships make us incredibly happy when they're going good, we also know that

• Relationships require a lot of time and energy
• Relationships are much more risky than other pursuits
• When relationships go bad, they can cause a lot of pain
• Let's be honest - relationships are just a dang mystery. How to build good relationships just escapes us most of the time (as a husband and father - I am painfully aware of this).

Busyness and overwhelm ruin our relationships. Busyness and overwhelm ruin our happiness.

Relationships Too Can Be Under Your Control

So can you handle some more good news?

Relationship building is a set of skills that can be learned. The more time and effort we put into learning these skills and putting them into practice, the better our relationships can get. Yes, there is that pesky fact that relationships require more than one person, but there is a lot that you can do to maximize them. That's why it is important to make our relationships the highest priority.

I am no relationship expert, but I have picked up a few really good principles in my work with marriage preparation and parenting. These have really served me well, and I want to share them with you to show you what you can do to make your relationships a top priority.

The Relationship Progression - to keep our relationships healthy, we must continue to revisit the stages of building a relationship. We first build trust, then intimacy, then commitment, then love. Keeping our relationships healthy means strengthening all of these vital elements. Of course, doing so takes lots of time (the subject of this series).

Carefree Timelessness - Catholic speaker Matthew Kelly coined this term in his talks. Our loved ones need more from us than passing attention. Relationships grow in time the way plants grow in soil. They need to be immersed in it. Carefree timelessness is the total gift of ourselves to our friends and family. It means spending time completely immersed in them - giving them our undivided, undistracted selves. You'll know you've given this gift when you are so involved with being with other person that you completely lose track of time and aren't at all worried about it. This is what it truly means to put our relationships first.

As a writer and at-home entrepreneur, I have a difficult time giving carefree timelessness even as a stay-home dad. However, I have discovered the ancient secret of Sundays. Besides going to Mass, what better way to keep the Lord's Day holy than by dedicating it to God and family? So Sundays are my days to give to my family and friends - to turn off my busy brain - and to just be with those I love.

Problem-Solving Communication: Conflict is inevitable in any relationship this side of Heaven. Do you assume that conflict (over money or sex or children) is the number one cause of divorce? Wrong! The number one cause of divorce is the lack of conflict. Surprising? You see, conflict between fallen human beings is inevitable. So if a married couple reports that they never have conflict, the truth is really that they are not facing the conflict. And failure to face and resolve conflict is really the number one cause of divorce. The skill for handling conflict is problem-solving communication. The number one rule is don't attack the individual; solve the problem.

Changing Yourself: Michele Weiner-Davis of Divorce Busters teaches about the power of changing yourself. We have all heard the truism "you can't change the other person." With the qualified exception of shaping children through discipline, this is very true. The focus within most relationships really needs to be on how you can love the other person more completely. So if there is something in the relationship that you don't like, seek out a way that you can change your attitude or actions. The power comes in what psychologists call the "Law of Reciprocity." If you make positive changes that really serve and love the other person, the other person is much more likely to reciprocate by making changes of their own.

Time: the Key to Building Healthy Relationships

The key to every single one of these relationship "secrets" is time. We need to make our relationships a priority. We need to consciously block off time for our relationships (Yes - schedule your carefree timelessness! Just don't schedule a solid end time. Don't squeeze it between things. But get it on your calendar or it won't happen!). Don't let busyness and overwhelm get in the way of love.

Now, we must always keep in mind (humility demands it) that our relationships will never be perfect. Human beings suffer from the effects of Original Sin. We must learn to forgive ourselves, forgive each other, and heal. But there is one way we will experience perfect relationships and perfect happiness. God has created us to be in covenant with him. Perfect relationships and perfect happiness will finally be fulfilled in the eternal covenant in Heaven. But let's not wait for Heaven to begin cooperating with God's grace to improve our lives in this world!

The next article is the last in this series on Catholic Time Management. We'll put it all together by talking about how Prudence helps us to live our lives deliberately and take control away from the currents of the world.

Back to the Tutorial

Step 1: Create a set of objectives based on your goals and priorities.

At the end of the last article, you were positioned to create your first set of objectives based on your priorities and goals. A “set” of objectives (tasks, actions) consists of 3-5 objectives. I recommend that you choose each objective in the set from a different goal. I also recommend choosing objectives from your spiritual and relationship goals first so that you don’t lose track of God and people as priorities in your life.

Right now I am working on this set of objectives

1. Pray morning prayer every morning and at least one decade of the Rosary before beginning my afternoon work
2. Dedicate every Sunday to being with my wife and children (second only to Mass and prayer)
3. Write one article each week for this Catholic Time Management series
4. Write one article each week for my parish education website’s “Learner Identity” series
5. Edit one video each week for my online membership program
6. Lose one pound a week until I reach my target weight

Notice that while I have five objectives in this set, the first one is not time intenstive - it’s just a matter of establishing a habit of prayer - and neither is the last one - though ideally it would include an hour of exercise each day in addition to calorie counting. Only three of them really require a large amount of dedicated time. That’s ideal for one set. Notice that I also have objectives that have a definite end. When I’m done writing an article series, that objective is done. When I have met my target weight, that objective is done. The prayer objective is ongoing. At some point I won’t have to have it on my list because it will be second nature, but it will probably remain on my list for a long time, carrying over to the next “set” of objectives that I create. It is best to have a dominant number of definitive objectives so that you’ll know when to create a new set.

Step 2: Schedule the tasks into your day

OK, so now your objectives are your primary focus for your day. The next step is to actually schedule these activities into your day. This is the place where I struggle the most. My days never seem to go as I have planned them. But after a few months of habit, it is getting easier. What I have found works best is to try very hard to make use of the same hour each day for a particular task.

So, I pray morning prayer during my first cup of coffee each morning. I get up early enough to be able to write for one hour in the morning before I go to work. After work is dedicated to running the business, but I try to set aside another hour for writing or video production as well. I also assign a different writing objectives to each day.

• So Monday is dedicated to the Catholic Time Management series
• Tuesday is dedicated to the Learner Identity series
• Wednesday is the day to work on the online membership sites
• Thursday I set aside for larger writing projects - e-books, books, etc.
• Friday and Saturday extra days to close up any unmet objectives and to take care of the business.

Specifying an objective to each day keeps me from wasting time trying to figure out what to do each day. It also helps me balance out my time among my objectives.

Step 3: Get rid of what Dean Jackson calls the “reactive activators” - assign a specific time of the day or week to handle them.

OK, so you have your objectives scheduled and you’re about to sit down and work on them. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you really have to focus on the self-discipline part of prudence.

It is so easy to get distracted from the task on hand. I have the really bad habit of opening multiple browser windows and flipping among them.

Dean Jackson warns us against “reactive activators,” those little things in our lives that draw our attention by causing us to react spontaneously. We get an email, we feel we have to respond immediately. Our cell phone rings and we must answer it. We feel we need to keep up with our social media feeds. People come to us demanding our attention - sometimes for important things, sometimes for trivial. All of these are examples of “reactive activators.” All of these are thieves that steal control over our time.

There is a time and a place for all of these things. But to tame the reactive activators, we need to be proactive toward them rather than reactive. That means scheduling them into our day. Assign one hour (or half an hour) each day for email, and another hour (or half an hour) for social media. When someone interrupts a work period, politely ask if you can get back to him or her and schedule a time.

Not that you can never be spontaneous. But if you’re going to spontaneously allow your children to interrupt your work, let it me a free choice rather than a begrudged reaction to their demands. It will be much more a fit to them.

So again, the message here is to focus on what you have scheduled.

Step 4: Work on your objectives every day until they are complete before moving on to the next set of objectives.

The other way we sometimes waste our time (and I’m guilty of this one as well) is that we get tired of working on one set of objectives and we become tempted to move on to a fresh set. So we move on before the current set is completed. Then we get sick of the new set of objectives and move on again. We therefore fritter away our time without actually accomplishing anything.

The virtue needed here is perseverance. We need to stick with a single objective until we have seen it through to completion. Finish the entire objective set before moving on to the next or making any changes to the current set (with rare exceptions that allow for flexibility).

This simple four step process will help you to focus. Focus will allow you to take control of your time and to most effectively apply yourself to what is most important. That’s the goal of Catholic time management. In the next article, we'll go back to the idea of focusing on what is most important to find true happiness.

Back to the Tutorial

Translated into practical action, the first step of prudence is to set your priorities, objectives, goals and actions. Let's take a look at each of these steps to exercising prudence.

Priorities

The first step to exercising prudence is to clarify your priorities. What do you hold as most important in your life? What will make you truly happy?

This is not just a subjective question. We really do need to have our priorities in the right order. The more disordered our priorities, the more energy we waste and the less fulfilled we are.

Once we set our priorities according to what will truly make us happy, we then need to live by those priorities. That's where the real challenge comes in.

The next step toward living our priorities is to set goals that align our lives with our priorities.

Goals

Goals are very general statements about the direction you want your life to take. They are based on your priorities - what is most important in your life. They lead you to create specific objectives.

Let's first clarify the difference between objectives and goals.

So, for example, a priority is to grow in my relationship with God. In order to do that I create a goal for myself of "improving my prayer life." To help advance that goal, I create a specific objective of "praying Morning Prayer before breakfast every day." Every time I accomplish my objective I advance my goal and therefore stay true to my priority.

It can be very helpful to set up an accountability system for goals and objectives. This can be a loved one with the ability to be brutally honest with you. Or you can use a technological solution. Personally, I use Toodledo as my task list, which helps you set goals and track how many of your completed tasks have contributed to each goal.

Objectives

Setting the right objectives is really important. Here is where the rubber meets the road. Meeting an objective is the only way you know for sure that you are really living your goal and therefore are oriented to your priorities.

Here are some guidelines for setting good objectives:

1. Create each objective directly from a goal.

2. Don't go overboard! Set a few at a time. If your objectives have a point of completion, set new ones as you complete your current objectives. If they are are ongoing, wait until you have firmly established a habit before adding more objectives to your list.

3. As much as possible, make your objectives measurable. They should at least be observable and specific so you can definitively track if you've done them or not. It's even better to make them measurable - losing x amount of weight by a certain date, praying the Rosary x number of times in a certain time period, etc. That way you can get a sense of progress, or a specific plan for improvement.

4. Write your objectives down! Make them concrete. Writing them down also gives you the opportunity to review them on a daily basis. Keeping them fresh in your mind helps develop the willpower to follow through on them.

5. Identify possible obstacles to achieving each objective. These can be personal obstacles (the tendency to procrastinate) or external obstacles (having young children in the home). Then make a plan to overcome or get around these obstacles.

Setting priorities, goals and objectives isn't just about getting things done. It's about deciding what's most important in life - what will fulfill God's plan for your life and bring you true happiness - and focusing your time and energy. In the next article we'll discuss the importance of having this focus and how it increases our margin and reduces overload.

Back to the Tutorial

1. Prudence conquers busyness and overload by helping us to focus on what is most important.

Prudence is the virtue of knowing what is truly good and making a plan to attain it. So the first thing practicing prudence leads us to do is to evaluate the things we are after. What goals is your life oriented toward? Are these the greatest goods? Are they the best use of your time, energy and resources? Here are some of the standards we use to analyze the directions our life are heading.

• Do our current goals lead us into a deeper relationship with God?

• Are our current goals making us better, more loving people?

• Do our current goals feed and nurture our relationships?

2. Prudence conquers busyness and overload by encouraging us to set goals and work toward them so we're always making progress.

Productivity experts tell us that a fundamentally important step to achieving anything is to

• create specific, measurable goals

• Write them down

• Look at them every day.

Most of us don't take the time to stop and think about our goals, let alone shape our lives around them. As a result we live most of our lives floating from event to event, wasting a lot of our time and energy on things that don't move our lives forward or lead to spiritual growth.

By taking time out to think about our goals, we empower ourselves to

• Focus on what is truly important (see the point above)

• Orient our lives toward getting the most and the best out of life

• Create specific plans to attain what we need to be fulfilled

• Know concretely what we need to invest our time, energy and personal energy into

3. Prudence conquers busyness and overload by leading us to plan what we do with our time and therefore regain control.

The main problem in what we call “busyness” is a lack of control over our time. We feel pushed from even to event, task to task. In fact, I’m feeling exactly that sensation as I write this. I have three deadlines looming, and I have had very little time this past week to work on any of them.

So how can prudence help? Well, the reason that I didn’t have any time to work on my deadlines is that I did not plan well for the needs of my family last week. Instead of being a planned use of resources, my family became an intruder into my schedule, adding to my sense of busyness - lack of control.

What would have happened if I had communicated better with my wife and planned the needs of my family into my week? Would I have had the time to complete my deadlines? Probably not, actually. But I wasted a lot of time fretting, rearranging my schedule, and multitasking. If I had planned more carefully I would definitely have had more time to dedicate to those projects.

The good news is that my family didn’t suffer this time from my lack of organization. Thanks to the small but steady progress I’ve made in setting priorities, they received my undivided attention when they needed it most.

Remember - I stink at this stuff! So I’m struggling to implement these strategies right along with you. But the good news is that they work, even for someone like me! I could have taken much more control over my time this past week by exercising prudence more completely.

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4. Prudence conquers busyness and overload by reducing our tendency to react to life and increasing our ability to respond.

My experience from last week illustrates another point too. The reason I wasted time last week was because I fell into old habits of multitasking and reacting. So when I say “reacting” I mean that I spent a lot of my time giving immediate, unplanned attention to little emergencies that popped up - emails, phone calls, orders to get out, requests from my wife, etc. These constitute what marketing professional Dean Jackson calls “reactive activators.” They are triggers that activate within us a behavioral pattern of giving up control of our time.

Prudence helps us to turn off these “reactive activators.” Yes, phone calls and emails need to be answered (most of the time). Yes, I need to respond to my wife’s request (all of the time). But we can do these things much more efficiently when we exercise prudence and plan a thoughtful response to them rather than spontaneously reacting to them. For example, if we set aside a defined period of time to answer email, we tend to respond to emails much more efficiently and much more thoughtfully than when we spontaneously react to them.

These are just four benefits of prudence, but they are the four benefits that I think are most related to conquering busyness and overload. Because as Catholics we know a lot about the virtue of prudence, we are actually in a good place to activate that knowledge and conquer this time management thing in a major way.

I have more to offer you in this arena as well, but these are two services that really compliment and expand on what I'm teaching. Click on each link now and subscribe to one of the services.

When I talk to people about the obstacles they face in growing in their faith, one response that I get quite consistently is the problem of being distracted by the world. The world constantly clamours for our attention. Just think about

• All of the advertisements you are exposed to every day
• The constant bombardment of communication through media, "old" and "new"
• Demands of work and social responsibilities
• Changing cultural and legal morality that devalues life, marriage and freedom and overvalues material possessions, sex, and worldly success
• The desire of the heart that I hear from my clients and customers is to be able to shut it all out - just for a while - in order to focus on God. Do you experience that same desire? I sure do.

How can we hope to focus ourselves on the Kingdom of God with so much distraction?

What Answer Does Saint Benedict Offer?

In the first century AD, Saint Benedict felt the same desire. He was living in the bustling city of Rome, going to school at the age of 19 or 20. Yet, he felt the draw to leave behind the wild life of his pagan school companions and to deeply embrace the more meaningful life offered by Jesus. Benedict left Rome to seek shelter from the distractions. Eventually this desire of his heart led him to found a religious order and build a monestary. Saint Benedict's monestary became a place of sanctuary sought out by many people who felt the same desire to shut out for a time the world in order to recenter themselves on Jesus.

Find Your Inner Monestary

Yet, Saint Benedict's famous rule and "Spiritual Exercises" talked more about the importance of establishing a sanctuary within your own mind and heart. Those of us who are called to serve in the world, not to the life of religious orders, are still called to focus on Jesus - to center ourselves on the Covenant. Here are some ways to get started building your inner monestary.

1. Begin your day in prayer - one great idea is to turn a morning habit into a time of prayer. I'm a coffee drinker. My morning delight is to linger over my morning coffee, usually reading or daydreaming. I have recently been challenged to use that time for prayer, to make a morning offering. What a simple way to begin my day focused on Jesus! I don't even have to carve out more time in my day than I already take. What morning habit do you have that can be overlayed with a morning habit of prayer?
2. Be sure to take time to pray before each meal. Don't just say the "Bless us oh Lord" prayer (though this prayer is considered an official blessing of the Church and is important to say) - also take a minute of silence to refocus yourself on God.
3. After your work day, don't launch right into your evening routine. Instead, take some silent time to build the wall of your monestary. Turn off the TV, radio and computer for a specific amount of time. Sit quietly. Use this time to pray, read the Bible, or do some spiritual reading. Or just sit silently in God's presence. End your time of silence with a prayer of thanksgiving for the blessings you received during the day.
4. Before you go to sleep for the night, do a quick examination of conscience. An examination of conscience includes recognizing where you sinned or fell short of the goodness God expected you to do during the day. But it also include recalling the good that you were able to do abd the grace and blessings that God gave you through the day. It may also include creating some goals for the next day. End your time of prayer with an "act of love" - just a statement to God that you love Him and desire to participate in His life.

Begin Simply - But Begin!

Look, the good news is that the solution to our distraction is within our control. But it is a challenge, no doubt about it. Most people make the mistake of trying to tackle the challenge with a large commitment.

"From now on, I'm going to pray at least an hour every day."

Then they fail to make the commitment and they just quit.

Growing a virtue (a good habit) is like building muscle. It is best to start small and simple, and then slowly add "weight" and intensity of the workout. If you start with too large a commitment, you're going to pull something!

So begin by grafting new habits of prayer onto habits and routines you have already established (like praying over your morning coffee). Begin by making small daily commitments to prayer (1 minute before meals, 10 minutes after work). But do it - every day - until it becomes second nature. Then add to the intensity (saying a Rosary after work would take 15-20 minutes).

It's important to remember that our primary call is to live our primary vocation. Our spiritual growth needs to integrate into our vocation. For most of us, our vocation calls us to be members of the "world." We are not called to completely shut it out. However, creating an inner sanctum to which we can retreat periodically helps us to stay focused on what is truly important - and can help us to nurture our spiritual growth on the road to sanctity.

Like many, I assumed that my busyness was out of my control. I was frustrated, but I really didn’t think I could do anything about it. Then I read about margin and I realized that feeling that I lacked control was exactly my problem! I had the same 24 hours in a day that you have, and how I use that time is really mostly up to me. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have enough time - the typical perception of busyness. The real problem was overload - I was allowing other forces to take control of what I did in the time I had. Once I recognized the real problem, I decided to apply some Catholic principles that I had been teaching but not living. I began to exercise the cardinal virtue of prudence. I can honestly say that my life has changed. Busyness has all but disappeared.

And that is what I’d like to share with you in this series and beyond.

Now, what I have been applying to my life so far is pretty focused on time management. And that’s what we’ve been discussing so far in this series. But these concepts can actually be applied to a number of areas in life. So in this post I want to just explore some possible spheres in which we could apply these concepts. Getting deeply into each area is beyond the scope of this series. But the “Planning for Grace” program can take you as deeply into each of these domains as you want to go.

Let’s explore six spheres that we can apply the area of margin.

Time

No Margin Ned Episode 2: Time Management

We’ve already explored the idea of margin in time when we discussed the myth of busyness, and this will be our area of focus. When you take control of your time, you empower yourself to focus on what is most important. You therefore do not feel like life is “passing you by.” You have a strong sense of control over your time. You therefore don’t feel harried and rushed all the time. You don’t feel like you can’t fit another thing into your schedule, though you’re going to be judicious about what you choose to add. When the unexpected happens, you have the flexibility necessary to adapt.

Physical Energy

Much of our problem with overload is related to a lack of physical energy. This lack of energy is caused by being out of shape, lacking sleep, and eating poorly. At the same time that medical advances have gotten rid of many threats to human health, we are allowing bad habits to give us a “disease of lifestyle.” 50% of all deaths are related to lifestyle choices (Swenson, 96).

If you are able to build margin in physical energy, your energy levels stay fairly constant throughout the day without a large crash (except for the natural circadian rhythm low that happens in the early afternoon - prime time for a short nap). You can enjoy a productive, high energy day and rest at the end of the day in a satisfied way, rather than collapsing from exhaustion.

Emotional Energy

Emotional overload saps our strength, paralyzes our resolve, makes us more vulnerable, and erodes margin in other areas.

If you have emotional margin, you are empowered to confront problems and challenges with hope and a sense of power. Think of emotional energy like a bank account. All of us have a limited amount of emotional energy in our account. Overdrawing our account causes us pain. However, we can also make a deposit into this account. Building emotional margin is a matter of recognizing when we are approaching our limits, knowing when and how to put on the brakes, and how to recharge our emotional batteries.

Finances

No Margin Ned Episode 3: Finances

Living with financial margin means first of all living within our financial means. Debt is the main symptom of financial overload. However, according to financial expert Thomas Zordani, financial margin also includes having enough money saved to plan for the unexpected. In his book Faith Financies, Zordani recommends saving up to six months worth of income as an “emergency fund.” His book also has many other recommendations for creating financial margin.

Having financial margin gives you peace of mind and a sense of security. It is also the most practical form of margin. It can really save you when the unexpected expense comes up, or if you suddenly lose your source of income.

Moral

No Margin Ned Episode 4: Morality

Without moral margin, you are always living on the edge of sin. You may worry about the salvation of your soul because you can’t seem to kick the bad moral habits that continue to drag you down.

Living with moral margin begins with knowing what kind of person you want to become and what kind of person God created you to be and working toward those goals. It means erecting a hedge around yourself to protect you from sin - this is called “avoiding the near occasion of sin.” It means seeking the greatest good, rather than simply trying to avoid sin. This not only gives you a sense of peace about your eternal destiny, it fills you with joy, peace, and excitement.

Relationships

No Margin Ned Episode 5: Family

When you nurture margin in your relationships, you give your relationships the greatest gift you can. What Matthew Kelly calls “carefree timelessness.” This is the ability to completely dedicate yourself to being present with those you love, to the point that you lose all track of time. Total presence is the best way to nourish relationships.

One last word from No Margin Ned

So these are just six domains where we can build margin. And if we do, we will find the peace and happiness that alludes us in our overloaded world.

I’m speaking from experience here - from the overloaded side. I came very close to burnout a few years ago. This past year, I discovered this concept and have since been working out how to use this concept. I’ll share with you some of my successes and ongoing challenges - and hopefully I’ll bring you to the magic place of marginland a lot sooner than I got there!

So the next question that would be natural to ask is how do we build margin? We’ll begin to tackle that question in the next article. For now, I’ll give you the quick answer - the secret that I discovered. The virtue of prudence is the secret weapon.