While eating an after-mass donut, I chatted with a friend who is vastly smarter than I am. He has a doctorate in genetics and does research at the local medical university on hemophilia. He told me about cancer.

He shocked me with the fact that everyone has cancer. Cancer, at its most basic, is just a cell in the body that has stopped doing what it’s supposed to do. Normally, this isn’t a problem because the body sends immune system cells to kill the malfunctioning cells and dispose of the remains.

Cancer cells only become a problem when the immune system fails to detect and destroy them. Unfortunately, that failure is all too common and leads to a cancer diagnosis. He told me that cancers have several characteristics that make them especially difficult to tackle.

Cancer cells experience uncontrolled division. Normal cells only divide and make new copies of themselves when new copies are needed. The cells responsible for bone growth, for instance, only continue their rapid division until a growth spurt has run its course. I don’t pretend to know or understand the mechanisms that control the rate of cell division. I think it’s a field called epigenetics, which describes how genes are turned on and off. But cancer cells ignore the rules and go into a mode of constant reproduction.

Along with limitless reproduction, cells also avoid “apoptosis,” or programmed cell death. Normal cells have a lifespan at the end of which they annihilate themselves or are destroyed by the cells tasked with cleaning up the body. Cancer cells don’t do this. What’s interesting is that they somehow become invisible to the T-cells, which normally destroy non-functional cells. The cancer cells, in a sense, begin to live forever, able to produce more and more copies of their disordered, non-functional selves.

Perhaps due to their constant reproduction and longevity, the DNA in cancer cells undergoes rapid changes, which makes it very difficult to target with specific medicines. A medicine might target a specific protein on the outside of a cancer cell, and kill 99.99% of the cells in a tumor. But if even one cell mutates to the point where that target protein is not present, then it will escape the medicine. That single cell can then grow into a whole new tumor that is immune to the treatment that nearly knocked out the previous tumor.

If all of the above was not bad enough, the cells have a way of feeding themselves by a process called “angiogenesis.” Cancers send out chemical signals that cause the body to build new blood vessels that then fuel the tumor’s expansion. The blood vessels bring the nutrients needed to sustain the cancer cells, support the rapid cell division, and even spread the cells to distant parts of the body.

Non Serviam!

As we discussed these cellular disorders, I heard an echo of Satan’s, “I will not serve,” in the cells’ refusal to perform their original functions. The more I pondered my friend’s description, the more parallels I saw in this biomedical parable.

Saint Paul tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). History only holds two exceptions, the Son of God and His mother. Like cancer cells, everyone has sin in their lives, whether it be doing things they shouldn’t or failing to do the things they should. This is the human condition. As a cell in the Body of Christ, I have access to resources like the sacrament of confession, which should hold those sins in check. But I don’t confess my sins as often as I should. Instead, I allow these unforgiven sins to fester and grow.

Sins, even little ones, tend to grow out of control. “It’s just a little gossip,” I might say when I pull out my phone and open up a social media app. “I’ll only look for a minute to check the headlines.” Then an hour, two hours, days vanish into the abyss of doom scrolling.

My favorite sins have a way of hiding themselves from my conscience through rationalizations. “I deserve this,” or, “No one has a right to tell me what to do with my …” In his conference on the Fear of the Lord, Saint Bonaventure explains that becoming blind to my sin is one way that God punishes me for my sin during this life. When I no longer see my sin, then I can no longer repent and seek God’s forgiveness.

It’s also amazing to see how sin can mutate and change. How many pornography addictions start with images of women wearing revealing clothing? “It’s not that bad” can swiftly mutate into “it’s not enough, I want to see more.” Every venial sin contains within it the potential of mutating into a mortal sin. Lust of the eye can bear fruit in a full-blown adulterous relationship, or worse. And even if I start to get a particular sin under control, there’s a danger that victory over one sin will lead to spiritual pride, like the disdainful Pharisee who despises the repentant tax collector.

I was particularly struck by the concept of angiogenesis, of blood vessel growth in response to the cancer’s call. Sin has a way of reordering my life to make room for more sin. Sin will change the kind of friends I cultivate, the activities I do in my spare time, the way I spend my money. I won’t even notice as the healthy relationships and activities atrophy and fall by the wayside.

Perhaps the saddest parallel I see between sin and cancer is that both grow in secret, hidden ways and are often far progressed before the warning signs are heeded. When sin has metastasized to the point that I must do something about it, I’m already surrounded by the wreckage that it has created in my life. The treatment for sin often involves a painful process of mortifying sinful desires, cutting off disordered relationships, and avoiding the near occasion of sin. Anyone who has faced recovery from addiction will affirm that, while good, this process is exceedingly difficult. Statistics and stories abound about how often sin recurs.

I’ve drawn this parable out for a very important reason. As an American, I live in a culture that denies the existence of sin and proclaims a freedom that will accept no moral limits. Sin is celebrated in its many forms and held up as virtue. It is madness.

I should instead look at the sin in my life with the sober gravity of a person who just heard the words, “I’m so sorry, it’s cancer.” More even. Jesus said, “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” (Matthew 10:28) Cancer might destroy the body, but it cannot destroy the soul. Sin, on the other hand, has the power to destroy our body and our communion with God with eternal consequences. is not overcrowded. There is room enough for me, should I choose to spend eternity there.

There’s a cure… for sin.

But we have reason for hope. On the cancer front, I recently heard an interview with a leading cancer researcher whose company focuses on training the body to identify and destroy the cancer cells without intense chemo or radiotherapy. While the jury is still out on the efficacy of those treatments, I know that Christ definitively won the battle against sin on the Cross. It’s why He came.

St. John Paul II wrote in Dominum et Vivificantum that one of the primary roles of the Holy Spirit is to convince us of sin. When I sin and cultivate habits of sin, I’m like the prodigal son who wallows with the pigs after squandering my inheritance. It was the Holy Spirit that came to the lost son and brought him back to his senses. The Holy Spirit will do the same for me.

One of my favorite ways to pray, especially as I prepare for the sacrament of confession, is to ask Jesus for Living Water. I pray for the Holy Spirit to open my eyes to my sin and reveal the sins that I cannot see. Quite regularly, I get an immediate sense of conviction about some sin that I had never really noticed before. The Holy Spirit brings to mind sins that He wants me to confess so that He can forgive me. God deeply desires my repentance. It is the reason for the Incarnation.

While mankind still searches for the cure for cancer, God has given us the definitive cure for sin and death. Repent. Believe the Gospel. Turn from my sin and follow HIm. It’s a cure that transforms my life today and leads me into eternal life.

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At the post office the other day, I recognized a young woman who graduated from the small Christian school my children attend. She seemed upset as she talked to the lady behind the counter, but it wasn’t my place to intervene. I didn’t mean to listen in, but she got pretty loud. She explained that she needed her mail held because she was living at a homeless shelter. She didn’t have a forwarding address, but she still needed her mail.

My heart broke. I know her parents well, and they are wonderful people. When the postal employee went in the back to check something, I approached her. “Excuse me, is your name Sara?” (Not her real name).

“Yes.” She looked at me with eyes I can only describe as haunted. Like a feral cat looking for the fastest possible escape route.

“I’m a member of the Alleluia Community.” I stumbled over my words because she looked so scared. “Are you ok? Do you need help?”

“No, I’m fine.” The fear turned into a blank mask as she turned back to the counter. Conversation over. I got called up to the counter, and when I looked back, she was gone.

I texted her dad later and told him about the encounter. He was grateful for the message and told me that he had been seeing her recently and things were going pretty well.

My Personal Experience of Being Homeless

Seeing her filled me with deep compassion. It’s been 20 years since I was homeless. I never lived on the streets, but only because of the kindness of friends and family. It’s called “couch surfing,” because you move from couch to couch when you wear out your welcome. You know you’re homeless when someone tells you it’s time to leave.

Since I was going through a serious mental health crisis, their charity wore thin pretty quickly. Fish and guests start to stink after three days. When the guest is half crazy, it’s more like two days. I was pretty hard to handle, but they endured me for months as I recovered. The length of time testifies to their generosity of heart.

My parents bore the brunt of it when I returned to Georgia with nothing to show for ten years of living in Los Angeles but a single suitcase of clothing. But over time, love did its work.

I gradually found more and more healing, in particular when I started renting a room in the home of my (now) long-term friend and spiritual director, Mike Firmin. He founded Golden Harvest Food Bank (where I’ve worked as a fundraiser for 15 years) and spent a lifetime serving the poor. During his seminary days, he got in trouble for letting the homeless into the dormitory so they could sleep in unoccupied rooms.

When I met him, I’d had enough time, counseling, and deliverance from evil spirits (a much longer story) to be able to hold a job and pay auto insurance. I wasn’t the first person he’d taken into his home. He’d done it several times with people he met at the Food Bank’s soup kitchen. Some stayed with him a night or two; others stayed longer. I lived with him and his wife for three years. To say that it changed my life is an understatement.

Looking Deeper at the Causes of Homelessness

Mike isn’t the only person I know who gets hands-on with homelessness. One of the most passionate advocates for the homeless that I know is a Presbyterian pastor named Luke Niday. His church is just a few blocks from the Master’s Table Soup Kitchen, so the homeless live right on his church’s doorstep. I asked him what he thought about the causes of homelessness in our community.

His first answer surprised me: Airbnb. He said that investors bought up most of the low-cost homes in the downtown region and turned them into B&Bs. They’re able to make enough money in a few weekends a month to pay the mortgage, so the houses sit empty most of the time. It significantly reduces the supply of low to moderate-priced housing available. The idea of people living on the streets surrounded by empty houses kind of makes my head explode.

His second answer surprised me even more. It’s not a lack of resources, it’s a lack of community. He asked one homeless guy how he was able to survive on the streets. The fellow told him that he slept in the shelter when it was cold or wet, and he was able to get breakfast, lunch, and dinner at different ministries every day. He got a new set of clothes from different ministries every couple of days and threw his dirty clothes in the trash. He had a felony, so he couldn’t find a job. Nobody will hire someone with a criminal record.

My friend described how the person he met didn’t have any relationships that he could count on. He had no access to employment. He didn’t want to be in that situation, but he didn’t see a way out.

Luke now has a vision for a community of tiny houses that are given to people who are experiencing homelessness. But he doesn’t want to just provide housing, which would just be another resource thrown at the problem. He wants to get his Church involved. He wants each person living in a tiny house to have a mentor from his Church, similar to the way Mike got involved in my life. Each mentor will build a relationship with that one resident, help them get to church on Sunday, and take them to lunch afterward. He wants to see the rich and the poor building the kingdom together.

He got really excited when he shared this vision with me. His hope is that making this happen would inspire other churches to get more hands-on with ministry to the poor. He told me, “If the ‘frozen chosen’ can do something like this, anyone can do it.” Now he just needs to find $1.5 million to make it happen (let me know if you happen to know “a guy”).

I’m sure my Presbyterian friend would be quite surprised to learn that his passion for serving the poor resonates strongly with Pope Leo XIV’s recent apostolic exhortation “Dilexi Te – On Love for the Poor.” This new encyclical points out that the response of the church to the poor has always been, and must always be, love, generosity of heart, and sacrificial giving.

Pope Leo, having spent decades as a missionary priest among the poor in Peru, recognizes that ministry to the poor transforms the minister as much as the recipient. “Each in their own way discovered that the poorest are not only objects of our compassion, but teachers of the Gospel. It is not a question of “bringing” God to them, but of encountering him among them. All of these examples teach us that serving the poor is not a gesture to be made “from above,” but an encounter between equals, where Christ is revealed and adored.” (Dilexi Te 79)

A Cathedral Made of Broken Stones

While pondering Luke’s vision, a flash of inspiration hit me. “I’ll see your tiny home community and raise you a monastery.” If a lack of community is the real poverty of the homeless, then maybe the only answer to homelessness is community. The Church has numerous examples of intentional community from millennia of monastic life. Imagine a religious order that founds monasteries where the homeless can find a home and a place within a community. Instead of the open floor plan and congregate sleeping so common at most homeless shelters, each person could have a cell to call their own as long as they wanted. They would be invited to pray, perhaps join daily Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, and given meaningful work to support the community.

Would all of the homeless become religious brothers and sisters? Certainly not. But it would mean each one would have a place to live for as long as they needed. They’d have a place they could call home and a community that could support them in their efforts to find sobriety, healing, employment, and stability. No one would tell them to leave.

No doubt some or even many who find sanctuary will dedicate their lives to serving others who are struggling with broken lives. Who better to serve the homeless people who know what it’s like to be homeless?

The idea of seeing the homeless as an opportunity rather than a problem is an old one. The Roman historian Livy writes how the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, opened their doors to landless men and runaway slaves who had no city to call their own. The homeless built the most powerful empire in the ancient world. They are the founders of the Eternal City.

All this monastic response to homelessness requires is two things: people who are radically committed to loving the poor, and space. The church has an opportunity here because empty monasteries dot the land. These could easily be turned into monastic communities for the homeless if only people were inspired by the Holy Spirit to take up their cross and serve.

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Why does evil exist?

This is a big question, especially if I believe God is all-good and all-powerful. If that’s true, then why does He allow evil to exist? If evil exists, isn’t God to blame? Didn’t He create it alongside good?

Quick left turn. Let’s talk about Willy Wonka of Chocolate Factory fame. Willy Wonka is a crazed candy maker who sits around dreaming up delicious things to delight children and adults around the world. He holds a big contest, and kids come to his factory. Some of the products he shows them are not quite done yet. Some of the rooms hold potential dangers. Willy explains the dangers to his guests and tells them they’ll be perfectly safe if they just obey the rules.

But they don’t. All of them, including Charlie Bucket, break the rules (at least in the movie version). Terrible things happen to the children one by one because they don’t resist temptation.

Whose fault is the evil that occurred? Is it Wonka’s fault for allowing children into his factory? Or for making candy in the first place? Did he consider the possibility of his creations being used poorly? How could he be good if his creations allow for the possibility of evil? Isn’t he responsible for the evil itself?

God is a Candy Maker.

Have you ever looked at a blackberry bush covered with ripe blackberries? It’s a thing of beauty. Blackberries are my favorite, but maybe you prefer strawberries or blueberries. It’s a bush that produces candy. Candy that, if you plant a piece in the ground and pour some water on it, will produce another bush that produces more candy. It’s amazing.

So let’s walk back in time to the Garden of Eden. God has filled the garden with good things and planted Adam and Eve in a perfect paradise. Everything He has made is good, and the creation of man and woman is, by God’s own testimony, “very good.”

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is not good for food, so God tells Adam not to eat from it. It will kill him. Eve gets deceived by the serpent, eats the fruit, shares it with Adam, and then our first parents get kicked out of the garden. Chaos ensues.

Why did God create a tree that would cause all of this trouble and put it in the middle of the garden? My personal pet theory is that God’s long-term plan was to allow them to eat the fruit at some point, but it wasn’t ripe yet. But that’s idle speculation. The fact is that God created something dangerous and put it within reach of the first man and woman. Doesn’t that make this whole thing God’s fault? Isn’t He responsible for creating evil?

Magnificent, Dangerous Freedom.

The mystery of human freedom lies at the heart of this primordial drama. God made man and woman free. It’s not a small thing. None of God’s other creations besides the angels were given freedom.

A bear, for instance, isn’t free. It’s a bear. It does what bears are made to do. It eats as much as it can during the summer so it can sleep all winter. It’s incapable of going against that fundamental pattern of behavior. Same with a shark. There’s no malice in a shark, just hunger. It was designed to eat pretty much everything that moves. When it does that, it is fulfilling its purpose. It will eat when hungry and not eat when satiated.

Humans are different. While I have a love for berries the same as the bear, I don’t have to act on it. I can freely choose to act or not act. If I walk past my neighbor’s loaded blueberry bushes, I can choose not to eat the berries because they don’t belong to me, even if I’m hungry. The bear will just see berries and go eat.

Why is this important? Because freedom is what makes love possible. Love is the best thing in the universe. God Himself IS love, so it’s the best thing outside of the Universe, too. But bears cannot love. Neither can sharks because they aren’t free. No mere animal can love in the way God or human beings can love. They don’t have the capacity.

And let me be specific here. When I talk about love, I’m not talking about the warm fuzzy feelings you get when you’re scratching your dog’s tummy. That’s a good thing, but it’s not love. It’s a form of taking pleasure in something pleasant that can be a very good thing. The dog can likewise take pleasure in something pleasant.

But love is something different. Love is to will the good of another. It’s an act that must be freely chosen. It requires the kind of freedom that God gave human beings, a freedom that includes the possibility of NOT choosing to love.

Choosing not to love is evil.

Love is Worth the Risk.

God’s creation is entirely good, but it isn’t entirely safe. This is hard for the modern American helicopter-parent generation to understand. There’s a current misconception that good parenting means removing anything even remotely dangerous from their child’s environment. High school boys get expelled from school for carrying pocket knives because they have sharp edges that might be dangerous.

Being dangerous doesn’t mean something is evil. A shark might be dangerous, but it’s not evil. A pocket knife might be dangerous, but it isn’t evil. The fruit in the middle of the garden was dangerous. Deadly dangerous. God told Adam as much. But it wasn’t evil.

The forbidden fruit at the center of the garden symbolizes freedom, or rather the misuse of freedom. God gave me freedom so that I would have the capacity to love. Then He gave me some simple guidelines of things that I shouldn’t do with my freedom because they are destructive. Don’t worship idols. Don’t kill anybody. Don’t commit adultery, or even look covetously at my neighbor’s wife. Etc. The list is actually pretty short.

Like in the garden, there is a nearly infinite variety of good, loving things I can do with my freedom. I can build a house, learn to play a musical instrument, bake cookies, serve the poor, play a board game with my kids, program a robot. Freedom is an incredible gift.

But freedom is not safe. God knew that when He gave me the gift. But the gift was so good that He didn’t want me to miss out. It was worth the risk. Learning to handle something as dangerous as freedom opens the door for me to do amazing things.

By giving me the gift of freedom, God gave me the capacity to become a co-creator of His creation. I can choose to make or do something that doesn’t already exist, that isn’t already written into my nature as an instinct. I am responsible for my actions and creations because God didn’t program them in my nature the way He did with a bear’s pattern of eating and hibernation.

I can also choose to make a mess and be destructive to myself and others. I can choose to do evil. Been there, done that. Lord, have mercy. This is not God’s plan. It’s contrary to His plan. But He allows it because He has given me freedom.

God’s Beautiful Mess

Keeping my house clean is a perpetual battle. I have six children who can undo hours of cleaning in mere minutes. I’m starting to teach the older ones to clean (which is part of God’s plan for parenting), but sometimes it feels like a tremendous uphill battle.

It’s worth it. I love my kids, and I’d rather have a house full of noise and life than a perfectly manicured mausoleum. If we didn’t have kids, designing and maintaining a Better Homes and Gardens lifestyle would be relatively easy. But it wouldn’t be as good as what I have now.

God chose the mess because He saw how good it was to have a world filled with people who can love and create. He knew that it was risky, that it would be messy. That evil would be a possibility. But that’s not His plan. He doesn’t want evil. He didn’t positively create evil, even though He did create dangerous things. The dangers are part of His plan to teach us prudence, responsibility, and obedience to His will.

Willy Wonka loves creating delicious treats. God loves creating human beings with the capacity to love and create. It’s not safe. It’s positively dangerous. But it’s worth the risk. And it is very good.

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During one of my community’s men’s retreats, our retreat master read us the parable of the sower and the seed.

For those who haven’t read it recently, it goes like this:

A sower went out to sow. As he scattered his seed, some of it fell on the path. The birds of the air came down and ate all the seed. Some seeds fell on rocky soil. It sprang up immediately, but then the sun came up and the shoots withered and died because they didn’t have depth of root. Some seeds fell among the weeds and grew up alongside them, but the weeds choked the good seeds out. Finally, some seeds fell on good soil, and they bore fruit, 100, 60, and 30 fold.

The retreat master told us to pray about this parable. Specifically, he told us to ask God to show us the state of our souls.

Examining the map

During quiet time, I asked Jesus, “Show me my soul.” Almost immediately, a mental image of my property in Dearing, GA came to mind. I live on about half an acre in the country.

The first thing that struck me about this image is that my property is not a homogenous piece of land.

I have a chicken coop and run which the chickens scratch into a desert wasteland. The driveway is a half-circle gravel path where some grass attempts to poke through. The edge of our property abuts a forest, so it’s basically a wilderness. Also, my wife loves to garden, so I have four big raised bed gardens in the back, a flower garden in the front, and another shade garden around the side.

What struck me about this image is that my soul has every single kind of terrain from the parable.

A Bird’s-Eye View

I’ve always thought of this parable as an all-or-nothing proposition. My soul is either stony ground, weedy ground, barren path, or fertile ground.

But the Lord wanted me to have a more nuanced view. Some areas of my life are more fruitful than others. Some things cause me anxiety. Sometimes, I just don’t understand what God is doing in my life, or how to live out the Gospel in a concrete way. Suffering tends to throw me off track.

I need to recognize these different parts of my life and see that not all areas need to be dealt with in the same way.

Chickens of DOOM!

The chicken coop seemed to represent the path where the seed fell and the birds came to eat all the seed. The parallel is pretty obvious. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a chicken coop full of chickens, but when food hits the hard-packed ground, the chickens come clucking. The chickens devour just about anything that I throw in there. They are particularly fond of watermelon. I was surprised, too.

In my prayer, it seemed that this area represented places in my heart where I’ve let sin build a nest. One particular sin I struggle with is envy. God keeps trying to sow seeds of contentment, but those envy chickens run out right away and snatch the seeds right up. Not a single one stands a chance. I find it hard to understand how God could expect me to be content when He gives others around me more than He gives me.

How do I deal with this type of ground? In real life, I won’t get rid of the chickens. Farm-fresh eggs are too delicious. But in my spiritual life, I need to actively look for areas of sin that prevent God’s word from bearing fruit in my life.

One of my favorite prayers in this regard is, “God, please reveal to me the beam in my eye. Please give me Your Living Water to cleanse me.” More than once, this prayer has revealed a previously hidden area of sin. This allows me to take advantage of the sacrament of Confession and take other steps to eliminate the sin.

Rock Collection

My driveway is rocky ground. When I drive over the gravel, I hear a satisfying crunchy sound. The weight of my vehicle grinds any grass desperately trying to grow there to pieces. I thought of the rocks as my woundedness. Each rock represents a hurt, some little wound that has caused a little nugget of hardness in my heart.

The seed takes root in this rocky soil quickly, because of the joy I feel in my wounded heart when I experience the love of God. But if some other suffering comes along, these hurts flair up and wither my joy and hope.

While I need my driveway, I don’t need to hang onto the stony hurts I’ve collected through the years. I can seek healing through counseling, forgiveness, and prayer. God can transform rocky soil, but that means digging up the rocks and putting them somewhere appropriate (like the heart of Jesus).

The Thorny Wilderness

Georgia has these crazy thorn vines that grow as thick as my thumb straight up until they hit a tree branch they can grab. The thorns are monsters and shred clothing or skin with equal ease.

I have this wilderness in my heart that shreds my peace. I have more than one, but the one that came to mind was my finances. (The wilderness is right next to the chicken coop. Coincidence? I think not.) I have six children, my wife stays home to care for them, and God has called me to serve the poor. Money gets tight.

In the midst of this, God has done marvels of provision. Everything from a house that we can afford to vehicles straight up given to us, God has been trying to plant seeds of trust in His provision. But I worry about providing for my family. I worry about retirement. I worry about affording college for my kids, or even what to do if one of my vehicles breaks down. This anxiety is living with the threat detector constantly going off in my mind, even if only at a very low level.

One practice that I’ve recently learned to help uproot these thorny vines is reframing. The idea behind reframing is that every challenge God gives me is an opportunity to grow in some virtue. I just need to try to see the opportunity that God is hiding in the challenge. Reframing allows me to rip those thorns of anxiety out by the roots and turn the wilderness into fertile ground.

Right after the retreat, my refrigerator stopped cooling. This could be a huge, unexpected expense, a major cause for stress and worry. But God has taken me through a number of these kinds of challenges and I’ve gotten pretty good at appliance repair. By the end of the day, I’d gone to the appliance parts store, purchased a replacement evaporator fan, and installed it in the fridge. I think I still have to replace the control board, but I’ve ordered the right piece and should be able to replace it over the weekend. Reframing has transformed my anxiety into an opportunity to exercise mastery and practice fixing things.

Gardens of Delight

My wife’s flower garden is a source of joy for everyone in our neighborhood. Our friends walk up and down our road and frequently comment on the beautiful flowers she grows there. I’ve also built her four raised-bed gardens where she grows whatever is in season: strawberries, kale, basil, beans, peas, tomatoes, and one time Carolina Reapers (the second hottest pepper in the world).

The gardens represent places in my life that are bearing good fruit. Things like spiritual direction, my daily prayer time, my work as a fundraiser at the food bank, and parenthood are places where God is bringing forth good fruit from the work of my hands.

But gardening takes work. When I built our house, not much vegetable gardening got done, and we didn’t get much produce. This points to a spiritual truth. I can’t sit back and enjoy the fruit of a spiritual garden without putting in the effort and attention that will ensure another harvest. I have to watch out for pests and weeds, plant new seeds, water, and fertilize.

The gardens point out that spiritual fruitfulness is the result of cultivating good spiritual habits. I need daily time in prayer. I need spiritual direction, the sacrament of confession, a men’s bible study. I need community. These things will only continue producing fruit in my life as long as I’m investing the time and attention my soul needs to flourish.

Encouragement and Warning

I hope you found this meditation very encouraging, the way I did. My soul is not a static thing, but constantly developing based on the way I think and act. By God’s grace, I can do something about the areas in my soul where the Word of God, the seed that Jesus plants, is not producing the fruit that it should. My current state is not my eternal destiny.

Yet, there’s also a word of caution. Any fruit in my life is a gift God gives me from the seed that He has planted in my heart. If I neglect my spiritual health and the good spiritual practices I’ve developed over the years, I will become a wilderness again.

One of my favorite scriptures is “Better the man who can conquer himself than the man who can conquer cities.” (Proverbs 25:28) God told Adam to cultivate the earth and subdue it. The earth that I’m called to cultivate and subdue is not just that piece of property in Dearing. It’s me. I’m the earth that I’m supposed to cultivate and subdue. Why? So I can bear fruit that will last.

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Last summer, I chopped wood with my son, David Jude, in the side yard. I swung the maul, and he took cartloads of wood and stacked it in the woodshed. Suddenly, I heard a scream. David ran past me shouting about a black widow. He isn’t fond of spiders, but black widows really scare him.

I stopped what I was doing and went inside to get some spider spray. I told David he needed to show me where the spider was hiding so I could kill it. He reluctantly agreed. We walked out back, and he pointed to one of the logs on the wagon.

I turned it over, and sure enough, there was a black widow spider. A big honking one with a shiny black abdomen like a licorice jelly bean. The thing looked like Shelob’s little sister. I sprayed it and smushed it with a stick, then brought it over to David to look at close up.

He looked at it before going inside, still too afraid to go back to stacking wood. After seeing that big thing, I found it a little hard to reach into the woodpile myself but managed to get over it.

The Brain’s Threat Detector

That night during dinner, I showed the family a couple of videos from a series that we’ve been watching by Dr. Kevin Majeres. Dr. Majeres is a cognitive behavioral therapist (CBT) who lectures at Harvard, a devout Catholic, and podcaster. He runs a website and podcast called Optimal Work, which teaches CBT principles to professionals. It’s interesting because he’s not focused on helping mental illness as much as he is teaching the way the brain functions to help his audience achieve high performance.

By kind of a divine coincidence, the videos discussed the amygdala, which functions as the brain’s threat detector. When the amygdala detects a threat, it floods the body with adrenaline, which primes the body for fight or flight. I witnessed David Jude’s amygdala in full activation when I saw him run past. 100% flight.

The interesting thing about the amygdala is that it pays attention to your behavior. If it sounds the alarm and you respond by running away from the cause of the alarm, then it will increase the threat level the next time you encounter a similar situation. So, if you run away from a big spider because your amygdala is activated, the next time around you will be even more frightened of the spider. Dr. Majeres calls this process “threat learning.”

What’s interesting is what happens if, instead of running away, you approach the source of the threat. If you can stay in the presence of the source of the threat without running away, you will slowly relax and your adrenaline will calm down. The next time you encounter the same type of threat, you won’t be as scared. Dr. Majeres called this process “Safety Learning.” By approaching the source of the threat, you are training your amygdala that it’s not a threat.

Strike While the Iron is Hot.

One point that Dr. Majeres makes is that threat learning and safety learning only happen when the amygdala is sounding the alarm. The moment when the feeling of the threat is most intense is the most potent opportunity for changing your response in the future.

He describes three core skills needed to master the amygdala threat response.

1. Reframing – the practice of reframing means looking at a situation and trying to find a new perspective on what is happening. In emotional situations, this practice allows you to bring your higher-order thinking abilities to bear on a problem. When you reframe your threat response, you are looking for a positive opportunity within the previously negative experience. For instance, simply recognizing that the feelings that accompany the adrenaline surge will help you perform at your best in any given situation can help your higher brain function to grab hold of the steering wheel.

2. Mindfulness – You don’t have to run from the uncomfortable feelings associated with your threat detector going off. Dr. Majeres recommends that you become fully aware of the sensations of your body when it is in threat mode. Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your attention on the sensations in your body as a way of anchoring yourself in the present moment. When adrenaline is flowing, some of these sensations include tightness in the front of your chest, rapid heartbeat and breathing, and sweaty hands. They might not be pleasant, but welcoming these sensations instead of running from them can rapidly turn a frightening experience into safety learning.

3. Challenge – If reframing helps you change the way you think about a threat, then challenge helps you approach the threat. Every difficult experience provides an opportunity for growth. Maybe it’s an opportunity to grow in courage, generosity, or patience. Embracing the challenge means seeing every threat through the lens of growth opportunities. When one fully embraces a challenge, they can say to any threat, “Bring it on, the more the better.”

I’ve been trying to integrate this mental framework into my way of thinking for a little over a year. It sounds really simple and easy, but it takes some doing. Repetition is important. My emotions act strongly on my thinking. It takes a deliberate effort to put the brakes on my emotional roller coaster and begin to engage my higher thinking powers. It takes repetition of this process to make it a habit.

Practical Example.

While we were watching the videos, I saw the gears turning in David’s head. When the first one finished, he asked to watch another one. He saw the connection between his experiences at the wood pile and the videos about safety learning.

I didn’t force him to kill the spider on his own, because I didn’t think that was prudent given how freaked out he was. I didn’t want to further traumatize him. One of the videos talked about an experience called “thwarted escape” which produces the most rapid and intense threat learning. It happens when you try to escape but can’t. I didn’t want to do that to him.

He also didn’t go through the whole process of reframing, mindfulness, and challenge. Before he watched the videos, he didn’t know what any of that meant. But when I asked for his help (firmly) so I could kill the spider, he came. He faced his fear as much as he could in the moment and experienced some real relief by seeing the threat smushed with a stick.

Be Careful with the Two-Edged Sword.

I talked with him about it afterward, and he could see how his experience mirrored the content of the video. He asked some good questions. We also talked about the fact that intentional safety learning is so effective that you can even do it to your own harm.

You can train your mind to view some things as safe that it really SHOULD view as threats, like sharks. We saw this video a few summers ago where a biologist was trying to demonstrate that sharks are safe by wading in waist-high water with a bunch of bull sharks. One of the bull sharks decided to take a nibble and bit the dude’s calf off. He almost died of blood loss. He should have known better, but he had trained his mind to ignore the threat.

The amygdala also doesn’t have a moral sense. It can’t tell what’s right and wrong. Practicing a vicious act like theft might produce safety learning to the amygdala so that it doesn’t sound the alarm. It probably SHOULD sound the alarm in that case, because theft is evil. Doing any evil thing is a threat to our spiritual well-being.

What About the “Fight”?

It’s also good to know that anger, the “fight” part of the “fight or flight equation”, is also strongly connected to amygdala function. But instead of needing to approach the threat for safety learning to occur, as is the case with fear mode, anger requires restraint for safety learning. If you go in all guns blazing, yelling at the top of your lungs, you’re reinforcing to the amygdala that the threat is best dealt with by using full-adrenaline aggression.

Safety learning for anger means practicing patience in the moment that the internal alarm sounds. Exercising patience and restraining the aggressive response provides the safety learning that the amygdala requires to recalibrate its threat response. This is important for me to know because I’m much more prone to anger than fear.

Growth Over Time

As I wrote this post and prepared the picture, I asked for David’s help. He looked at a bunch of AI-generated pictures of boys fighting off giant spiders. This is one way to approach the threat that provides safety learning. He came by one afternoon and told me, “You know, Dad, black widows aren’t actually aggressive. They won’t bite unless you’re messing with them.” He’d been doing some research, getting a new perspective on the source of the threat. He is taking this lesson to heart.

In a time and culture where fear and anxiety have such a hold on the public discourse, it’s important to understand how fear works. Our brain’s threat response was designed for a good reason, to keep us out of harm’s way. But it can become over-vigilant and produce anxiety that robs us of our peace of mind.

The triple practice of reframing, mindfulness, and challenge is not a way out of fear. It’s a way through. By intentionally approaching the source of the threat, or exercising patience in its presence, we master the threat. It no longer has power over us. There’s science that backs this up.

I find it very beautiful that St. Ignatius of Loyola anticipated these scientific discoveries and understanding of the process of threat and safety learning in his 13th rule for discernment:

“The enemy conducts himself as a woman. He is a weakling before a show of strength, and a tyrant if he has his will. It is characteristic of a woman in a quarrel with a man to lose courage and take to flight if the man shows that he is determined and fearless. However, if the man loses courage and begins to flee, the anger, vindictiveness, and rage of the woman surge up and know no bounds. In the same way, the enemy becomes weak, loses courage, and turns to flight with his seductions as soon as one leading a spiritual life faces his temptations boldly, and does exactly the opposite of what he suggests. However, if one begins to be afraid and to lose courage in temptations, no wild animal on earth can be more fierce than the enemy of our human nature. He will carry out his perverse intentions with consummate malice.”

There’s no inherent contradiction between sound spiritual practices and scientific mental disciplines. They examine the same thing from different perspectives and are mutually enriched. Whether the truth is discovered by the scientific method or revealed in scripture and the teachings of the Church, it is the truth that sets us free.

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The parable of the sower and the seed describes a farmer planting a seed in the field. Time passes, and without the farmer's further effort, the seed produces the blade, the ear, then the grain in the ear. Then the farmer swoops in and harvests the grain. He might receive 30, 60, or even a 100-fold yield from the seed in a single summer.

But sometimes, the farmer doesn't plant wheat. Sometimes, he plants a pecan orchard. The growth of a pecan tree in a single summer is hardly noticeable. It produces little more than a twig, and certainly no nuts. The farmer has to wait much longer until harvest time. A pecan won't get to full production for 15 years, but then it will continue producing for 100, 200, sometimes up to 300 years. In that time, it won't produce 30, 60, or 100-fold. It might produce 2,000 - 20,000 fold every year. For 100 years. One pecan might produce a 2,000,000-fold yield over the course of several human lifetimes.

This pecan tree represents the "Long Obedience". It means that the fruit of obedience doesn't always appear right away. It may not appear at all during the first few years. But the results are extraordinary. Supernatural. Generational.

One of the best examples of the "Long Obedience" is Abraham. God promised him a son and a land to call his own. He believed God and obeyed. Decades passed, and the promise seemed impossible, to the point that Abraham took matters into his own hands and fathered Ishmael with his wife's slave. But God's promise still awaited him. When Isaac was born, they named him "laughter" because Sara laughed at the possibility that she could still bear a child. Abraham's long obedience bore phenomenal fruit. The biological descendants of Abraham through Isaac, Ishmael, and Keturah likely number in the hundreds of millions, and there are billions more Christians who are spiritual descendants of Abraham by faith. God plays the long game.

In our life together, God calls us to do many things, and sometimes the fruit is not immediately evident. It's not wheat that springs up and ripens in a single summer. When we hear a word from the Lord, we prayerfully discern it (extremely important), and then we act on it. Two examples of the "Long Obedience" from my life are my marriage and my work at the Food Bank. God said that these were part of His plan for my life. He doesn't have to say anything in particular to keep me moving in this direction. He said it once and doesn't need to repeat Himself. My responsibility is to respond to His word with the obedience of faith.

God chose us to tend His pecan orchard. Sometimes it's a little nuts. Other times, big trees topple in a storm. We have to continue to plant new pecans, knowing that in good time, they will bear fruit. It takes just one nut to make millions more.

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If you’ve lived any time in the South, you’ve seen a bug zapper. Miraculous inventions. They emit a calm blue light that is irresistible to bugs. Mosquitos, flies, all kinds of creeping, biting things fly entranced towards its siren glare.

Then… ZZZZAP!! Dead bugs. In mosquito season, the sound fills the listener with an almost primal joy. I can’t imagine what good purpose God planned for mosquitos before the Fall, but at this point in the story of creation, the only good mosquito is a dead mosquito.

Bug zappers are different from normal lights. In the evening, a normal light fixture is no help at all. Normal lights call forth hundreds, thousands of bugs that send the humans running for cover. That’s why bug zappers are especially glorious.

Bugs in the spiritual life.

A while back, I noticed something that I’ve experienced ten thousand times but never given a name. The bug swarm.

I had added a new discipline of prayer into my daily routine because I felt that God wanted me to do so. Something simple, easy, but good.

And instead of feeling the spiritual consolation and peace that I expected, I had a really rough day. I got into an argument with a coworker, which I hardly ever do. I felt irritated by some of the work on my plate. Situations at home arose that made me downright grumpy by the time I loaded up to drive home.

What on earth? I prayed on the way home and reclaimed my peace, but I wanted a better understanding of what caused this terrible day. Or rather, what caused my terrible attitude on a really pretty normal day.

I prayed about it the next morning, and I had a vision of my soul as a lightbulb. Not as just a lightbulb, but a lightbulb in the South during the summer. At night. What does that look like? Lots of bugs. A cloud of insects divebombing the light.

What an appropriate analogy! Whenever I try to let my light shine a little bit, the demons start to swarm. They want to overwhelm the spiritual light in my soul.

Jesus talked about this reality in the parable of the sower and the seed. When the seed falls on the path, the birds of the air swoop down to eat it. The demons want to make sure that the Word of God is not fruitful in my life.

From light bulb to bug zapper.

My vision of the light changed as the brightness of my soul intensified. Instead of a cloud of bugs surrounding a light, I saw an unobscured light with piles of dead bugs on the ground beneath it. My soul burned so brightly with the light of God that demons shriveled and died when they approached.

St. John of the Cross wrote that the devil fears the soul united to God as he fears God Himself. This should make me really excited. Unfortunately, what St. John means by being united to God doesn’t happen immediately at baptism. He’s talking about the full unity of wills, as St. Paul describes when he says, “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.” Galatians 2:20

I received the light of Christ when I was born from above, but I still have a lot of the world in me, too. When I believe things that aren’t true, the darkness of ignorance obscures the light of truth. When I cling to desires that aren’t good, those darker impulses hide the light of heavenly hope. If I choose to do evil, the darkness of sin clouds the light of divine love.

St. John says that growing in union with God is like cleaning a glass window so that His light can shine through. The light doesn’t come from me. It comes through me. If only I can get rid of the muck and the mire that prevents that light from being visible and radiating outward.

A soul transfigured.

To become a spiritual bug zapper, to make the transition from a light bulb that just attracts demons to an inferno that destroys demons, I must allow God to purify me of every bit of darkness. It’s very simple, but it isn’t easy.

And it isn’t just an idle fantasy, either. The Book of Acts reports that sick people who were brought into St. Peter’s presence were healed (Acts 5:15-16). While this seems so extraordinary, it’s simply the result of the fact that St. Peter had attained such a high degree of union with God that demons and sickness just couldn’t stand to be in his presence.

This kind of holiness isn’t just for the saints. It’s for all Christians. The same Holy Spirit that caused those healings around St. Peter dwells in me.

Shocking, isn’t it?

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The story of Cain and Abel does not surprise me. I remember a time when I heard my second son screaming/crying in his bedroom. His big brother ran out into the living room with skip and a smile. Tearing around the corner behind him came his younger brother, face contorted in a grimace of sorrow and rage. I’ve nicknamed the younger, “The Vengeance.”

“What is going on!?!” I exclaimed in a voice loud enough to cut through the laughter and the screaming. “Both of you, get in the push-up position!” The two boys limply obeyed, and the younger brother sobbingly tried to explain that his brother had shoved him into a windowsill while they were wrestling. I told my oldest to apologize. “I did!” He shouted at me. “Do it again.” “I’M SORRY!” “Both of you, go to your beds!” They went to the room they share, one to the top bunk and the other to the lower. Ten minutes later, they asked for permission to come back out and returned to the living room as if nothing happened.

Wrestling with Anger.

Like most boys, my sons like to roughhouse. Wrestle. Chase each other around with sticks. The problem comes when one of them (usually the oldest) gets too rough, and the other (typically his little brother) gets hurt. Then the younger one gets mad, and when he gets mad, it’s like the world is ending. He gets a certain look in his eye that tells me that he’s not going to stop until he hears his older brother screaming in pain.

My goal is to teach them to exert more of their energy wrestling with their emotions than with each other. As Proverbs says, “Better the man who can conquer himself than the one who can conquer cities.” (Proverbs 16:32) They really have two different enemies they have to learn to fight.

The first is the flesh. Anger strongly affects us physically and mentally. Our heart rate speeds up and our breathing increases. Adrenaline jets into the bloodstream, adding a short burst of rocket fuel in case we need to fight a bear. Our ability to think rationally diminishes as our mental energies focus on identifying and eliminating threats. This physiological anger response is neither good nor bad. It was very useful when one was fighting bears. It can become a problem when it’s directed at a loved one and not properly restrained.

One of the strategies I use to deal with this physical excitement is the pushup position. A friend of mine who is in the military and has older sons suggested it. When the boys are fired up, the pushup position acts like a heat sink. The energy required to maintain a plank slowly drains them of their fury. I’ll leave them in the pushup position for as long as needed while they explain to me what is going on. By the end of two minutes planking, the anger is totally gone and replaced with sorrow. Not necessarily contrition. Their arms just hurt.

Mastering the demon.

The second foe is the demon of anger. In the story of Cain and Abel, God warns Cain that sin is sitting on his doorstep, but that he can be its master. From what I’ve read, the word used for sin in the original text refers to an evil spirit. The story tells us that Cain did NOT master the demon, and his anger bore fruit in murder.

One way to recognize that a demon is active is when the anger persists past a reasonable point. I can see being angry if your brother just broke your Lego castle. If an hour has passed and you have rebuilt your Lego castle, but you’re still angry? That might be a sign that an evil spirit is at work. That’s exactly what happened to Cain. His anger flared because Abel’s offering was received more favorably than his own. But it didn’t just go away. He nursed it… the demon kept that fire going until it became hatred and ultimately murder.

If I notice that my kids are particularly quarrelsome, I’ll stop them and pray. “Shoo devil, in the name of Jesus,” is a prayer that any child can learn and say with faith. I also love to use sacramentals. Holy water and holy salt do amazing things to clear the air when evil spirits are stirring up trouble between the children. I let the kids get in on the fun, and send them through the house with a bottle of holy water, praying, “I bless this room in the name of Jesus.” Demons can’t stand it.

Wounds that leave a mark.

When my children injure one another, whether physically when roughhousing or emotionally through teasing, I must deal with the fact that they are sinning against one another. It’s useful to think of the fact that an injury creates a debt to the other person that must be repaid. Sometimes that debt is repaid through punishment. That’s justice. Sometimes the debt is released through forgiveness. That’s mercy.

The best way to teach my children to forgive one another is to teach them to ask for forgiveness when they have hurt each other. Sometimes the sincerity of the apology is… borderline. But the fact that one brother has acknowledged his wrong in front of me and the other brother is really important. I might have to step in and return the stolen toy, but I think this is less important.

My kids are young. My hope and observation is that they have not experienced a lot of truly grievous hurts. But I have little doubt that they will one day experience hurts that are not easy to forgive. When (not if) that happens, I want them to understand that forgiveness is an act of the will, not an emotional state. When I choose to forgive, it might take months or even years for my emotions to catch up. That’s ok. The act of forgiving is like putting antibiotics in an infected wound. It goes to work immediately, but the inflammation takes some time to calm down.

Following in daddy’s footsteps.

If my children paid attention to me during the day, they might notice me muttering, “Jesus, have mercy on me a sinner.” They might see that I say that when I walk into a bedroom that looks like it has been hit by a Class 4 hurricane. Or when they are screaming at each other. Or when the tool that I know I put in its proper place is missing. The demon of anger comes after me relentlessly because it’s an area of personal weakness. In the days before Jesus, I punched holes in walls and doors. Prayer in general and that prayer in particular opens my heart to the grace that I need to exercise self-control.

When dealing with bigger hurts, I need bigger guns. A very wise priest once told me a powerful practice for dealing with my deep hurts. When the image of the person comes to mind, stirring up anger and hurt, I imagine the person standing next to Jesus. I make the sign of the cross over the mental image, praying, “I forgive them and give them to Jesus.” I might have to do this a hundred times. Or a thousand. But eventually, the sharpness of the pain in my soul dwindles away to nothing.

I want my children to follow the pattern of Jesus, not the pattern of Cain and Abel. The number one way I can do this is by modeling the right way to deal with anger. Anger happens. What do I do after the fact? I apologize to my children. It’s humbling to ask your children for forgiveness. Often this opens the floor for a deeper conversation with them about love, anger, and forgiveness. Sometimes there is a lot there to discuss. Or not. But it always ends with a hug and an “I love you.’

And love covers a multitude of sins.

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My uncle, Fr. Jim, is a born evangelist. His vocation story is pretty amazing. He studied at the Naval Academy as a young man, but fell away from the faith. His journey back to the Church started when some evangelical protestants at the Academy invited him to a Bible study. Their love for the Gospel and excitement about studying the scriptures reignited his interest in the history of the Christianity. A study of the early Church Fathers led to his return to the Catholic Church.

He graduated from the Academy and served as an officer on a nuclear submarine. When I was a boy, he married my Aunt, and they had two boys, my cousins. After returning to civilian life, he worked as an engineer and traveled all over the world doing projects with Rockwell Collins. He decided to practice evangelism with every person who sat next to him on the airplane. As the years went on, he honed his method.

Socratic Evangelism

His approach to evangelism focused on building a relationship and asking questions. He loves the Socratic method because of the disarming power of good questions. One of his favorite questions was, “Imagine if there is an all powerful God in the Universe and .. if that were the case, what would be the most effective way to communicate His very nature to human beings?” By asking the person to imagine the possibility of God existing, it sidestepped their skepticism and frequently lead to astonishing realization that the best, most effective way would be for God to become a man.

He often closed the conversations with one of two invitations. If they were a lapsed Catholic or Protestant, he would invite them to Mass. Even if he was landing far from home, he might suggest that they go check out a nearby parish.

His other closing came in the form of another question. “Do you think you might possibly be open in the future to inviting that God and that Jesus into your heart? Is there anything preventing you from doing this right now?” He once built a spreadsheet that calculated that out of about 2,000 airplane conversations, about 40 people said that prayer with him right then and there on the plane. Remember, he’s an engineer. Numbers matter.

When he was in his mid-50’s, my aunt tragically passed away. He worked hard for several years to process his grief and help his sons cope with their new reality. After several years, when my cousins were done with high school, he sat down with them to tell him about the call he felt to enter the priesthood. Knowing the depth of their dad’s faith, they encouraged him to do so. He applied, entered seminary, and was ordained to the priesthood in 2022. He now works directly for Archbishop Lori of the Diocese of Baltimore as his Priest secretary.

The Power of the Invitation

In an early pastoral assignment, he got a chance to exercise his love for evangelism in a larger context. He didn’t want to fly solo anymore. He wanted to send harvesters out into the harvest.

But the reality is that many Catholics struggle with evangelism. “What do I say? How do I say it? Isn’t it kind of awkward to talk about your faith?” He wanted to make it easy and concrete for his parishioners to say, “Yes, I can do that.” That’s where he came up with the idea for “Three in One Sunday.” He planned it to land, appropriately, on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, which is the Sunday after Pentecost.

He did some ground work beforehand. For three weekends before the big day, he had carefully vetted parishioners come up and tell a brief 90 second - 2 minute testimony. Each testimony had a common theme: who first invited them to church, and how it has changed their lives? He wanted his parishioners to have eyewitness testimony to the power of the invitation.

Then, on “Three in One Sunday,” he explained to his parishioners that none of this was accidental. He wanted to challenge them to make a commitment to invite three people to some Church function, be it Mass or something else, in one year. Three in one, in honor of the Most Holy Trinity. He had little forms in the pews that people could sign, but he told them that this wasn’t a homework assignment where someone was going to check their answers. It was a challenge and an opportunity to live the call to spread the Gospel.

That first year, about four hundred of his thousand parishioners took the pledge. He then worked to create a calendar of events to make it easy for them to extend an invitation. Initiatives like “Theology on Tap” and parish picnics drew strong crowds. His parish responded and started to build a culture of evangelism. He did this at four parishes, and always had a strong response. At one point, he even added a “Three in One Workshop,” where parishioners could come get a couple hours of training on how to invite people and evangelize.

We are Messengers

This approach to evangelism comes right out of the parables of Jesus. You might remember the one Jesus told about the king planning a wedding feast for his son who sends out his messengers to invite the guests. The first guests invited decline for all kinds of silly reasons, so the king sends out his messengers again to tell everyone about the feast. He wants His son’s wedding feast to be full.

The wedding feast of the King’s son is the Mass. As the Catechism states, the Mass is a foretaste of the Heavenly wedding feast. Before we receive the Eucharist, the priest intones, “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.” This p

The parable reveals several key points about evangelism. Evangelism is, first and foremost, an invitation. While it is true that we cannot save ourselves, God requires our free will response to the invitation in order to save us. He gives us the option of saying no. He won’t save us if we don’t want Him to.

This points out a second characteristic of evangelism found in the parable. As an evangelist, prepare yourself for rejection. People will say no for many different reasons, but in reality, they aren’t saying no to you. They are saying no to the great King who sent you as his messenger.

Which brings us to the third, and perhaps most important point of the parable. The people who will respond to the invitation will probably look different from what you expect. It might not be your stock broker or your pediatrician or the commercial real estate developer. It might be your hairdresser or the barista who is covered in tattoos or the garbage man. The parable tells us that all are welcome and that you will probably find people who will respond to the invitation in the most unlikely places.

The beautiful truth is that you’re not alone in this process. Since it is God’s desire for you to be “on mission,” prayers for assistance are what I like to call “irresistible prayers.” How could God fail to answer a prayer that is aligned with His will for you? So say a prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to point out the person that God wants you to invite to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. If you say that prayer three times, you will probably get three answers. Three in one, done.

But if you say that prayer every day, you’ll probably get 365 answers. Before you know it, that wedding feast will be full to overflowing.

This article first appeared on Catholic Stand.

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Hi, I’m Nathan. I’m a news junkie. Social media, too. A total addict. But I’m in recovery.

I started to notice something a while back. Most of the time I spent reading news sites and social media ended up with me being steaming mad at something or someone. It might be someone close to me sharing an article that I strongly disagree with on Facebook. Or it could be another news site that convinced me that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

The more time I spent reading, the longer it took to regain my peace. That’s when I had the big “Ahah” moment. Most of this so-called news is nothing but gossip, and I was swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. No wonder it got my stomach all twisted up.

But it’s just a little gossip!

Gossip is harmless, isn’t it? The word conjures images of little old ladies sitting around with their tea and knitting while sharing the juicy stories from the neighborhood. But the reality is not so Norman Rockwell.

St. Paul said, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8) Any “gossip” that falls into one of those categories is fair game.

But how much of what I read in the news or on social media meets St. Paul’s test? Pretty much all the stuff that I actually like. Pictures of friends with their kids. Encouraging notes and inspiring testimonies.

Unfortunately, these days it seems to be a relatively small percentage of the content on news and social media sites.

Follow the downward spiral.

I heard recently (yes, it might be gossip) that the Facebook algorithm loves content that makes people angry. The system looks at the words that people use in responding to content and can tell if the content makes them angry. Anger drives user engagement, engagement drives ad revenue, and so the algorithms drive provocative content. It’s a vicious circle.

It’s almost as if the algorithms have been trained in an anti-gospel. Whatever is evil, whatever is false, whatever is scandalous, whatever is unjust, whatever is hideous, whatever is worthy of condemnation, if there is anything wretched, or gross, or foul, or disgusting, or impure, these will show up at the top of the newsfeed. In the media business, this reality is found in the two very common phrases, “If it bleeds it leads,” and “sex sells.” (It’s the reason you find sexual innuendos in Disney cartoons.) No wonder that I usually end my time on social media or news sites feeling worse than before.

If a story fills me with fear and anxiety, it robs me of the peace of God. If it fills me with anger and hatred for someone who disagrees with me, it drives out the love of God and my fellow man. In other words, reading gossip leads me into sin. Listening to (or reading) gossip is itself a sin.

The antidote is simple… stop the gossip.

I brought this up with Mike Firmin, my spiritual director, and he affirmed that the gossip had to go. Since then, I’ve almost completely cut out all social media and all news sites except the Wall Street Journal (and Substack articles that build up my faith or teach me about computers). I don’t have an actual subscription to the Journal, so I can only read the headlines and track my investment performance.

It’s simple to cut out these sites, but it isn’t easy. The problem with sin is that it gets into the belly. It becomes a hunger for more of the same. If you feed on a steady diet of political news that fills you with rage, you’re going to want a steady diet of wrath. If you delight in the latest scandalous Hollywood relationship disaster, you’ll hunger for more tales out of Follywood.

Even as I write this, I have a niggling thought in the back of my mind about going to one of my old favorite watering holes for a tall glass of political scandal. The hunger is still there, even though I’ve been trying to starve it for several months.

Be like St. Paul.

The other thing that I try to do is to keep my use of social media within the bounds of what St. Paul says. A briefer way to say it is, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Man, does that saying keep me out of trouble. I don’t get into arguments on social media. I don’t even stew about the arguments I WANT to have on social media. I’m able to hang onto my peace.

On the plus side, I’ve been using the time I’ve freed up very productively. I have been reading about the programming language Python and teaching myself to program. It’s useful, fun, and good.

Getting rid of gossip, both intake and output, clears up more room in my life for what is good, true, and beautiful. St. Paul says what he does because thinking about good things leads to happiness, just as surely as thinking about evil things leads to misery.

And who doesn’t want a little more happiness?

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A friend of mine was stationed in Naples, Italy, for several years. When I asked him what he thought of it, he told me that it smells like burning garbage and prostitutes are everywhere. The funny thing is that these two facts are connected.

Naples is a mafia town. They control garbage collection. Sopranos fans are not surprised. Art imitates life. Everybody hires the mafia to collect their garbage because “or I’ll break your knees” is surprisingly effective marketing. Gangsters don’t pick up the garbage regularly. I guess they’re busy. Who does an irate customer complain to? Vinnie? Fugheddaboutit. Everyone gives the garbage service 5 stars even though they’re in their backyard burning trash.

Of course, prostitution is also run by the mafia. The ladies (and men) on the street do all the real work, but they’re violently controlled by their pimps, who control what they do, who they service, and how much they earn. The mafia profits handsomely by controlling access to their “company.”

I do want to say that I know that organized crime is not just an Italian thing. Crime syndicates exist all over the world. Wherever there’s money.

Just a little visit to the doctor

“Where is this little meditation about the mafia going,” you may ask. Stay with me.

Last summer, I ended up in the emergency room with a pinched nerve. I’ve never experienced pain like that in my life. I thought it was a blood clot and that I’d stroke out on the way to the beach. First, I went to an urgent care, but they didn’t have an ultrasound. After taking my copay, they forwarded me to the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that I wasn’t in immediate danger of death, so the doctor prescribed Lidocaine patches and muscle relaxers.

My visit to the ER also gave me a major headache... of the financial kind. For my five minute consult with the ER doc and the ultrasound of my left leg, I got a bill for $3,200. When I saw the bill, I just about had a heart attack.

I called people. I complained. I called more people. It turns out that my health insurance from the food bank has zero emergency room coverage. The full amount of the visit hits my deductible, which is also outrageously high. To add insult to injury, if I’d paid cash at the hospital, the bill would have been closer to $1,200. Since the visit had already billed it to insurance, they couldn’t change it. “I’m so sorry,” said the billing person who was paid to buffer the hospital from angry patients.

I’m still paying for that ER visit. Oh, and my back isn’t fixed. I still have partial numbness in my left foot due to an S1 radiculopathy on my left side (if you say that out loud it sounds like “ridiculous,” which is so fitting). My options are 1. Wait until it resolves (which it has been slowly doing), or 2. have back surgery. I’m working on option number one for the time being.

Lenny Two-Fingers will see you now

When I complained to our CEO about our health insurance, she replied, “Our coverage sucks, I’m so sorry.” She’s trying to balance the cost of providing insurance for her staff against premiums that have increased 20% over the past five years.

Complaining to insurance companies is like throwing darts at a sand dune. It doesn’t matter to them that my back issue hasn’t been resolved or that a 5 minute visit to the ER cost three weeks of my salary. They are not in the business of providing health care. They are in the business of collecting health insurance premiums and deductibles. Health care is just a cost that they try to minimize because it affects their bottom line. They have devised an endless loop of forms and someone else to call that slowly saps the will to resist. If I don’t pay up, they send the bill to collections and destroy my credit rating.

I do truly have compassion for the doctors and the medical professionals in this whole scenario. I have some wonderful friends in the medical community who really care about people and want to heal them. But they don’t work for their patients. They work for the insurance companies. Doctors hate it, but what can they do? Like the mafia managing call girls, health insurance companies dictate how much time doctors can spend with their patients, what procedures can be done, and what medicines can be provided. They measure success according to revenue, not health outcomes. Betta have my money.

Your death or chronic disease is a net positive for them as long as your premiums bring in more than your care costs. This brings us back to Naples. When you think about it, a dumpster fire in the red light district is a pretty good analogy for the state of our health care system.

Desperate for healing

The whole situation made my blood boil, which is not healthy. So I prayed about it. For a long time.

The first scripture that came to mind was the gospel story about the woman with the issue of blood. “And a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years, who had spent her whole livelihood on doctors and was unable to be cured by anyone...” Luke 8:43-48.

Two key items jumped to my attention: outrageous medical costs, and ineffective medicine. I found it strangely comforting that medical billing and powerless doctors is not a new issue. Two thousand years ago, the experience so frustrated St. Veronica (as tradition names the woman), that she braved the crowd to seek Jesus’ healing touch.

St. Veronica was desperate for help. She’d pursued every remedy that she could find, but nothing helped. When she was completely broke after twelve years of failed remedies, she heard about Jesus and His miracles. She found Him surrounded by others who had also heard about Him.

Then the mystery of God’s providence dawned on me. If she hadn’t been sick, if she hadn’t been poor, she wouldn’t have been there. She wouldn’t have had the opportunity to act in faith that Jesus could heal. She wouldn’t have experienced the healing that came from touching the hem of Jesus’ garment. And she wouldn’t have started following Jesus and been present at His crucifixion when she used her veil to wipe His face, giving us the Holy Face image.

Somehow, in the mystery of God’s love for her, her sickness and suffering became the catalyst for her conversion. There was a blessing hidden in the darkness.

The Good Doctor

My prayer then took me to St. Luke the Evangelist. At some point, St. Luke heard about Jesus, too. We don’t have a record of his conversion, but Jesus Christ transformed his life. St. Paul refers to St. Luke as the beloved physician (Colossians 4:14), so we know that he was a doctor. He accompanied St. Paul on many of his missionary journeys, riding out the shipwreck at Malta and staying with him while he was imprisoned in Rome. At some point during these journeys, he wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts.

I imagine that the stories of Jesus’ miracles played a role in his conversion, too. He also got to see and experience many of St. Paul’s miracles first hand. At some point in his life, he experienced the same need for Jesus that changed St. Veronica. Maybe, as a doctor, the stories of a healing power that was beyond the knowledge of men called to him, drew him in. Like Veronica and St. Paul, he left everything to follow Jesus’ call on his life.

I know so many medical professionals who have experienced something like this, who see their profession as a gospel ministry. Our family pediatrician is a great example. He loves the Lord and he really loves our children. He sees his work as a living out of the Gospel call to heal the sick. When you have six children, a good pediatrician is a gift from God.

Follow Zacchaeus

The last scripture God took me to was the story of Zacchaeus. A despised tax collector for the Roman occupation, Zacchaeus was still curious about this Jesus guy. When Jesus came through town, Zacchaeus climbed a tree so he could see over the heads of the crowd. Jesus called to him and invited himself over to dinner at his house. The Pharisees in the crowd were appalled that Jesus would eat with such a public sinner.

Jesus didn’t harass and chastise Zacchaeus. He ate dinner with him. At some point in that conversation, Zacchaeus was transformed, converted. “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.” (Luke 19:8) In the Gospel, this reads as a spontaneous outpouring of generosity and justice. Zacchaeus experienced the love of God, and it drove the love of money out of his heart. The love of God then made room in his heart for love of neighbor.

Contemplating this scripture made me realize something. My anger and unforgiveness toward the insurance companies lumped me in with the Pharisees, who hated the tax collectors like Zacchaeus. Like them, I wanted God to smite the bill collectors and rain fire on them from heaven.

But Jesus had other plans. He saw Zacchaeus in the tree, and being a Good Shepherd, knew him by name. He also knows the person who apologized on behalf of the hospital by name. He knows the actuaries calculating the new premiums by name. He knows the collections agents by name. He wants to save them and transform the way they do business. He wants to purge them of the love of money so He can fill them with love of God and neighbor.

Be a light in the darkness

Then God hit me with the final punch. Aetna needs Jesus. United Healthcare needs Jesus. Exactly the way that Zacchaeus the tax collector needed Jesus. Just like those Neapolitan mobsters need Jesus. Just like me. We’re all sick. We’re all in bondage to our sin. None of us can save ourselves. We need a Savior. We all need Jesus.

In each of those three Bible stories, an encounter with Jesus transformed someone’s life. I shouldn’t be surprised. It happened to me. When the Light of Jesus pierces the darkness of our sin and suffering, it changes everything. But there are a lot of people out there that haven’t had that kind of life-changing encounter.

This is the part you and I can play. We can shine the light of Jesus into the darkness. My friend’s mom was on death’s door in the ICU with acute liver failure, and she started singing with the nurses and techs, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he!” The techs marveled at her faith and good humor. Thanks be to God, she’s recovering, but in the midst of that darkness, she brought the light of Jesus and shared it with others.

When something happens that spikes my blood pressure, I have to keep one fact firmly in mind. Jesus came to save the world, not condemn it. The way I respond to what’s happening can shine His light in the darkness. There’s always an opportunity.

It makes you wonder. How would Jesus like Naples? He’d probably end up at a barbecue with the mafiosos and prostitutes, and maybe even a few insurance executives. I just hope I’m invited.

This post originally appeared in Catholic Stand.

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“The Chinese Restaurant is on fire!” My conversation on the spiritual life stopped mid-sentence. My friend and I looked over at the speaker, and sure enough, a pillar of black smoke rose over the trees about half a mile up the road behind him. During the next hour, every new customer who entered Huddle House loudly announced the news. When I finished my breakfast and drove in that direction on my way to work, the fire was gone. So was the restaurant. Only a smoking pile of ash remained.

A couple years have flown by since the fire. A Dollar General sprang up from the ashes of the Chinese Restaurant like a phoenix peddling low-cost consumer goods. I searched news sites to find the exact date that the restaurant burned down, but couldn’t find a trace. The building was erased from human memory.

The fact that the fire interrupted spiritual direction stuck with me over the years. My friend and I were discussing the knowledge of God, the very substance of eternal life, but the big news of the day tried to capture our attention. We were tempted to turn our attention away from a conversation on how to know and serve God.

The Present and the End

When I pray the rosary, every decade repeatedly reminds me where I need to put my attention: this present moment, which is my only opportunity to know and act, and the moment of my particular judgement, when my accumulated thoughts, words, and actions will bear their final fruits. That final moment gives me a context that I should use in the present to weigh my actions. What will Jesus say to me as He reviews the chapter of my life that I am writing right now? If I weigh every action in light of eternity, will I do the same things?

The devil likes to steal my attention. He wants me to wallow in remembrance of times past or obsess over things that may or may not happen in the future. The past can hold me in bondage of guilt, bitterness, or regret. Things I should have done, or shouldn’t, broken relationships, and various wounds can be like links in a chain that shackles my attention in the past, even though I can’t do anything to change what happened.

Or he might try to lure me into darkness with thoughts of the future. False hopes and fears about what might come to pass can bind my attention to a future that may never happen. I can sacrifice things of inestimable value that I have right now - like my relationships with my children - chasing the vapors that arise from my fertile imagination.

Even in the present moment, the devil works to draw my attention to things beyond my control. Political news, social media, entertainment, even real suffering, or overwhelming responsibilities can all rob me of the eternal perspective.

If I allow the world, the flesh, and the devil to rob me of my focus on the hour of my death, I will miss the opportunities that God is providing me right now; opportunities to love, to witness to the truth, to grow in faith.

I have to remember something important. The Chinese Restaurant is always on fire. Jesus came to cast fire on the Earth. He succeeded, but the fire isn’t done burning yet. This world is passing away. There’s nothing that I can do about it. It’s the nature of things. This world is not my home. As a Catholic, I’m a pilgrim who awaits the fulfillment that will only come when Christ returns in glory.

So what’s a man to do when the noise and the press of the events of this world begin to rob me of the peace in which I should abide?

Step into Eternity

For God, all time is now. A few years ago, I asked my son if he thought God answers prayers. His answer astounded me. “Yeah, but sometimes you have to wait for the answer. Since God’s eternal, He could put the answer two years from now. For Him, it’s already done, but for you, it will take two years.” It was the best explanation I’ve ever heard for Jesus’ exhortation, “Therefore I tell you, all that you ask for in prayer, believe that you will receive it and it shall be yours.” (Mark 11:24)

God invites me to step into eternity right now. St. Athanasius wrote, “God became man so that man might become God.” As a member of Christ’s Mystical Body through Baptism and Sanctifying Grace, I now have one foot in eternity.

I don’t have to worry about the Chinese Restaurant. The fire was not a crisis. That restaurant was closed and broken down ten years ago. The fire was probably the best thing that ever happened to that building. It was worth more burnt down than standing.

I need to focus my attention on following the Way, which is not some road map or list of rules for becoming a nicer guy, but a Person. Jesus is the Way. I’ve been invited into a relationship that is a participation in God’s own life. On this journey that will carry me the distance between now and the hour of my death, Christ Himself will teach me where to place my feet.

St. Teresa of Avila describes the road to heaven as a holy highway in The Book of Her Life. Rather than seeing it as a narrow way, she sees it as a path of ease and comfort, because it is a road that I do not walk alone. The moment I stumble or fall, our Lord extends His hand to lift me up again. If any enemy or roaring lion attacks, He will defend with His mighty right arm. If I encounter obstacles, He is there to encourage me or carry me over. The only price I pay to stay on this road is the love of God. I have to keep my eyes fixed on Jesus, who is right here, right now. I can’t be distracted by the fires raging all around me.

If I travel this way through life, the hour of my death doesn’t loom over me as this big scary thing. The final meeting with the just judge is nothing to fear. I already know Him.

The distance in time between now and the hour of my death will gradually collapse to nothing. I will reach the end of my life. When that happens, I will look over at Jesus, my life’s companion, and with a shout of triumph cry, “We made it!”

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Something got into my trash. Raccoon, possum. Some kind of critter decided to toss a bunch of my trash out on the ground. It immediately struck me… This is exactly what the devil does when I try to repent and turn from my sin.

The devil doesn’t like repentance because it breaks the chains he uses to keep us captive. He wants us to wallow in filth the way he does. He can’t stand to see someone turn back to God, something he cannot do.

So he stirs up the trash. Digs around in it. Tries to remind me that I’m really just a sinner and will never be able to change.

Is the devil digging in your trash?

How do you know when the devil is rooting around in your garbage? The first sign is the renewed temptation to sin. You know the feeling… you’ve just decided that you’re going to get rid of some garbage in your life. You threw out the magazines. Maybe emptied the bottles. You deleted her number. You feel like you’re ready to start a new chapter in your life.

But then that craving hits you. It wasn’t THAT bad, was it? It didn’t cause THAT much damage, did it? One more time won’t make that big of a difference.

If this sounds like the voice of addiction to you, you’re exactly right. The devil wants us to be addicted to sin because that means that we belong to him. His main goal is to take my good intentions, my desire to repent, even my actual repentance, and turn them back into garbage.

The Voice of the Accuser.

Another way that the devil stirs up the trash is through guilt, condemnation, and accusation. “I’m never really going to quit sinning. Look at my life, I’m going to be stuck in this forever. I’m powerless to quit. I just need it too much. I’m too weak. EVEN GOD CANNOT SAVE ME!” These thoughts are just the devil’s attempt to break my resolve and keep me focused on what I’ve done wrong instead of trying to clean up my act.

The terrible thing is that a lot of what the evil one is saying is true. Well, half-true. I am powerless to conquer sin… WITHOUT GRACE. I am a slave to sin… EXCEPT I HAVE BEEN SET FREE. I am too weak… BUT HAVE BEEN EMPOWERED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT. The devil specializes in half-truths. When he tells me the first half of a true statement, he can trap me in that feeling of powerlessness and sin if I choose to listen to him.

Cleaning up the mess.

Of course, I didn’t leave the mess all over the ground. I took a few minutes, tossed all the junk back in the trash, and washed my hands. Victory over the devil comes when I humbly shake my head at the mess that my sins have made again and start cleaning up once more.

Jesus told Peter that he should forgive his brother 70 times 7 times. He wanted to show me the magnitude of God’s mercy. If I keep trying to repent, He will continue to forgive. He knows my weakness. He also knows my enemy. He’s been trapping raccoons a long time. Jesus will help me, but I have to listen to Him instead of my enemy.

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A while back, the garbage collectors forgot to pick up our trash. For three weeks. Waste Management bought out Advanced Disposal, and apparently, they had some COVID “issues.” I get it.

But three weeks’ worth of garbage is a lot of trash. I have one of those big rolling garbage cans that the truck’s robotic arm can pick up. I had to keep on piling it higher. And higher. AND HIGHER! Do you understand how much trash 6 kids under 13 can produce in three weeks? Just the number of poopy diapers might get into the thousands.

So it began to stink. I live in Georgia, remember. It was August. The cloud of flies that delighted in that trash made me worry that America was going through the ten plagues of Egypt.

But then, one Monday morning, it was GONE. The good garbage men had recovered from their sickness and removed the plague of trash bags from my land. God bless them.

Take out the trash, oh my soul.

I had a lot of time to contemplate garbage during those three weeks. As I precariously stacked yet one more bulging trash bag in the can, it occurred to me how much this trash was like my sin.

Sin is the trash in my soul. Foul and festering, it piles up in dark corners, stinking up my interior life.

Now getting rid of the trash is a multi-part process. First, I have to pay attention to the trash next to my sock drawer or under the kitchen table. I have to pick it up, put it in the wastebasket in the kitchen, take the trash bag out to the big rolling can, and then roll it to the side of the road on Monday morning.

This seems like a lot of work. Or maybe it’s really just a little bit of work done regularly. But it’s important. Yet, it isn’t the full story, because if the garbage man doesn’t come, the trash just sits there. Waiting.

Sent to take out the garbage.

So this process of taking our soul trash to the curb is repentance. That’s our part of the bargain. But who drives the garbage truck and takes our trash to the dump?

After the resurrection, Jesus says something pretty mysterious. He breathed on 10 of the Apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” This was the moment that Jesus told His Apostles that it would be their job to take out the trash. He passed on His authority to forgive sins through the power of the Holy Spirit.

He knew that human beings needed garbage collectors. It’s a big job. A dirty job. I’ve heard from many priest friends that taking out the trash is dirty work. Sins get really nasty, especially if they’ve been sitting by the curb for a long time. When I did my first general confession after 10 years away from the Church, I towed a New York City garbage scow.

But the ministry of collecting soul trash can be tremendously fruitful. The stories of the Saints are full of examples of how the sacrament of confession changed lives. Two come to mind immediately: St. John Vianney and St. Padre Pio. Both of them had a tremendous love for this dirtiest of ministries. Each would roll up their sleeves and hear confessions for hours on end as people came from all over the world, bringing with them mountains of refuse. The stories say that these two saintly priests had a gift for noticing piles of garbage hidden in dark corners and pointing them out with a flashlight.

Seek ye first the garbage collector.

So if you’re feeling like your soul is a little bit stinky, like there might be a few more flies circling you than normal, head to the sacrament of confession. It might be that you have some trash that needs to go to the dump. It takes humility and courage to confess your sins to a priest, but God has empowered them to do something that He wanted to do in person. He has appointed them as His representatives to take out the trash.

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The video above shows my son’s middle school robotics team winning second place in the annual GAPPS Robotics Competition. I’m so proud of him!

At Alleluia Community School, we believe in giving our students every opportunity to discover their strengths and build real-world skills. Our robotics program is a hands-on, team-based experience where students from middle and high school learn engineering, programming, and problem-solving by building and competing with VEX robots.

I’m helping raise funds for new robotics kits, competition boards, and laptops—tools that will let more students join the team, work together, and take on new challenges. These aren’t just classroom projects; they’re stepping stones to real careers. One of our graduates, Philip Hatfield, went through the program and is now an electrician. Another, James Dooley, says, “Robots prepared me for my major in cybersecurity by providing me with extensive knowledge in computer programs and hardware.”

Our robotics club is a place where kids can build, compete, and discover talents they never knew they had. Many of our students wouldn’t get this kind of hands-on STEM experience anywhere else. We’ve seen firsthand how these opportunities open doors and inspire confidence.

Thanks to a $10,000 gift from a generous supporter, we’re almost at our goal of $12,000 for the new equipment. If you’re able to, please help us get it over the top. Any donations above our $12,000 will be invested in more robotics kits so more kids can participate.

Donate Today!

The Alleluia Robotics Club helps students learn programming and technology in a fun, energetic, and competitive environment. Please help us get the equipment and tools we need to keep it going today!

P. S. I know this Substack is not a fundraising channel, but I’m willing to ask on my son’s behalf to support his robotics team. What good is being a professional beggar if I won’t do it for my children?

I had an epiphany the other day about the devil. Seriously… why is he such a jerk?

First, keep in mind one extremely important fact. Love is the best thing in the universe. It is the stuff of God Himself. It holds all things in being and is the source of all joy, beauty, truth, peace, and goodness.

The devil rejected love. He cut himself off from love completely, and can’t have this ultimate good for himself anymore. He hates it. It fills him with unquenchable envy. When he encounters it, he tries everything in his power to destroy it.

The Green-Eyed Monster.

When I normally think of envy, I think about the feeling I get when I’m idling at a stoplight next to a big, brand-new Ford F-150. “Gosh, I’d really like to have that.”

The devil’s envy goes way beyond this kind of mild coveting (which I really do have to work on). His envy fills him with despair because he has been cast out of the heart of love. He can never enjoy or participate in love again.

“Through the envy of the devil, death entered into the world.” (Wisdom 2:24) Despair transforms envy into a destructive whirlwind. “If I can’t have it, then I don’t want anybody to have it!” The devil works furiously to destroy whatever love he can find. The fruit of this kind of envy is pure malice.

Malice – the antithesis of love.

Even as love seeks the good of the other, malice seeks to harm the other. This stark difference can be seen at the very beginning. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam everything. A sweet place to live, a fun job, and a beautiful lady. Even more than that, God planned to give Adam and his bride the ultimate prize: eternal life. The tree of life grew in the middle of the garden, and God ordained that Adam could eat its fruit.

The devil saw all this good stuff happening in the garden, and he hated it. He wanted to destroy the peace between God and mankind, the love between man and woman.

Envy blossomed and hardened into malice. He saw his opportunity in the (healthy) boundary that God had put around that other tree at the center of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surely, God had some good plan for this tree and its fruit, but God had not yet revealed it. He told Adam and Eve not to eat or even touch it.

The serpent lied to Eve, she believed him, ate the forbidden fruit, and BOOM! Sin and death enter the world.

Fun but not good – the hallmark of the devil.

The only shadow of love that the devil still possesses is desire. Desire is not evil in itself. I can desire something good. I can desire something good for someone else, which is the seed of love. The danger comes from disordered desires, when I desire something that is not good for myself or for someone else.

The devil lit the match of Eve’s disordered desire with his lies and led her to do the one act that would destroy her life. He still uses the same trick. I call it “fun but not good.”

Certain activities are fun but not good. Getting hammered. Getting naked (with the wrong person). Taking revenge. The list goes on and on. The devil knows that these things satisfy a disordered desire of our flesh but aren’t good for our souls. So, he works to enkindle these kinds of desires as much as possible.

His marketing team appears to have taken up residence in Hollywood, because it seems that they have completely replaced the idea of love as a self-sacrifice for the benefit of the other with a desire to do something fun but not good with another person.

Just like in the beginning, the fruit of these disordered desires is death. The desire for drugs and alcohol becomes a life-destroying addiction. The desire for commitment-free sex begets divorce, adultery, and abortion. A desire for vengeance becomes a cycle of mutual destruction.

In all of these deaths, love has no place.

Amor Vincit Omnia. (Love Conquers All)

The fruit of sin is a bit of a downer, but there’s good news. Love wins. It conquers sin and death. We just have the challenge of living through the battle to the foregone conclusion. We have to pick a side.

The book of Revelation tells us that the devil rages because he knows that he has but a little time. (Rev. 12:12) Malice is weaker than love. The devil breaks all of his pawns as he uses them. God, on the other hand, takes the lowly and makes them His children. The devil just can’t compete with that kind of generosity.

One goal drives all of the devil’s actions. He wants as many people as possible to share in his misery. He knows that the stakes are eternal, even if we don’t. At some point, God is going to take him and toss him in the lake of fire for eternity in punishment for his refusal to love. Everyone who followed his lead will join him.

Our job in all of this is to share the love. We win, and the devil loses, when love abounds. Our greatest victory over the evil one is to love God above all things, love one another as He loves us, love our neighbors as ourselves, and even love our enemies. In doing so, we become more than conquerors… we become like God Himself.

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If you want to hear more about my conversion story, check out my book Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

There’s nothing quite like trying to escape a murderer with a bunch of your coworkers. So fun. During a team-building day a couple of years ago, a group of us got to try it in an “escape room.”

I’d never done one before. Ten of us chose to do the room called “Cabin in the Woods.” The room itself told the story of a serial killer who had locked us in the cabin where he had killed numerous other victims. We had one hour to figure out the clues and escape before he came back to finish us off. The decorations were pretty gruesome.

Periodically, someone banged on the walls trying to scare us. It worked. We remembered about 30 minutes in that we could ask for up to three clues from the staff member observing our progress. We had to look up at the camera in the corner of the room and shout, “Help us Valerie, help us, we’re scared!” All of us had to do it together, or she wouldn’t give us a clue.

A majority of the puzzles involved figuring out the combinations of various locks that hid the next set of clues. I was pretty useless at first, but I figured out a couple of the puzzles near the end of the game. I found the key that let me unlock the final “escape” button.

We were the first of the three teams of coworkers to escape. Our team was also the only team that managed to escape in time. The other two teams got close but ran out of time, and the cops/killer got them (one team was trying to pull off a bank heist).

A metaphor for Christian Life.

Afterward, I thought to myself, “What an amazing metaphor for Christian life!” Instead of just being a set of rules that (hopefully) make me a nicer person, the Gospel is the roadmap to escape the kingdom of death.

The stakes are as urgent as a serial killer coming to put me on the barbecue. The devil was a murderer from the beginning. And he’s coming for me. He’s coming for all of us. The timeline is longer, potentially. I have my whole life to escape, but I don’t know if I will live a single hour longer. It’s just not a given.

Temptations are the locks and puzzles that prevent me from moving one step closer to freedom. The clues to my escape are found in Scripture, the teachings of the Church, and the natural law. To escape, I have to learn to be truly human according to God’s plan for me, and even more. I have to follow the path that leads to my escape. And I must act with as much speed as possible.

The devil does try to scare me and throw up roadblocks to keep me from focusing on my goal of escape. He knows that fear and suffering tend to make me stupid and overreactive. I can even forget that I have a direct line to the Man upstairs, who will help me if I only turn my eyes to Him and ask for help. Jesus wants me to escape, and His incarnation is what created the path I can follow to freedom.

Sadly, as Jesus said, “Narrow is the way that leads to life, and few are the ones that follow it.” Even as 2/3 of the staff didn’t make it out “alive,” this world ensnares more people than I can possibly imagine.

A Call to Urgency

One of the chief dangers of being a Christian in the modern world is a kind of ho-hum laziness that assumes that pretty much everybody goes to heaven except cannibals. “As long as they don’t eat people, they should probably be fine,” the thinking goes.

But it’s not true. No one enters the kingdom of heaven unless they are baptized in water and the Spirit. This “no one” includes a solid majority of the world population at this time. This is not something that should make any Christian happy. God desires that all should come to know His saving power. But they won’t make it if we Christians don’t take this seriously.

Seen rightly, our mission as Christians is to escape the “cabin in the woods,” and then set up a kind of underground railroad. It’s not enough that I make it out alive. I have to try to make sure that I help rescue as many people as possible.

This is our mission. “Making disciples” could be seen as helping others to get out of the trap that the devil has planned for us. But before we can do that, we must follow the path to freedom ourselves.

If this is your first note from the Country Disciple, subscribe today. You’ll get a fresh post from the intersection of faith and life every week. If you’re already a free subscriber, click “Upgrade” to make a financial contribution that will make it possible for me to keep creating new content!

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If you want to hear more about my conversion story, check out my book Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Middle schoolers love dirty words. A few weeks ago, I chaperoned a bunch of them on a trip to Tybee Island. Riding home with my best friend Andy (the middle school principal), the eighth-grade boys in the van started talking s***. Not in a disrespectful way. One of the boys just asked Andy if there’s ever a time when it’s appropriate to say that word. He used the word itself. Laughter exploded from the back of the van.

They were astonished when Andy and I both used the word ourselves to launch into a conversation about why we choose not to say “s***,” along with the other dirty words. This was not a trivial conversation. They were genuinely curious. They listened and asked questions. They wanted to know what kind of speech is appropriate for young men.

Andy has been a teacher for a long time and was also a Scoutmaster for many years. It was not his first rodeo. He launched into a story.

A Bold Recipe

At some point in the 80s or 90s, Steve Swenson, one of the teachers at Alleluia Community School, got fed up with the movies that were coming out because they made foul language and immorality look cool. I don’t know if you remember 80s and 90s movies, but a PG movie would include as many cuss words as the MPAA would allow. If they used the word “Jesus,” it was as a curse. And every year, they pushed the line a little farther.

Steve wanted to teach his students a lesson, so he decided to bake brownies. He gathered the highest quality ingredients and used the very best chocolate. Then he went out into the yard and picked up the littlest, tiniest bit of dog s*** that he could find, and mixed it into the brownie batter.

The next day at lunch, he had dozens of beautiful brownie squares sitting out on the lunch room table. The kids squealed as they came in and saw the treats, but Steve told them they had to wait until he told them a story. All the students gathered. Steve told them that he was so excited to offer them this delicious treat. He praised the quality of the chocolate and how tender they were when he cut them. They were quite possibly the best brownies that he’d ever made.

But he did want to warn them, however, that they had a little dog poop in them. Hardly any at all. You’d never be able to taste it. Then he said, “Alright kids, dig in.”

Nobody moved. There was whispering. Did he really put dog s*** in the brownies? Yes, he assured them, there really was just the littlest bit of poop in the brownies. But he’d baked it to perfection, so it was totally safe.

Still, nobody moved. Steve sprang his trap. The movies that were so popular were just like these brownies. They looked great. They had great acting and funny scripts. But the way that they used language was like putting poop in the brownies. No matter how good everything else about the movie was, the bad language ruined everything.

There’s Always a Better Word

I continued by telling the boys that using vulgar words is just plain lazy. A few years ago, I saw a post on social media from one of my favorite fundraising gurus that said something like, “Tell me why the F*** I should stop using four letter words.”

I don’t normally comment on things like that, but I felt inspired. I responded, “Because it’s lazy. You’re a better writer than that. Pick better words.” The reality is that I don’t know of any cases where the vulgar word is the best word. When used, they are stripped of any actual meaning at all and are just filler that gets a cheap reaction.

You see this a lot in media these days. I watched part of a comedy special on Netflix the other day, and from the very beginning it was f-bomb after f-bomb, this effing guy and that effing thing. I kept listening for a while, hoping it would get to some actual comedy. It didn’t. Foul language probably made up 10-15% of the words that he used. I turned it off. It was gross. I was disappointed.

And it’s not like I hate comedy. I love comedy. P. G. Wodehouse is my favorite comedic author, and his books are as clean as a whistle. And he’s the only author who has ever broken me. I was reading one of his books aloud to my wife, and his punch line was so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing for minutes. It was hilarious.

The English language has 170,000+ words, not including all the technical jargon or archaic forms. If you’re focused on the handful of words that will get a reaction because they’re considered dirty or impolite, you’re just missing out on the richness of our language.

A Heart Full of S***

Our conversation with the boys went deeper. A friend of the community is a practicing exorcist. I’ve participated in some of his exorcisms, and told a few stories about them. He gave a talk a few years ago about the awful, vulgar things that come out of the mouths of the possessed when the demons are talking.

I’ve seen it myself. The most vile things you can imagine come out of mouths that are twisted with rage and contempt. In that case, the possessed person is not directly responsible for the words that are coming out of their mouth. But what if we don’t have that excuse?

Jesus said, “For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. A good person brings forth good out of a store of goodness, but an evil person brings forth evil out of a store of evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless word they speak. By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:34-37).

Vulgar and profane language is a symptom of what’s in our hearts. It’s a bringing forth of what we have stored inside. I’m not throwing stones here — notice I said “we.” There was a time back in my Hollywood days that I had a horrifically filthy mouth. I was the worst of the worst. And it really did reveal what was going on inside my mind and heart. My thought life was filled with dark and vulgar images. I was ruled by sinful desires. As a result, the words that came out of my mouth were dark and vulgar.

After my conversion, that changed dramatically. I did a word search in my private notes on my computer for the word s***. There were no instances. Zero. I didn’t find it one time in my thousands of files and over a million words that I’ve written during the past 15 years. I just don’t talk that way anymore.

Also, notice what Jesus said about being judged according to the words that come out of our mouths. For this reason, St. Paul wrote, “No foul language should come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for needed edification, that it may impart grace to those who hear." (Ephesians 4:29) When God looks at the transcript of our lives, how much of what we say will fit St. Paul's description? How much will need to be blacked out with a sharpie?

Feed the People

"Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." (Matthew 4:4) God's word feeds us. In a mysterious way, since man is made in the image of God, our words feed one another, too.

How many people in the world are starving for a word of affirmation? Ravenous for a word of encouragement or comfort? How many languish because they need a word of affection? How many wander in darkness because they need a word of correction?

Our American love affair with freedom of speech has blinded us to the real purpose of language. Liberty should not be confused with license. We need to be free to use our speech to instruct, to affirm, to praise, to correct, to encourage, to comfort, to rejoice, to build up. All of those, and many more positive uses of speech, fall under the general category "to love."

But we shouldn't consider that a license to use our speech for evil ends. The power of our words should never be used to degrade, to lie, to steal, to offend, to calumniate... and all of the other ways that the Father of Lies corrupts the goodness of language. It takes some practice to avoid these corrupt forms, but it can be done. And everyone is the better for it.

The conversation that we had with the boys was a high calorie, stick to your ribs, kind of meal. We talked about what it means to be a man of virtue and self-control, disciplined in our speech. True, it did have a little s*** in it, but only enough so we could warn them not to eat the brownies.

This post originally appeared in Catholic Stand.

If this is your first note from the Country Disciple, subscribe today. You’ll get a fresh post from the intersection of faith and life every week. If you’re already a free subscriber, click upgrade to make a financial contribution that will make it possible for me to keep creating new content!

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If you want to hear more about my conversion story, check out my book Demoniac, now available on Amazon.