Intentional Faith

This is like the type of emotions and this is what I hope my children experience and say in their own lives, even at the ages that they are right now, but especially as they get older and become adults. It is my hope and my prayer as I’m sure that it is yours, that our kids grow up and that they say the same thing like I love being Catholic, I love our faith, I love the teachings, I love the prayer experiences, and the sacraments and all of it. And so the big question becomes how do we help our children to love their faith? And there’s a lot of things we can do, but I’ve come to understand that with all things in our lives when there’s important things and important goals that we have, so much of it comes down to our intentionality. We talk a lot about intention in Masters and in the coaching that we do. Because the reality is that in life, with whatever is important in our lives, if we’re not intentional about creating habits or creating working towards goals or creating the type of life we want to live. If we’re not intentional about it, then we’re just going to kind of go through life on default or on autopilot. And we’re going to often miss the mark. I know I learned this very well when it came to a number of years ago, my husband and I found that we were just kind of swimming in debt.

We racked up credit card debt quite quickly. We had our car loans and student loans and we were just going through life continuing to just build up this debt. And we knew that we didn’t want to have to carry that burden anymore and that we wanted to work at paying off the debt and getting out of debt. And the only way we were able to do that was to get very intentional about it because we knew that the path we were going down was just leading us down a path of greater and greater debt. And so we took a Dave Ramsey class. We read a bunch of books. We put a budget together, and we started to get very, very intentional about paying off our debt. And sure enough, after a couple of years, we did it.

We paid off our student loans, we paid off our car payments, we paid off our credit cards and cut them up. And I knew there was so much freedom in all of that, but we wouldn’t have gotten there just by accident. We wouldn’t have just miraculously suddenly just paid off our student loans and all of our debt without having a very intentional plan. It’s the same thing with maybe trying to get healthy or maybe wanting to lose weight. If that’s an area that you’ve struggled in, like myself, you’re not just going to automatically wake up one day and be at your ideal weight or just miraculously be healthy all of a sudden. If you want to make changes in your life regarding that, you have to be intentional. You have to say, okay, this is where I’m at right now, and this is where I want to be, and how am I going to get there? How am I going to get from point A to point B? What kind of plan am I going to put into place? What kind of research do I need to do? What kind of meal planner? What kind of foods do I need to be eating? What’s my exercise routine going to look like? You get what you want when you’re intentional about it. And so in my life, the faith has been very intentional, and a big part of that has been because both myself and my husband have been directly involved in youth ministry for 25 years.

Like, learning the faith and teaching the faith and being intentional about the faith has been part of my job experience. And I’ll never forget going to a youth ministry conference years ago. When I was in my early 20s, just starting out in youth ministry, I went to a Life Teen conference in Mesa, Arizona. And Mark Hart, who some of you might be familiar with, he’s kind of known as the Bible geek. He’s written a number of books about scripture and helping scripture come to life for young people. And he’s the executive vice president of Life team. And although I was at this conference for a week and heard such amazing talks, this one kind of moment in Mark Hart’s talk absolutely convinced me. I remember I was maybe 21 years old at the time, and he looked at all of us. There were probably two or 300 youth ministers in the room, and he looked at us and he said these words. He said, it is a sin to make the gospel boring.

And then he said, let me say it again, it is a sin to make the gospel boring. It’s a sin to make scripture boring. It’s a sin to make our faith boring. And oh my gosh, it hit me to the core. I was like, what? And this truth kind of hit me so much, it convicted me in this moment and it kind of became the cornerstone for everything I did in youth ministry after that and what I’ve done in youth ministry all of these years. And it’s even translated into how my husband and I intentionally lead our children in the faith as well. Because Mark Hart said that day he was like, the gospel, the story of the Scriptures, the Bible. This isn’t just a story.

This is the greatest story. This is not just the story of salvation. This is the story of our salvation. This is our love story that God has given to us. It’s his passion, his death and his resurrection. But this is our own unique, personal love story of how much God loves us each individually. And so in youth ministry, as youth ministers, we have this responsibility to make sure that we’re teaching the faith and transmitting the faith in a way that helps it to come alive for the young people that we serve and that we’re being very intentional about the youth programs that we run and how we do it. And so I remember going back from that conference and planning out my year in youth ministry and have done that every year, actually, since and looked at everything we do from the lens of how do we make sure that what we’re teaching and what the youth are experiencing when they walk through our doors is engaging and meaningful and impactful.

How are we leading them into a deeper relationship with Christ, which is the most extraordinary and exciting adventure that they could ever experience? And not that it always has to be highly entertaining and that’s I think, what I want to differentiate from. Like, we don’t have to make it entertaining, but we do have to make sure that it’s meaningful and that there’s thought put into it. And so we do. We spend a lot of time thinking about what our young people are going to experience when they walk through the doors of our youth group and how are they going to be greeted? Is it going to be welcoming? Is there going to be music playing? Are they going to be seen and known? Do people know their names when they walk in? What’s their experience going to be? We’ve been really blessed the last few years to have an extraordinary team of hospitality leaders, a husband and wife who have really put a lot of intentionality behind the meals that are served at each youth group and the snacks, and that when the kids come in and they get food that it’s well thought out and meaningful. It ties into the topic that we’re teaching about. And it’s just inevitable that the young people that were ministering to and with feel like they matter that we’re not just throwing out a box of cookies, but that there’s really been a lot of thought and energy and effort put into making them feel special and loved. And when we do that, when we set that type of environment up, it’s really significant. And then when we think about, okay, what games are we playing? What activities? How can we create an environment where they are having fun, that they’re engaged, that they’re thinking? How are we teaching whatever topic it is that we’re teaching in a meaningful and relevant way? Are we showing a video that’s going to have an impact? Are we giving a talk? Is there a peer testimony that’s going to be shared that really helps our youth feel like they can relate? What are we doing? Those are all the things that we think about.

And then, of course, each week we really spend a lot of time thinking about the prayer experience. And so we’ll spend 2030, maybe even 45 minutes in prayer with our young people, whether it’s spending some time in adoration or praise and worship, maybe doing, like, a living Stations of the Cross or Lexio Devina or something. Where they walk away from our youth group really having felt like they had an encounter with Christ, that they felt like they had a prayer experience that helped them to feel his presence or his love. And then, of course, even when they leave and they’re leaving, we try to think about things. What can we send with them? Can we send with them a scripture passage or a prayer card or a rosary or something that they can take with them and take home and use in their own prayer life? Is there a beautiful or thought provoking prayer card that they can stick in their locker at school to remind them about God’s love for them? All of those things? So when we plan our youth groups or our retreats, our social events, we’re always thinking with a lot of intentionality. How are we making it fun, meaningful, life changing and impactful? And how do we help them to know that they are loved and that being a part of the church and the church community is a really wonderful thing to be a part of? And so those are the things that we think about in youth ministry. How are we engaging young people in Mass and the liturgies? And how are we making sure that they realize that they are integral in ministries at the church and all of those things? And so how does this translate to us as parents? And what are we doing to really put thought and intentionality behind leading our own children into a deeper relationship with Christ and his church and helping them to fall in love with the truth and the beauty and the goodness and the traditions of our Catholic faith? It’s not just going to happen by accident. We’re not just going to be able to just go through the motions and then hope that our kids fall in love with Christ and his church.

We have to be intentional about this. And again, it doesn’t come back to this like making Mass entertaining or our faith entertaining, but what are we doing intentionally to make it meaningful and significant and relevant in their lives at whatever age they are? And I know for me and my husband, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and praying about this and practicing it and trying new things. And so I’m going to just share some things on this podcast episode. I’ve shared a number of these things before, but I think it’s important to keep coming back and reminding ourselves and hearing ideas. I love hearing what other families are doing and what traditions are they creating in their own homes. And so much of what my husband and I do has come from just surrounding ourselves with amazing Catholic families and learning from others and then hearing about a tradition that somebody does and then starting to practice that in our own home and seeing how our children respond to it. For us, when it comes to intentionality, I think preparing our children for a Mass has been an area that we’ve really tried to make an effort in over the years. I remember when our children were really small, especially because we had five kids in five years, and so we had babies and toddlers and infants, and it was just a lot.

And I remember for a number of years, getting to Mass on Sunday was like I hate to say this, but I oftentimes dreaded it. It was not fun and meaningful. It was one of the hardest hours of our week. And I want to just speak to the reality of life. I mean, that is partly the reality, right? Like you’re trying to get little ones to Mass and it’s not always easy. But I remember for a number of years those moments of trying to get to Mass and just the hour before, just trying to get everybody ready in the morning and dressed and out the door. Always, inevitably, we would lose something. We couldn’t find somebody’s shoe, somebody had an accident right before Mass or all the things.

And then we would be rushing and yelling and scrambling frantically, trying to get into the car. We’d be rushing to church. My husband would be stressed. I would be stressed. We would be short and irritable with each other, with the kids. Somebody in the car would be screaming and crying because they’re melting down because the stress level was so intense. And then we would be showing up to church, piling out of the minivan, getting to Mass late, and then just trying to white knuckle it through Mass, hoping that somebody didn’t bite someone or pull somebody’s hair or scream and then just get out of Mass. And those were like hard moments.

And I remember at a certain point really having to sit down with my husband, and we had to have some serious conversations around the experience that we were creating for our family with getting to Mass. And was this the experience? Because not only was Mass like, just the hour of Mass so stressful and hard, but the hour before it was, and even afterwards, everybody was just so tense that it was pretty miserable for everyone. And so we decided to get intentional about that. What were we going to do to make sure that the hour before Mass was like we were setting ourselves up for success? So we started laying out the kids clothes the night before, making sure everybody’s clothes were laid out, everybody’s shoes, socks, underwear. Like everything was laid out. The diaper bag was ready the night before. How could we make the morning as simple as possible? How could we make sure the kids had something to eat so that we weren’t going to Mass on an empty stomach and everybody’s hangry and upset and irritable? What could we do to make the morning more peaceful and enjoyable for everyone so we weren’t yelling and screaming at each other? How could we make the drive to Mass more pleasant? And what could we do to set our kids up to be thinking about Mass? And so, especially when they were little, we were asking them questions on the drive to Mass, like, what color do you think the priest investments are going to be this week? And we would ask them to listen for certain things in the Mass. And we would tell them that we were going to ask them questions afterwards, like, what was the gospel reading going to be? Was it Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? And we would ask them to pay attention to listen for that.

And then we would ask them questions about the homily after Mass, so pay attention. And what would be the things that they could look at in the church that may be tied into the liturgical season, whether it’s an Advent wreath or what was the church going to be decorated like for a special feast day, things like that. And so we would try to set those things up as we were going to Mass. We would try to get to Mass a few minutes early, which is really hard with a bunch of kids. And one of the most important things that somebody said to me when we had young children was to try to sit in the front row. And so when we moved our kids from the back by the vestibule and took our family up to the front row, my goodness, it was an absolute game changer. And I was terrified about that. I thought that our kids were going to be such a distraction to everyone.

I thought, gosh, how am I going to get out with the baby? What am I going to do but what happened is when we moved to the front row of Mass, number one, it forced us to try to get there early enough that we could get to the front row. That was a good thing. It gave us a few minutes to pray before Mass started. But it also made it possible for my little ones to be able to see what was going on. And they were so much more attentive and engaged and well behaved sitting in the front row. They got to experience Mass because they could see what was happening. And not to say that they were always perfect. There were still times that maybe we had to take the toddler out or the baby out, but their behavior changed so much more when we moved to the front row and got to see what was happening.

And then, of course, then we would leave. And so just making a few tweaks and being more intentional about our Mass experience set our family up for having a much greater experience. Because I knew that if we didn’t get intentional about that, then if Mass was every single week so stressful and everybody just dreaded it and it was a miserable experience. Well, what kind of message were we sending to our children about the most important hour of our week and the most important time that we are creating with our Lord? We as parents are responsible for creating that type of experience. And in a very similar way to what we do with youth ministry, it’s like, how are we setting our children up to have the best experience when we take them to Mass? It starts way before we walk into the church. It starts the night before or maybe even earlier in the week. Now that we have older children, teenagers, one of the things we do is we have a holy hour where every Tuesday night we go to Adoration for an hour. And oftentimes during that holy hour, we will read the readings for the coming week at Mass.

And so at the very least, we’ll read the gospel reading. But if we have enough time, we will read all of the readings for Mass and the kids will take turns reading it out loud. So they’re engaged in it, and we ask them to think about it. What do these readings mean to you in your life? What do you think the priest might talk about in his homily based on this gospel reading? If you were a priest, what would your message be and how would you tie these readings into your life today? And so again, even though it’s Tuesday, we’re thinking ahead and helping them to prepare themselves for really being engaged in the Word of God. And how does the living word of God pertain to their lives today? So for us Sunday Mass preparing our kids for Sunday Mass. Now, it starts on Tuesday night, and we’re thinking about that, and we’re preparing them so that on Sunday, when they hear the gospel, they’ve already thought about it. They’ve already thought about what it means to them, and they’re able to engage in Mass even more. And so those are just a few things that we do when it comes to Mass.

But also I want to talk about the whole Sunday experience, because a number of years ago, a friend of mine shared with me that one of their family traditions was that they would go to Mass in the morning, and then after Mass, they would let their children kind of pick a fun activity that they would do as a family. So maybe after Mass, they would get some lunch and then they would go and do a fun activity. Maybe they’d go to the park or go bowling or go to a movie or just go do something. And each week, a different child got to pick what that activity was. And so the whole point of that was making Sunday. The morning started with math, the most important hour of the week, and it continued on. It was like, okay, this is important to us. And then math on Sunday, followed by eating together and then doing something meaningful, always helped the kids to know that Sunday was special.

And we’re creating these special moments, these memories, and the kids gave the kids something really to look forward to. And it kind of extended that experience of Mass throughout the day for us. Because our Sundays have been so involved in youth ministry, we have had to be a little bit more intentional about that because Sundays have always been kind of a busy day for our family. But in the last few years, we’ve had five of our kids have been involved in our youth ministry program. And so in the middle of the day, we go to a youth group. My husband and I run the youth group. And then after the youth program is over, we all go to Mass as a family. And then after Mass, we come home.

And one of the traditions we’ve set up is that we have a really special family dinner every Sunday night after Mass. And my parents come over, my sister and her husband and their kids come over almost every Sunday, and we have a really nice dinner together. And we’re all sitting together and laughing and talking and cooking together, all of that. And so our whole day on Sunday is a special day with youth group Mass and our family dinner together. It really is a way that we as a family intentionally make Sundays meaningful and significant. And I know that not everybody has their families that live really close to them, but there’s a lot of different ways we can do it, whether it’s getting together with friends or creating just some special memories on Sunday. And I hope that over the years, because we do this every week, that I have a feeling that my children are going to want to kind of create something like this with their own families when they get older, just because I’ve seen how meaningful this is to them in their lives right now. And it’s also a really beautiful way to kick off their week.

And so that’s just an example of kind of being intentional about Mass, being intentional about Sundays and what we’re doing. The other thing about our Catholic faith is that everything about our faith is very intentional. Like the Mass, for example, is very intentional, how it’s laid out and our traditions and the liturgical year is very intentional. And our so living out our Catholic faith, it just makes it easy to be intentional in how we live it out. For us as a family, our traditions are very important. As a family, we try to go to confession at least once a month so that becomes part of our monthly routine. And going to confession, doing an examination of conscience and going to confession with our children, usually on a Saturday afternoon. But then also when we’re done with that, we go and do something fun together. Let’s go get ice cream, or let’s go do something fun after we go to confession.

So it kind of creates this experience. And we don’t do it all the time, but we try to, again, be thoughtful about how we weave this into our lives and make it meaningful for our family. And also, like so many things, like feast days and holy days of obligation, what are we doing? Like we have these liturgical seasons, Advent, Lent, all of these are opportunities to be intentional and to create these really meaningful moments in our family life around our faith. I’ve shared this before, but there are some feast days in our family that are very important. In June. Like this week, as I’m recording this podcast is St. Anthony’s feast day. And St.

Anthony is a really important saint in the life of our family. We love St. Anthony of Padua, and so usually on his feast day, we try to have a big Italian dinner, spaghetti, pasta, pizza, play Italian music, and then we’ll have dinner together and we’ll share some of our favorite St. Anthony miracle stories of when we’ve lost things and found them or just things like that. And we talk about his life and some of the miracles that are associated with St. Anthony, things like that for us as well. St. Theresa, St.

Torres of Lesoux, she’s one of our favorite patron saints. And every year on her feast day, like leading up to her feast day, we do the St. Torres Novina, but we also have on her feast day, we have a big picnic in the park. It’s like a potluck picnic with seven or eight other Catholic families that all love her, and we eat amongst the roses and we talk about her and her life and we share some of our own personal stories and miracles and we just share in that and that tradition over the years. My goodness, my kids look forward to that every single year. They know it’s coming up. They know we never miss it. And it’s always something really special.

We always, as a family, try to celebrate big celebrities. We have cakes, we have parties, we have things around those days and we celebrate with family and friends and it just is something that is really fun. And those are the things, those are the memories that our kids are going to remember when other friends, other Catholic friends, come over and we have a big party because it’s the Feast of the Assumption or the Ascension or the Immaculate Conception, and we’re celebrating that while we’re coming together and eating and celebrating the gift of our faith together. The really cool thing that we have in our lives today is we have access to Pinterest and to bloggers and Catholic moms and family websites that have some of the most amazing and creative ways of living liturgical life. In our Catholic faith today and bringing our Catholic faith alive to our children, to our teens, to our young adults and making these moments in the life of our faith very meaningful. They’re super fun recipes and craft ideas and all of those types of things. And I don’t want to overwhelm you because this doesn’t have to be something that is on every feast day or every day of the year, but what are some things? What are a couple of little things? Like, for us, there’s a couple feast days every year that are really important and so we go all out on them. Now, we’re not going all out on 20 or 30 feast days, but if we are intentional about a handful of them, that can make a big impact.

And we can take advantage of what our parish is doing, taking advantage of vacation, Bible schools and celebrations. We just celebrated Corpus Christi. The feast of Corpus Christi. And every year our own parish does a beautiful Eucharistic walk, like through our downtown Boise area procession. It’s a Eucharistic procession with hundreds and hundreds of people and it’s so powerful to just participate in that. And then we come back to the parish and there’s a big carnival celebration at our parish that our kids just love. And the nice thing is that as parishioners, we don’t have to do a lot with it. We just get to show up and participate in the beautiful life of our parish community and so it’s taking advantage of those moments and opportunities as well.

And then I just want to kind of wrap up by finishing sharing some things that we do as a family. When it comes to our own prayer traditions, we really make sure that we’re praying as a family every day. In the mornings. We usually start off like. If we’re taking the kids to school or we’re praying in the morning, we’ll do our morning offering prayers. But then really at night as a family is when we pray together. And there’s a number of different things that we do. But we have that connection point every single night as a family.

Whether we pray the Rosary, sometimes it’s maybe a couple of decades of the Rosary. Sometimes we’ll pray at the Divine Mercy chaplet. Or again, depending on the liturgical time of the year, if it’s Lent, maybe we’ll pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet. If it’s advent, we always pray to St. Andrews. Novena. There’s different things that we do also in Advent, we will eat dinner with the lights out and we’ll just turn on a lot of candles. And we usually will eat dinner by candlelight as much as possible.

This is definitely harder. When our children were really little, we would maybe just kind of dim the lights. We wouldn’t go completely candlelight because when you’ve got two year olds trying to eat, that’s not really conducive. But we would make a shift. We would make it feel different because of the liturgical season that we happen to be in. And so whether it’s just creating a change in your home, what are we doing to make different liturgical seasons feel different in a sensory way so something like stands out with our children. The other thing is making sure that we have beautiful Catholic art in our house. We heard a talk a number of years ago from Scott Hahn who said it’s important to invest in Catholic artwork in your home.

That for our children to see beautiful images, Catholic images, and to be moved by them, to be touched by them. And so every year, we try to maybe get a new piece of art in our house or something that we can switch out so that throughout our house, we have different forms of artwork that I think can evoke our children’s creative and spiritual senses, in a way, and draw them into prayer and draw them into a deeper relationship with Christ. One of the things that we were able to do when we moved into our new house is that there was kind of maybe a formal sitting room in our house or I don’t know if maybe they used it before as a formal dining room. It’s not a really big room. It’s not a full living room size. It’s kind of a smaller room. But we made that our prayer room. And in the middle of the prayer room is a table.

And so we’ve used that table for a number of things. Sometimes our kids will go in there during the day and they’ll do a craft or they’ll do homework, but there’s chairs all around it for all nine of us to sit in when we gather in that room to pray at night. And a lot of times, especially if it’s in summer break, or a Christmas break or things like that. On that table in the middle, we will get a puzzle. And so what a tradition we’ve done is we’ll come together, we’ll pray together as a family, and then maybe we’ll spend ten or 15 minutes a night working on the puzzle after we pray. And again, that just creates like we just keep, we’ll start talking or maybe we’ll be talking about faith or family or just whatever is on our minds or in our hearts after we’re done praying. And it just again, it kind of makes that experience special, that we’re not just praying and then leaving, but staying together as a family and creating some meaningful moments and memories around our prayer experiences. And then finally, I just also want to talk about what we are doing to intentionally be talking about our faith during the week with our kids.

One of the things I’ve experienced from doing youth ministry all of these years is that young people, especially, love to hear miracle stories. I think whenever I’ve shared a miracle story with young people, they are captivated by it. And even with our own children, we’ve experienced this. And so my husband and I, we love talking about miracle stories. We love talking about stories like Fatima, for example. So we’ll maybe share the story of Fatima and talk about it. What must have it been like for those children to have the Blessed Mother appear to her? What would you do if the Blessed Mother appeared to you? How would you feel? What would that experience be like? And then we talked to them about the miracle of the spinning of the sun. And 70,000 people witnessed this great miracle.

And what must it have? It was like that day to be there and to be standing in the rain and to be thinking that this is some big joke. But then to have this extraordinary miracle, the sun dancing in the sky. And so we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about miracles from the Old Testament and the New Testament. And what must have the apostles or the disciples felt when they experienced Jesus and the multiplication of the lows and fish? Like, what must have been that been like when Jesus fed thousands of people with just the bread and the fish. How incredible would that have been? And so we’ll break down those stories and we’ll talk about them. And the really cool thing is now that we have series like The Chosen and so we can watch that as a family. There’s a lot of amazing movies that you can have access to, whether it’s through forms or other Catholic websites.

EWTN I know there’s many others, but just watching Catholic or Christian movies together and talking about them, talking about important issues when they come up and really bringing the faith into it and having a catechism handy like we have several catechisms very handy in our home, so that if a topic comes up, we can go, hey, what does a church teach about this? This is the topic. Or maybe the kids will have a topic that came up at school and they’re like, how do we answer this? Or what do we believe? And so we love engaging with our children about those topics and really helping them to know what the church teaches. We also just love sharing our own faith and our own miracles and our own experiences that we’ve had, my husband and I, with our children. And this is one of the things, when I teach Confirmation every year, I always talk to the parents privately. We’ll break the teens and the parents up. And one of the things that I always ask the parents to do is especially while their children are preparing for confirmation, is for them, as parents, to be sharing with their kids about why their faith is important to them? And what personal experiences have they had with God in their own life? And why does the Catholic faith mean so much to them? I know it’s so easy, and for a lot of us, our faith is so personal that it’s hard to articulate it and to share it. But these are those beautiful moments that we have as parents in really helping our own faith come alive for our children. I know that when I share my conversion experience, like, I had a conversion, my very first conversion in high school, and when I share that with my kids, they’re captivated by it and they ask questions and they want to hear more.

And when we talk to our kids about how my husband and I met and how God played such a big role in bringing us together, they love hearing about that. They love hearing the stories of when they were born and the miracles that came into place with them being born into our family, and miracles that might have happened when they were younger children, and the story of our life as a family and how God has played such a significant role in all of that. Like, they love talking about that. And so I think that whenever we can share the big miracle stories and even the small miracle stories, whether it’s maybe something that happened in the middle of the day, we all have these God moments. And then when we come home and at night, we’re having dinner and we share with each other, like, what were your God moments today? What God experiences did you have and how did he speak to you today? And when we talk about those things as a family, and it becomes comfortable and easy gosh, it’s so beautiful. But those are the things, those are the ways that we can be intentional about thinking about those types of moments that we’re trying to create in our family life. And so this podcast episode is not in any way meant to overwhelm you or to make you think like, oh my gosh, I have to be doing all of these things. No, it’s not that.

It’s just thinking about how we are making some liturgical moments in the life of our family special and meaningful? How are we making our faith come alive, whether it’s at church or in our homes? How are we exposing our children to different types of prayer experiences? How are we helping the Word of God come alive for them at different age appropriate levels? And what are we doing? For me, I think this is one of the reasons I love being Catholic. Because the things that we did with our family years ago, some of those things we’re still doing now today, some things are new and we’re always trying new things. I love learning new things and learning new ways to share the faith with our kids. And I’m sure down the road, someday when we have grandchildren, we’ll be doing some of the same traditions and then we’ll probably be doing all sorts of new things. The beauty of our Catholic faith is that it’s living and it’s full of vibrancy and there’s tradition and there’s newness and there’s all sorts of new ways that we can incorporate our faith in the world that we live in today. And so I just wanted to share this with you. These are a few things that have been on my heart, and I can’t wait to hear from you guys. What are the things that you do? What are the memories that are meaningful and important? If you have a special prayer tradition or a family tradition or a faith tradition in your home, I would love for you to share it with me.

You can email me at lorissa@madeforgrainess co. You can share it on our Made for Greatness Facebook page or Instagram page. Let’s share these ideas. If you’re in Masters, you can share it in the slack group that we have. But sharing these ideas is so valuable, you might hear somebody share a faith tradition that they do. And maybe it’s not necessarily something that you would do, but maybe you get an idea from it. It stirs an idea in your heart of something different that you might be able to do, but that you might not have ever thought of because until you heard that. And so this is the beauty of our Catholic faith.

We are a community. We’re in this together. And sharing ideas and seeing how other families are living out their faith is so incredibly inspiring. And so let’s keep doing this. Let’s keep thinking about it being intentional and helping our children to just continue to fall in love with Christ, his church, and this beautiful faith that we have. And with that, as always, my sisters in Christ, may you remember that you are Made for Greatness. Have a great week.