As I was recently revisiting the Walking with Purpose Bible study, Ordering Your Priorities by Lisa Brenninkmeyer, I realized I’d completely forgotten something I once knew: after God, the second priority is not your husband, but your own heart.

Tending to your heart—allowing yourself to feel what you feel—even that which is painful, difficult, or confusing; bringing the moments of your heart to the feet of God and asking Him to speak truth over you, to give you a spirit of wisdom—is all part of being a spiritually mature woman and tending to your other four priorities well.

But I’ve been skipping that part. For a while. I’ve been so focused on showing up for everyone else—God, my husband, our children, our extended family, my work, our friends, our community—that I’ve forgotten to slow down and listen intentionally to my heart.

Mary shows us so beautifully what can happen when we make room to notice, to ponder, and to pray with the things we keep within our heart. Scripture tells us that after the shepherds came and told her what they had heard about Jesus, “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Later, when she and Joseph found Jesus in the Temple, Luke tells us again that she “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51).

Mary didn’t rush, distract, ignore, numb, stay busy, deny, or minimize the emotions she experienced or the events she witnessed. Instead, she pondered; she meditated; she paid attention to the mystery entrusted to her (be it sorrowful or joyful), and before jumping to any conclusions, or worrying, or dismissing, she invited God in.

Lately, there’s been a movement within my own heart that I’ve mostly been ignoring, or at least brushing past and making light of, minimizing. It has to do with a discernment I’ve been carrying quietly, one that touches some of my deepest hopes and fears for the future. Bringing it to God? Well, a little, yes. But fully, honestly, authentically, in a time intentionally set aside for us? No, no, I’ve been avoiding that.

Tonight, as I sat at a restaurant at my Well Read Mom’s monthly book talk, we discussed Theo of Golden (not an official WRM book, but something we chose to read for the past month). As we did, we shared updates from our lives. Something in me shifted.

At first, I shared my heart lightly, even flippantly. But an older mom pressed in and asked a question. As if beckoning me, or inviting me, to take my own words more seriously. And suddenly I felt a painful lump in my throat from all the emotion I’d been trying to stuff down.

Vulnerably and candidly, I shared my heart with my friends. The words came tumbling out. Tears, too. Tears I didn’t even realize I had stored up. My honesty and forthrightness surprised me. But I kept sharing.

And my friends kept listening, not shying away from my heart. They listened keenly and compassionately; they didn’t rush me or appear distracted; they didn’t critique or try to brush away the emotion. They entered in, asked questions, and offered faithful wisdom, encouragement, and hope.

Isn’t this what happens when we slow down enough to listen to the movements of our heart? We feel more deeply, but we also live more authentically. Beautifully, God can use other people to help draw out that which we’ve been carrying or trying to bury. He can use their words as an offering to us for something to pray with, to ponder. He can use the honesty we finally dare to speak to a friend as an invitation to return back to Him and confide in Him and lay it at His feet and listen.

No, they didn’t have all the answers. But through their own listening, they helped me to listen to my own heart.

Tending to the heart is not a priority to be skipped or forgotten; it’s not egocentric, and it’s not a corrupt form of self-care. It is, ultimately, a form of surrender and obedience, of intimacy and relationship, and of discipleship and spiritual maturity.

How can I love other people fully, abundantly, sacrificially, and joyfully if I refuse to pay attention to the very heart through which I am called to love?

Never underestimate what God can do with a heart that pauses long enough to feel. Never underestimate the wisdom He longs to give you when you stop minimizing your hopes, fears, desires, doubts, questions, and aches, but instead surrender them to Jesus.

Not too long ago there was the viral refrain on reels stating that “you only get eighteen summers with your child.” Now the idea has evolved into something even more precise: “one summer with your baby, three with your toddler, ten with your child, four with your teenager.”

The videos are usually set to soft music and filled with picturesque moments: toddlers running through sprinklers, sandy feet dangling from beach chairs, sleepy babies in swimsuits, popsicle-stained smiles, golden-hour bike rides, and mothers looking wistfully into the distance as though they alone have discovered the passage of time.

If you're anything like me, somewhere between the music swelling and the countdown ticking away, you feel it: that little knot in your stomach.

Gulp.

Have I appreciated it enough? Am I being present enough? Have I already missed it?

And that, my friends, is just about when I put my phone down and reject and rebuke it all. Here’s why:

While I understand the impulse behind these reminders, l I find myself resisting them more and more. Yes, time is precious. Yes, in its own beautiful, magical way childhood is fleeting. But I find this trend cultivates anxiety and perfectionism, encourages grasping and striving, rather than a posture of gratitude, surrender, and opened hands. They encourage us to view our children's lives through the lens of diminishing inventory, counting down a finite number of opportunities, while subtly suggesting that each season must be fully savored, fully documented, and fully transformed into a "core memory" before it slips away.

What begins as an invitation to cherish the present can quickly become another burden (as if there aren’t enough of those already). It becomes one more way for parents, particularly mothers, to wonder whether they are doing enough. Another reason to feel that ordinary days somehow fall short — which is perhaps the greatest lie of all.

More and more, I am convinced that holiness—and much of what is truly extraordinary—lies hidden within the ordinary and mundane.

What are we robbing our children of when we perpetuate the fallacy that life is found primarily in the picturesque moments? When we teach, even unintentionally, that the days worth remembering are the vacations, the grand adventures, the perfectly curated experiences?

A child's life is not built on a handful of magical summers. It is built on thousands of ordinary moments: helping make dinner, riding in the grocery cart, listening to stories before bed, watching a parent fold laundry, lingering around the dinner table, running errands together on a rainy afternoon, catching bugs, watching a sunset, lying in the grass and find shapes in the clouds, blowing a dandelion and making a wish, learning the sounds of the birds, studying the language of the flowers.

The great deception of social media is not that it shows beautiful moments; it is that it persuades us those moments are the point.

Yet the Christian story has always suggested otherwise. God enters the world not in spectacle, but in obscurity. Most of Christ's earthly life was spent in hiddenness. Holiness is formed less often in mountaintop experiences than in faithfulness to the duties immediately before us.

Perhaps the danger of counting summers is not merely that it makes parents anxious. It is that it tempts us to overlook the quiet abundance of ordinary life, convincing us that meaning resides somewhere else—somewhere more memorable, more photogenic, more worthy of a reel.

But here’s the other, albeit uncomfortable and perhaps morbid, problem I find with this trend:

We are not promised eighteen summers with our children. We are not even promised tomorrow. Some families will have fewer.

And, uncomfortable though it may be to acknowledge, it is not always the child who goes first. Much of the rhetoric surrounding these reminders assumes that we will be present for every stage of our children's lives, faithfully counting down the years until they leave home. But none of us has been given that guarantee.

The truth is that we do not know whether we will have two summers, eighteen, or fifty. We do not know whether we will be the ones grieving a loss or the ones whose absence will be grieved. The future is mercifully hidden from us.

If these reminders are meant to impress upon us the fragility of life, then they are pointing toward something true. Yet, I wonder whether the proper response to life's uncertainty is not to count more carefully, but to hold more gratefully. To stop treating our lives as a ledger of summers remaining and instead receive each season as the gift that it is.

Why do we speak as though the relationship reaches its conclusion when a child becomes an 18? Some of my favorite memories with my parents and siblings have occurred in my 20s and 30s. The particular form of parenting changes, certainly, but change is not the same thing as loss.

When I was young and grieving a change I was anxious about, my dear Grandma Joan held my hand and told me, "Sweetheart, the only guaranteed thing in this life is change."

At the time, I hated the thought. I wanted to freeze the moment I was in and keep it forever. Yet the very change I feared ended up bearing fruit I could never have imagined.

Perhaps that is precisely what these viral reminders get wrong. They treat change primarily as something to mourn rather than something to receive. Every season contains losses, yes, but it also contains gifts that cannot arrive until the previous season has passed. Rather than counting how many summers I may have left, I would rather gratefully receive the one in front of me.

Indeed, “do not be anxious about tomorrow,” Christ commands us, “for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matthew 6:34). Jesus reminds us of the importance of being present, of not having anxiety about the future.

Tomorrow belongs only to God.

May we spend this summer, and every moment gifted to us, loving the people before us well, receiving each day as it comes, and trusting that our future — when placed in the hands of God — will be one of goodness and prosperity rather than scarcity.

I know medications like Ozempic are going to change people’s lives. And for those who truly need them, praise God that such medicine exists.

But two things can be true at once. For many women, I fear these drugs also reinforce two enduring lies.

The first is the lie that we must become smaller to become worthy — thinner, tighter, closer to our adolescent size … the size we were before adulthood fully formed us (which is insanity), before pregnancies stretched us, before life itself left its marks upon us. Over and over again, we are told beauty is found in the art of reduction: fewer pounds, fewer wrinkles, less skin, less softness, less evidence of the live we have lived or carried or fed.

But of course, God forbid something is “too small”, there’s a fix for that too: fill it, plump it. lift it, sculpt it. Nothing is ever allowed simply to be. The distinct markings of the Creator upon His creation must be scrutinized, embellished, corrected, concealed, erased. The beauty industry (and increasingly the medical industry beside it) thrives on perpetual dissatisfaction. We are chained to standards that move the moment we approach them. Those who worship beauty and profit dangle before us our own idols — our reflection, numbers on a scale, jean size, perfection, control, the elusive promise of finally being “enough” — exploiting our innate desire to be loved, to be desired, to be received, to be seen and know.

Recently, I searched the phrase “Ozempic face.” Many of the top results were plastic surgeons and estheticians promising solutions: procedures, fillers, treatments, corrections. My immediate thought was: of course. The machine creates the wound and then sells the cure.

I also recently read discussions about renaming PCOS to “polycystic endocrine syndrome,” alongside conversations about GLP-1 medications. And while there are meaningful reasons those shifts matter medically, we are naïve if we think pharmaceutical companies are primarily motivated by the flourishing of women.

I want the freedom to age naturally. I want to value interior beauty more than outward perfection. More than that, I want this freedom for my children — especially for my daughters. I want them to inherit a world where womanhood is not treated as a problem to be minimized, corrected, or endlessly optimized, but as something inherently dignified, even in its softness, change, and age.

For we are not merely bodies. Indeed, we are body, mind, and soul, and that distinction carries significance and eternal consequences.

I have many more thoughts tumbling through my mind on this issue. This is only the beginning of articulating them, of putting words to the fire I feel in my stomach. It is a familiar fire, one I have felt whenever human dignity is reduced or exploited. A fire I believe is holy, and not one I am meant to extinguish for the sake of comfort or approval.

For the sake of the feminine genius — for the sake of our daughters, our humanity, and the world itself — Lord, deliver us from the lie that a woman’s highest calling is to perfect her reflection.

On Saturday night, after hearing a talk on becoming the Bride of Christ, I entered into a beautiful Holy Hour of Adoration. Powerfully, and unexpectedly, the Lord placed a Scripture passage on my heart, one I hadn’t prayed with in a long time, and suddenly it was illuminated. It was a breakthrough moment for me in prayer and things I’ve been wrestling with. The kind of moment you want to write down immediately, to share, to put into words before it fades.

The next day, I sat down to write about it. But something, or rather, Someone, gently tugged at my heart: not yet.

On the plane ride home, I kept returning to the passage, praying with it, and sitting with the hesitation I felt to share it.

And then it became clear: He wants me to be His bride.

If you want to be His Bride, there must be secrets and intimate conversations that are yours and His alone.

Admittedly, after discerning that I was not called to religious life, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about this spousal relationship with Christ. This dimension of the feminine genius felt distant, almost abstract. But through the words of Catholic speaker, author, and podcaster, Heather Khym, I found my way back to it.

On a talk on the feminine genius and being the Bride of Christ, she said the following:

When we are truly able to be the bride—open and receptive—then life flows from us. This is the place from which spiritual motherhood begins.

And I began to see what was being asked of me.

For those of us who feel called create for His glory, there is a tension: not everything is meant to be content; not every revelation is meant to be published; not every encounter is meant to be explained.

In marriage, the most sacred moments are often the ones that remain hidden: the quiet conversations, the shared glances, the things that would lose their meaning if they were constantly exposed.

Why would it be any different with Christ? If I am to be His bride, then some things must remain secret and hidden between us.

There is a kind of intimacy that cannot survive constant exposure. If every moment is turned into something to be consumed, I risk losing the very thing I’m trying to share.

Because the fruit does not come from what is posted. It comes from where and when we abide, in secret, with the Bridegroom.

On Saturday we attended the 4pm Mass, something we don’t usually do, and the parking lot was overflowing. With ten minutes to spare, my husband dropped us off and I went in with two toddlers holding my hands and the baby strapped to me. Usually, this works out fine enough.

Only on this particular day my 2.5-year-old sprinted away and ran down the side aisle. I followed behind her as best I could. When we got to the center aisle, in front of the altar, I almost grabbed her hand when she tore off again — straight down the middle of the church.

At this point I was fully aware of the spectacle we were causing.

Thankfully we attend a small, humble church. So I just looked up, smiled, and said, “Hello dear friends,” and everyone burst out laughing — joyfully, not in a mocking way. An elderly woman stood up and asked if I needed help, though by this time someone else had already grabbed hold of my spirited little one.

Afterwards, countless people made their way over to my husband and me to tell us they love our children and are so glad to see them each week.

The mother I was three years ago would have fainted at this story. But the mother I am today surrendered to it. Did some people think I was a bad parent with zero control? Perhaps. So be it. Worse has been said. But I think most just sympathized with me, were aware of how wild 2.5-year-olds can be, and were truly just grateful we were here.

I have friends who say, “We’ll start going when they can sit through church,” or who assume I’ve been blessed with tantrumless, fidgetless angels who miraculously sit through the entirety of Mass.

But the truth is, our children do not sit through Mass.

They squirm. They whisper. They cry. They attempt to get away. They drop missals and have even crawled under pews. And now I can also say that sometimes they even make a break for the aisle like they’re competing in the 100-meter dash.

And still . . . we come. Because Jesus is here. And He loves us. And He loves them.

We don’t come because it is easy or because it is quiet or because we have mastered the art of parenting in public.

We come because this is where we belong.

Our children are learning, slowly, imperfectly, week after week, that this is their home. That this is where we pray, where we kneel, where we receive the Lord. Long before they understand what is happening, they are learning that Sunday means Mass.

To parents of toddlers: bring them anyways. Bring them even when you have excuses not to. Bring them even when you spend half the Mass in the back or walking the aisles. Bring them even when you leave sweaty and humbled. Bring them because this is how they learn and because you are wanted here and because this is where you belong.

To the parishioners watching young families each week: thank you.

Thank you for the smiles. Thank you for the patience. Thank you for helping us catch the toddler sprinting down the aisle. Thank you for your edifying words, especially on days we are least deserving of them.

You may think you’re simply being kind in the moment. But what you’re really doing is helping raise the next generation of the Church.

My husband works from home; a luxury, I know, that not every family is afforded.

But like most good things, it isn’t without some sacrifices.

He misses the leaving and returning. The small ceremony of being sent off in the morning and welcomed back at night. The feeling of a household that has counted the hours until he walks through the door and the flurry of stories that accompany the greeting — both from his wife and children — filling him in on a day he didn’t fully see. He forgoes daily, in-person camaraderie with colleagues. Maybe even something older and instinctual: that sense of heading out into the world to hunt and gather, to venture out and come back home.

And yet, he (at least for now) is convinced the trade is worth it.

Since there is no commute, he helps make breakfast and wrestle little arms into shirts beside me. Between meetings, he can run upstairs to warm his coffee and steal a hug from each child. His “water cooler” breaks are sometimes spent reading a short story or building a tower out of blocks. Lunch breaks look like sitting around our own table. And when the workday ends, he is already home.

My husband, who loves to travel, who, if he didn’t have a wife and children, would still be traversing the world because there is a little bit of a lone wolf, a quiet vagabond, stitched into his soul, measures his days differently now. Not by miles driven, or cities visited, or meetings stacked, but by minutes gathered. Minutes that add up to hours and days and, eventually, a childhood.

He talks often about what this might mean when we homeschool someday, how these moments might be transformed into the building blocks of an education, of the forming of a mind and soul.

I find myself fascinated by it all. I ponder what this kind of presence might mean long term, anthropologically, sociologically, even spiritually. What happens to a family when a father is simply… there?

My own dad was deeply present. Still, he was a principal, often gone for twelve hours a day, Monday through Friday. That was normal. Good, even.

But already, I see something different unfolding in our home. Our children have an astonishing attachment to their father.

This weekend made it especially clear.

I was in the ER with my oldest while my husband was away at a wedding. As the nurse prepared her IV, she panicked and cried out for “Daddy.” The nurses laughed and teased that she’d given up on me.

In a sense, maybe she had.

But really, it wasn’t rejection; it was her instinct and her heart’s desire.

She is, through and through, a “daddy’s girl.” He is her safe place, her comfort, her steadying presence. They are kindred spirits with a fierce, tender bond.

I don’t know where all of this is going. Any of it could change tomorrow, for we know not what the future holds. But I find myself wondering, what might grow from all these gathered minutes, from a father simply being present in the in-between moments, the ordinary moments, the stolen, hidden moments of a day?

Thanks be to God, I no longer have it in me to do a litany of spiritual exercises for the sake of proving my worth to Him. Motherhood has purified what I do with my time, and the why behind the things I commit to. It is a longer story of how I arrived at that point, but much of it can be read about here.

Since 2024, I’ve entered Lent with a question: What is the idol in my life?

This year, after weeks of praying with this, and a challenging word from my husband, it became clear: self-suffiency.

Somewhere along the way, I began to believe lie that if I could manage things a little more efficiently, then things would feel more in control, and then I would be more calm, more patient, more prayerful, more at peace.

I simply needed the children’s perfect cooperation: if they could simply be quieter so I could read, sleep longer so that I could finish my prayer, and interrupt me less so that I could complete my workout, life would be perfect. I would be the mother they needed.

Slowly, I’d started to believe that these interruptions—precious little souls, mind you, souls I’ve been entrusted with — were, in some way, denying me fullness of autonomy.

The funny thing is that, in a sense, that is of course true. Motherhood does strip away autonomy. It costs you your time, your plans, your unrealistic expectations.

But what the enemy loves to do is take a small truth and twist it, distort it, until sacrifice feels like deprivation.

A lie began to take root: I’m missing out, being denied a better portion.

Rather than being at peace with unfinished to-do lists, interrupted plans, and dreams and goals deferred, rather than welcome the domain of my motherhood, the gift that I have been given by God to form the culture of my home and the hearts within it, I felt burdened by it.

And so this Lent, along with fasting from desserts (something I haven’t done in years, after being pregnant or nursing through the last four Lents and needing, in a very real way, to deny my flesh a bit), and committing to Friday Mass as a family, the hardest, though I suspect most fruitful, practice I’m taking on lives mostly in secret.

It is quiet, hidden, interior work in the castle of my heart: paying attention, surrendering, choosing love and joy and silliness and song and dance and presence and gratitude. I’m embracing the yoke the Lord has placed upon me and trusting that it is not heavy because it is mine, crafted for me by a Father who knows exactly what will make me, and my family holy.

Venerable Fulton Sheen once said, “To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”

For a long time, I resented this sentiment. The reality is we all have been given free will and women are not solely responsible for the world’s sin. But that is a post for another day. And I do not think Sheen meant to put undue burden upon women. Instead, I think (or hope) he meant to empower us, to remind us that our presence and influence truly matters, that what we cultivate in our homes has real weight.

Our feminine genius is a gift more powerful than we realize. May we learn to harness it and use it for good.

I’m praying this Lent is slowly but eternally transformative. A transformation that takes place in the castle of my heart, one that my Father sees in secret, one that occurs on the living room floor, and in re-reading books, and singing songs, and scooping up children, and getting on my knees to look in their eyes, and loving well.

Because if my heart changes, our home changes. Lord, let it be so.

At first glance, today’s Gospel is a bit jarring. Jesus, who so quickly ministers to the outsider, to women, who is moved by suffering, seems hesitant, resistant, coarse, and dismissive toward a woman begging for healing not for herself, but her daughter.

Jesus uses the analogy of dogs seeking their Master’s scraps (which may seem insulting, but we can trust that our Lord did not lack in virtue or compassion) to reveal a truth about God’s saving plan: the promise of salvation first came through Israel, God’s covenant people.

But the woman, unoffended, persists, insisting that anything the Lord could offer her — even the scraps — would be enough.

This delay of the Lord’s grace reveals to us the faith of the woman, and her willingness to persevere in prayer, to continue earnestly trusting that our Lord is a good Master.

Not only does this Gospel serve as a powerful reminder to pray without growing weary, but as someone who can be easily embarrassed, quick to retreat when I perceive an insult, it is a reminder to focus less on feelings and to be more confident in who Jesus is.

Because even the smallest crumb of His grace is enough.

Today we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, remembering when Our Lady first appeared to fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a humble peasant girl. Our Lady famously told Bernadette, “I do not promise to make you happy in this life but in the next.”

In today’s Gospel, we recall this truth: the good wine is coming. T

he best is being saved for last, for the Feast of Feasts.

How do we receive it?

By allowing our Holy Mother to lead us to her Son, and then, by doing whatever He tells us to do (John 2:5), by obeying Jesus. It’s that simple, and that hard.

Obedience has become a controversial world in our culture, certainly within the context of marriages, but even more recently, I’ve found resistance to it within the realm of parenting. There’s a belief that obedience can do more harm than good, that we shouldn’t raise people who follow blindly.

I’ve considered this a bit as I raise my own brood of children. The reality is, I need my children to obey me sometimes, not merely cooperate, or spend time questioning why. Sometimes, oftentimes, I need them to trust in my leadership, my authority, and my goodness, and surrender to it. We can discuss the “why” later. But some moments call for immediate acts of obedience. And as I teach them this, I hope I am also preparing their hearts to obey God.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, “to obey (from the Latin ob-audire, to “hear or listen to”) in faith is to submit freely to the word that has been heard, because its truth is guaranteed by God, who is Truth itself . . . the Virgin Mary is its most perfect embodiment (CCC, § 114).

May we do whatever He tells us.

If we have clean hands, but unclean hearts, then we worship our Lord in vain.

But oh, washing hands is so easy (and apparently very fun, according to my two-year-old). How much harder it is to have a pure heart.

Why? Because the work is hidden. Because it requires intentionality. Because it asks us to die to self and, well, that is always a little uncomfortable. Because it means we have to admit that we were wrong. Because it means examining and reexamining and paying attention one hundred times a day.

And yet, it is only with a pure heart that we will see the face of God (Matthew 5:8).

May we have the courage to regard God’s commandments more seriously than our own preferences, to choose obedience to Him over the ease of habit, and to care more about faithfulness than appearance.

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “In place of ritual purity, what we have now is not merely morality but the gift of encounter with God in Jesus Christ . . . It is the incarnate God who makes us truly pure and draws creation into unity with God.”

Reflect:

• Which commandment do I need to follow to better encounter Christ? Where am I lacking unity with God?