Podcast

Tell me if you’ve ever said something like this before:

“If my boss wasn’t such a jerk, I’d like my job.”

“If my wife would just listen to me, we’d be able to be happy.”

“If only my friends would stop doing x, y, or z, I’d be able to be myself.”

This blame game is a favorite tool of the enemy going all the way back to Eden. As long as we’re focused on what other people aren’t doing right or how they’re hurting us and waiting on them to change, we’re not facing ourselves and becoming the saints we’re called to be.

In this episode, we’re talking about why so many of us feel stuck. The simple answer is that we fall into this trap that says happiness and freedom depend on other people changing their behavior, and that’s not at all the case. We’ll get into:

🔹What stories we tell ourselves about the struggles we face

🔹The responsibility we have to choose our responses to the things that happen to us

🔹Where the search for freedom and happiness truly starts

If we know something someone’s doing isn’t right, of course we hope and pray for a change. But whether or not they do is between them and God, and only God has the power to change their hearts. It does us no good to tie our happiness, our freedom, our calling to what they’re doing. That plays right into the enemy’s hands. If you find yourself in this place, I hope this episode encourages you to chase after the freedom God has for you, no matter what everyone else is doing.

As Catholics, we treat Mary with a particular sense of reverence and honor. But sometimes it’s hard to know how to relate to her, and how to open ourselves up to a relationship with her without feeling like we’re somehow taking time away from her Son. The truth is that she always brings us closer to Jesus, so the time we spend with her is time spent with Him. That’s what my friend John Heinen, executive director of The Catholic Gentleman, joins us in the pew to talk about. Today, we’re going to talk about:
🔹Mary’s role in our growth in virtue
🔹How to build a deeper relationship to Jesus through Mary
🔹A few concrete things you can do right now to grow closer to Mary, and by necessity her Son.
As John said, Jesus spent 30 years of His life on earth glorifying God through obedience to Mary and Joseph. If Mary is that important to Him, she ought to be for us as well. And if you’re worried about giving her too much and God not enough, just remember that no matter how much you love Mary, you’ll never be able to love her more than Jesus does.

God did not create us to have a mediocre marriage. My good friend Paul George, the author of Rethink Happiness and Holy Grit, joins us today to discuss common ways our marriages get put on the back burner and how to make sure that our union is treated like the sacrament that it is. In this episode we’re talking about:

🔹Different seasons of marriage

🔹How the fall of Adam and Eve contributed to our current relationship weaknesses

🔹How to model what marriage looks like to our kids.

Paul also talks about the things he’s learned in his own marriage, and how he’s helping to build up marriages in his ministries. Whether you’ve been married for years or only a little while, or are in the discernment process, there’s some great wisdom in this episode you don’t want to miss out on.

• The power we lost in the Garden of Eden
• The power we mistakenly chase in the world that leads us to feel powerless
• The power of God made perfect in our weakness that is sufficient for us