On The Road To Perfection

We dive into this sometimes confusing and dismissed time of the liturgical calendar by exploring how life is Advent.

Life is a series of endings, and to have endings, we must have beginnings.

Our traditions pepper this discussion, along with the big things in our life and your life, and we offer some sanity to the confusing schedule of Masses you may be dealing with going into the Fourth Week of Advent, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.

Controversial out of the gate - but honest as always! - we jump right into trust between parents and their children by talking about a BIG reason parents need to rebuild trust with their kids.

This is not a marriage counseling session, but we talk straight-up about divorce from personal experience before we get into the meat of the matter, and this was a question a listener asked.

Of course, there are many reasons for having to rebuild trust with our children, and there are great ways to build trust with our children.

It's a packed episode, so jump down off the curb and walk with us!

Answering a question from a listener, we chat about building trust with our spouse, and rebuilding trust with our spouse, no matter the circumstance.

Seriously - no broken trust is too broken, and we discuss that.

We acknowledge difficulty in various situations, but get to the core pretty quickly.

We share our deepest breach that we recovered from - yep, that one - and explore in-depth how you can recover, too.

We give two very specific practices that will start working for you immediately!

We cover the facts in the first thirty seconds, making this the easiest and fastest podcast listen one might every have.

We are consuming flesh and blood, soul and divinity when we receive the Eucharist; and we thought it important to discuss that and proclaim it.

Asking the dead to pray for us can be a bit discomforting.

It can seem blasphemous, useless, or silly superstition.

But asking the dead to pray for us makes absolute perfect sense when we consider the belief that "we are all one body" and that body does not have separate, disparate parts that exist away from each other.

Walking in the Catholic Faith is an important part of Being Perfect and Being On The Road To perfection.

In this episode, we focus on that walk, and what it means.

How do we start walking in the Catholic Faith?

How do we keep doing it, and encourage others to do it?

Are we all walking the same path?

We are called to be perfect, as we discussed last week.

So, what does being on the road to perfection look like?

If Jesus was "finished" and his ministry was "completed," as it means when He said, "It is done," by saying, "It is perfected" just before He died on the Cross, He must have walked a road to perfection.

And so must we.

In this episode we discuss that concept, in terms of what we are doing and how we respond to the call for our life.

It's a simple concept, and a difficult task, but we have the example of Our Lord which, from the proper perspective, is not an impossible example to follow and exemplify.

Being Perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect is a daunting idea!

Starting from the beginning, when we first launched the podcast, we talk about Jesus' use of the word "perfect" in Matthew 5:48, its Greek etymology, and His use of the same word only one other place in His ministry - when He is dying on the Cross.

Being Perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect is to be who we are supposed to be, just as God is Who He is supposed to be.

So how do we BE perfect?

Glad you asked.

The answer is here!

God's time is not our time.

Well, duh!

In this episode that is short on time - possibly our shortest episode ever - we discuss the intricacies of life complicated by our concept of timing and how our own blindness to the Plan of The Lord makes us impatient as He works for our good with His Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.

When we do not think God is responding to our prayers, it does not mean He isn't involved and not doing things.

When we are kids, we try to get God to do things, to fit him into our expectations.

Do we still do that as adults?

When we are non-believers, does some of that lack of faith come from not getting, having, or experiencing what we think should be happening?

1 Timothy 6:10 is our source for this topic (not Proverbs, as we erroneously say!).

We discuss the love of money in the context of the Mass reading recently about the rich young man asking Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life.

We look at the idea of a camel fitting through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich person might enter heaven, and explore what that actually means.

Does God hate rich people? No.

Does the Church tell us not to be rich? No.

What if we are rich - does this story apply to us?

Well, we are, and that depends...