Chet Collins's Blog: Catholic Husband, page 20

Increments

Lent is quickly winding down, and perhaps the success of your Lenten rituals is a bit checkered. Sustaining any type of radical life change is often easy at the beginning, but the slightest bit of friction from life can cause the best intentions to crumble.

Jesus tells us that he came to fulfill the law. In many ways, he raised the bar, asking us to aim even higher. He asks us to be perfect as God is perfect, despite his full knowledge that we will never attain that level.

Reading through the Old ...

Examination of Conscience

Last month, my son received his first confession. As he was preparing to receive the Sacrament again last weekend, I sat down for a few minutes to help him do his examination of conscience.

We printed out a helpful sheet to guide our discussion. It contained the common errors that kids make, all of them rather pedestrian. As we went, line by line, I’d read out the sin, and ask if he committed it in the previous month. Each question brought a new contortion to his face. I could feel his discomfort...

A Sense of the Sacred

A few years ago, I watched a documentary about the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. They followed the historic rise and fall of the population, along with the complexity of adjudicating cases of those sworn to defeat the United States of America as an experiment in human history. Although I can’t tell you much beyond the scope of the documentary, I vividly recall the coverage of religious life in the facility.

There is a librarian who stores and distributes copies of the Koran. Each copy, ...

Desensitized

Evil’s greatest objective is to desensitize us to its reality. If we fail to perceive evil for the threat that it is, to our lives and our society, then it can more easily dominate us.

We have a political class in Washington that universally denies the basic dignity of children in the womb. So evil their beliefs, that they don’t even believe that these children have a basic right to life. That is evil. The Chinese Communist Party has interned over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps for wel...

Never Wasted

Starting or growing a habit of prayer can seem like a big lift. We first have to restructure our day to meet our new objective, and then we have to maintain the momentum each day. The biggest challenge comes when there’s disruption. Like any diet or exercise routine, vacations or illness can throw a wrench into our finely tuned machine and cause us to feel discouraged.

Prayer is a relationship, not a zero-sum game. It’s a conversation, one without beginning or end. The solid relationships in our ...

13 Cents

Lent is upon us, this year's opportunity for us to take a fresh look at our spiritual life. As our thoughts turn to what we're going to take on or give up for the next 40 days, they're also likely to turn back to our character flaws. We are all predisposed to a unique mix of temptation and sin, the ones that come up in confession after confession. Although this constant battle can wear us down, Lent reminds us that the war is already won.

For many years, I dealt with a low-grade discomfort from m...

Icy Slopes

I went skiing for the first time in my life last week. We started discussing a trip in July and firmed up later in the fall. I spent a lot of time thinking about the trip's logistics and surprisingly little on the mechanics of learning this new skill.

As one can imagine, the critical skill is braking. While beginner trails are wide and calm, they are cut through woods. There are trees, light poles, and other skiers to avoid. Our trip in mid-February put us in the dead of winter, so it was very, v...

Detailing

Our vacation plan for this year included a trip to the Great White North to enjoy a week of snow, play, and skiing. Driving north, the landscape turned from winter browns to gleaming white. Unfortunately, flurries and snowstorms met us along the way, as well as road salt and ice.

Upon arrival, the car was filthy. Two days of toys, food crumbs, and wrappers littered the floor, and the road dirt caked on the truck's body panels. I took it in for a half-day detailing this morning, and at lunchtime, ...

Keto Recycle

Over the past three years, I've experimented with the keto diet. It's fashionable right now, a fact that's helped me stay consistent. My grocery store stocks a variety of keto-friendly options, which is fantastic.

Alison and I first switched over because we were looking to do something different. I wanted an eating plan that would make menu planning easier. With fewer food options, we could benefit from focus. I learned that a strict keto diet is the single lifestyle factor that consistently deli...

Noticing Progress

It’s hard to notice progress in our personal growth. We’re so intimately familiar with ourselves that small changes are imperceptible. Even the markers that we mentally track can be deceiving.

In our relationships, we tend to have conflicts around the same themes. Those areas where there are disagreements between spouses seldom change. However, in time, the friction can fade away with work and love, as you both learn to accept each other for who you are.

In the spiritual life, the same is true. T...