One of the themes of Advent “waiting”. God values patience, and a lot of our sanctification comes through waiting. When God does something He often starts very small — like a farmer planting a seed. Many times what He is doing is hidden. But God is very patient, and He calls on us to wait. […]

Advent is a time to open our hearts more to receive Jesus. A good place to start is to acknowledge that God’s ways and thoughts are very different than ours. In order to do this, we need humility and receptivity. God wants to bring good out of our failures, to use them to teach us. […]

Even if you live for 100 years, it’s not a long time compared to eternity. Our life is short. Then we die and will have to give an account to the Lord for how we spent it. Jesus gives the parable of the greedy landowner who planned on building new storage bins for his abundant grain […]

Pride is at the root of all sins. God loves the humble of heart, and that’s who He gives wisdom to.

Fr. Nathan O’Halloran, SJ talks about how Father Thomas lived a life of self-sacrifice and was constantly dying to self, but he was always joyful. Fr. Rick was one of the freest people Fr. Nathan ever knew. The oldest paintings of St. Francis of Assisi depict the nails still in the wounds. As Fr. Nathan […]

This is a teaching that Fr. Nathan O’Halloran, SJ gave at our Wednesday night prayer meeting some years ago. Jesus tells his disciples, “Give them [the hungry crowd] some food yourselves.” What if we look at it with this punctuation — “Give them some food: yourselves.” Like the disciples, we’d rather give anything but ourselves. […]

There are two little parables that Jesus gives in Mark 2:21-22: 1) don’t sew new, unshrunken material on old cloth or the tear will become worse, and 2) don’t put new wine into old wineskins or the skins will burst and all will be lost. New leather is soft and pliable, old leather gets crusty, […]

The best prayer is prayer from your heart. Prayer is communication with God. It’s like talking to your best friend. We can’t hide anything from Jesus so we may as well tell him. Thanking God for things is a very good prayer. When we pray from our hearts, we are going to begin to know Jesus. […]

The Word of God repeatedly tells us to praise the Lord. God doesn’t tell us to praise Him because He has low self-esteem or needs affirmation. He tells us to praise because it is for our own good. We are evangelizing ourselves when we praise the Lord, telling ourselves “this is who God is!” We […]