What is the best way to prepare for the season of Advent? You’re free to do what you know will help you prepare for Christmas the best. If decorating and so forth does not help you prepare for the coming of Christ, you can be the judge of whether it’s worth doing.

Fr. Mike also wants to remind us that Advent is not just about preparing for Christmas. It’s also about preparing for Christ’s Second Coming. One day we will meet Christ face to face. Advent is the stark reminder that we need to get ready for eternity. With that in mind, what if you prepared as if December 25 will be the day you die?

Have a merry Advent.

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Which is better, being an owner or a steward? Fr. Mike reminds us of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) as he points out how seeing ourselves as an owner is not as great as it seems. When we see ourselves as the owner of something, we hold onto it more closely for fear of losing it. When that thing is taken from us, we may become resentful.

Our lives are not our own, our bodies are not our own, our homes are not our own. Not even our children are ours. God owns all of these things, and we have done nothing to deserve them. God has entrusted them to us. If we see everything we have as a gift from God, we will always have a reason to be thankful.

In our culture, we may have been conditioned to think being owners is the American Dream, but being a steward is much better.

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Last week Fr. Mike Schmitz talked about why prayer is so hard in his battle of prayer video, and this week he talks about what to do when you experience dryness in prayer.

He says being distracted or discouraged in prayer is like losing control of a car on ice. When dryness or distraction in prayer occurs, don’t overcompensate. Gently bring yourself back to focus.

St. Theresa of Avila would always bring a book with her into prayer so she had some kind of springboard to converse with God. If this doesn’t help and dryness persists, then you persist. God may be calling you to a deeper relationship with him in these tough moments. There are some things God can only do when we come to him when we least want to. If you feel like God just isn’t giving you anything when you pray, it’s an opportunity to just spend time with the giver while expecting nothing in return.

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Growing up Fr. Mike thought prayer should be like soaking in a hot tub. He didn’t understand why it was so hard when he tried it.

It took him a while to learn that, as the Catechism says, prayer is a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. Prayer always presupposes effort. There’s always some kind of engagement when we properly pray to God. It’s not just about soaking in God’s grace. The required effort in prayer is difficult more often than it is not. Prayer is a battle against ourselves and “the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer” (CCC 2725).

Over time, Fr. Mike discovered that prayer needs to be more than a momentary time where we seek solace and closeness with God. We need to constantly acknowledge our relationship with God throughout the day, just as a husband and wife are constantly thinking of each other. Then when we do set aside time to simply be with God, it happens more naturally.

If you want to improve your prayer life, make the intentional and faithful decision to live the same way outside of prayer as you do within prayer.

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Fr. Mike comments on Kanye West’s conversion. He celebrates Kanye’s conversion, but hesitates to lift him up as a Christian leader. He recommends that we let Kanye’s roots in the faith grow without the responsibility of having people watch his every step to see if he will fall; because we all fall in the walk of faith. Support Kanye by praying for him because everyone who is striving to do the will of God needs our prayers.

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Fr. Mike uses the life of St. Maximillian Kolbe as an example of how God is going to interrupt us if we choose to do his will. We may love schedules, like Fr. Mike does, but life is unpredictable and tends to create a dangerous environment for our schedules. No less happened to St. Maximillian, who had plans for his life before being sent to Auschwitz. The inconveniences put in our path may not be that extreme, but be prepared to be interrupted if you want to be a saint. See interruptions as an occasion for holiness.

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God may want you to be spontaneous, but he also wants you to be disciplined. How does that work? Well, unless you just want to have no control over you impulses like a dog chasing a squirrel, discipline is a necessary prerequisite to being spontaneous.

Spontaneity requires a schedule, Fr. Mike says. God can only introduce new and exciting things into your day once you’ve done the things he put on your path in the first place.

So make a schedule for your day. Yes, life will get in the way and you may have to abandon some things on that schedule, but at least having a schedule helps you decide whether or not the unexpected things are more important than the priorities you set for yourself.

Fully embrace today by making a plan for it, as the author of Hebrews encourages us:

“But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).

The truly spontaneous person has a carpe diem attitude that starts with a set of determined goals. This determination is what gives him or her the energy boost to get to the uncharted territory of spontaneity. Have the disciple to schedule things right now so you have the freedom to be spontaneous later.

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We may be too hard on ourselves when considering how we use the word “should.” Of course, we should go to Mass and pray every day. We should avoid stealing and other sins. However, in the midst of the healthy “shoulds,” there could be unhealthy “shoulds,” like “I should enjoy going to Mass and praying,” or “it shouldn’t be this hard to avoid sin.”

But no one ever said that. No one ever said doing what’s right would be easy. So let’s stop “shoulding” ourselves, and let’s rely on God’s grace to pull us through instead. Our weakness is an opportunity to embrace God’s grace. Fr. Mike says if all the things we should do were easy, we wouldn’t need Jesus.

“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

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Knowledge is always good, but St. Thomas Aquinas said curiosity—or the fickle pursuit of unnecessary knowledge—can be a vice. What he meant, and what Fr. Mike means here, is that the methods by which we feed our curiosity, and our motivation for feeding it, can lead to vice if we just want to know something instead of pursuing what we need to know.

Those things we say we have to know about because everyone else is talking about them—like that popular show we say we simply cannot miss, or that things someone did that’s none of our business but we just need to know about it—these things can lead us away from a wholehearted pursuit of truth.

The counterpart virtue of unhealthy curiosity is studiousness, where the motivation and method of pursuing knowledge are correct. Curiosity is a good place to start, but it should always lead to studiousness, the virtue of great minds.

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If you’re in any kind of situation in your life where you feel you are limited in what you can control, you may not be as chained to your circumstances as you think. Fr. Mike offers encouragement, saying you can still make interior decisions and have an effect on your circumstances to some extent. You still have agency.

Even though you may not be able to change everything you want, you can change your heart. Resentment and bitterness can prevent a great deal of needed change, so if they’re in your heart start by surrendering them to the Lord. This will give you internal freedom similar to what Jesus had when he was suffering on the Cross.

Give your circumstances to the Lord and put them under his dominion. This may lead to more pain, but it’s better than staying bitter because if we remain in that bitterness our hearts will become numb and incapable of love.

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