In general, the amount of information that we’re receiving is more than it’s ever been, and it’s so charged with negative emotion. Almost all of it is designed to get you to act, and so. It has some sort of, oh no, there’s something wrong. There’s some scarcity, there’s some lack. You need to solve something. Right now, it’s no surprise then that we all feel anxious. 

Now, there are obviously different levels of anxiety. It’s normal to feel a little bit anxious and bring awareness to a situation. To be ready to act right? Let’s say you are walking in a forest at night. You want to be a little bit anxious. You want to have your ears open and be listening for the sound of cracking branches behind you. 

That is an appropriate time to be thinking about your surroundings and to feel the feeling of anxiety and to decide what you’re going to do. The problem is we now feel this almost all the time from the moment we wake up till the moment that we go to sleep. And it’s hurting our bodies, and it’s hurting our souls, and it is very, very far from the way that God wants us to live. 

So earlier this year, I ran a challenge called Screenless. Encouraging women to get off their phones, and I’m gonna retool that challenge a little bit. I designed it so that it was a 40 day challenge that you could do over Lent, and after doing it, I just realized that that’s the wrong way to talk about it because this isn’t a temporary thing. You need to get off your phone.

A significant amount of the time for the rest of your life is not a like, oh, I’m giving up sugar for a Lent kind of thing, and then I’m gonna integrate it back into my life. We have got to put our phones and the rest of our screens. For some of you, it might be your laptop or your tablet in their proper place, and protect our brains more.

This is very, very important, and as I was thinking about how people lived throughout time. How they carved out time to pray and what that prayer looked like. I’m often brought back to the imagery of, you know, provincial France where towns were built around churches and the church was just built into the daily rhythm of life, right?

So the bells would chime and people would stop and they would pray. The Angelus 6:00 AM. Is it six? noon, and six? I forget about whether the Angelus is all those times, but then there were also the liturgy of the hours, right? And those are six, nine, noon, three, six, and nine. 

And it was so much more built into our lives to just take a moment, not an hour, just a few minutes to bring our hearts back to the Lord, to kind of cleanse them of the anxieties of the day. And to feel that oneness with him, to feel the goodness of God and how much he loved us and how he takes care of us. 

So you were never very far from these moments when something in the world might come up and make you feel a little bit scared or anxious or feel like you’re lacking in something, but then you would anchor pretty quickly after that back to the Lord. 

Hallowed be thy name, trusting the Lord. Knowing that he’s good, surrendering it to him, giving it back to him and just saying, you know what, Lord? You take care of it. You take care of it. It’s one of the reasons why I love that surrender novena so much because when you read it, you just, you almost feel foolish like a child where the Lord is like, what are you doing? Why are you trying to carry that? That’s not for you to carry. It’s not a problem. I’ve got it. 

And so we surrender it to him and we just say, Jesus, you take care of everything. And my guess is the vast majority of you are just going from, you know, anxious thing to anxious thing to anxious thing. Loud kids. The world is loud. The nervous system’s fritzed out, and we’re not resetting it. We’re not going back to our factory settings of love and trust and surrender and peace and joy, and freedom and gratitude and awe. These words are so important.

And they are what we naturally feel when we just take a minute to pray, to meditate on the word of God. And that doesn’t necessarily mean pulling out your Bible, although I’m a big fan of that. But just picking something that comes to your mind and meditating on it. Like even just a phrase, I am the light of the world. Be anxious for nothing. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We knew that we were gonna have to renew our minds. It’s written right there.

This is a def Coni situation you guys, and here’s why it’s so important in your attempt to live in the world and solve all of the problems that the world is throwing at you. You’re just receiving whatever the world is throwing at you and trying to catch it and then be like, oh, okay, I’ll solve this, and it throws you another one. Oh, okay, I’ll solve that. 

I want you to float outside all of that and realize that you were made for heaven. You are made for communion with the saints. You are made for peace and love and joy and gratitude and awe. I really love this word. Awe. I think we need to bring it back and make it cool again. How awesome our God is because when you really think about who he is and what he’s done for you, it inspires this great glowy, buzzy feeling of awe.

Wow. Lord, you are so good. Thank you for doing that for me. Thank you for giving me this life. We’re filled with awe and wonder and gratitude, and you wanna fall on your knees and say, bless you, Lord. Praise be the name of the Lord. 

And we’ve just kind of lost that and we didn’t lose it. It’s there. It’s in the background and we’ve just chosen to pick up other things. And so I really wanna invite you to put your phone down. First of all, start putting that thing in its place. Start creating an entire hour where you don’t touch it.

See how long you can go in the morning without looking at it. See if you can put it away to eight o’clock and not look at it until you wake up the next morning. Like just start playing these games with yourself. Where you fight for not looking at screens, and then every time you feel anxiety in your body, I want you just to ask yourself, will I care about this in 20 years? You can pick a different timeframe if you want, but 20 is a pretty good one. Well, I care about this in 20 years. 

And that doesn’t mean that we will then float through the world with apathy and not have charity for other people. But you just won’t charge the situation with as much feeling. So let’s just say, a lot of you are sports parents and I think you have to get a physical for your kid and maybe some other paperwork and get their stuff, whatever the stuff is before false sports starts.

And let’s say you missed one of the deadlines. And you’re just feeling so badly about it, and you feel like a bad mom, and you feel like you’ve let down your kid and then of course your brain will say, you’re such a mess and you’re all over the place and you’re so disorganized and you procrastinate everything and something’s really wrong with you. You’re never gonna figure this out.

That’s a pretty terrible way to live. And instead, if you just came in with so much love and kindness, like, you know what, we’ve had a really beautiful full summer and yeah, I miss this thing, but I’m pretty sure we can solve it. Let’s call the doctor. Let’s schedule that physicals, see if we can still sign up the kid for the sports and do the paperwork thing.

And in 20 years, no, I’m not gonna be upset about this. It’ll be a small thing, so let’s treat it like a small thing now, and maybe I’m gonna just stop and take 10 minutes to pray, 10 minutes to reconnect with the Lord and remember his goodness and his providence. If you’re feeling super stressed, I like to ask myself, you know, what am I believing right now? That’s not true. 

Because if I was walking in the truth, if I was believing in the goodness of God, I wouldn’t be feeling this way right now. And I just wanna say one more time that contextual stress. Is good, right? So if you were, this is, I dunno why this is an extreme vision that just came to my mind, but you’re like hanging off the side of a rock, okay?

You wanna feel stress in your body, you want cortisol. You’re like, how are we gonna get off the side of this cliff? Back up onto safety, right? But even being late, even missing deadlines, even having a kid whose heart is really crunched right now, maybe they just. You know, receive some rejection in their life and you’re watching them process that.

Maybe your husband is having a hard day at work and he’s kind of stomping around being a grumpy bear right now. All these things you can just go, this is okay. I can handle this right now. God is with all of us, and this will feel small in 20 years. And that is so much more true for when we are in heaven. 

I’ve been reading this book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven by Dr. Peter Cret. It’s great, and it just talks about the community of saints, the oneness, the fact that we’ll just know everything, which even stretches my brain because it’s constrained by my actual human brain, and by time cannot conceptualize knowing everything.

But do you think you’re gonna be in heaven and be like, oh, do you remember August of 2025? And that thing that was so stressful? You might remember the details, but it will not carry the emotional charge. And I heard that the other day that wisdom is being able to relive a memory with no emotion or no negative emotion.

And when we heal things from our past, that’s exactly how it feels. You can look at something that was difficult and think of it almost wistfully or with fondness or with compassion. Or with gratitude that it made you who you are today. Wisdom is being able to see that thing and how it served you and how it was good, and how God either intended for that to happen to create a change in you or allowed it to happen to create a change in you. 

So beautiful. So we can just get there already. This is not a big deal. This does not need to feel so emotionally charged. God is good. Our freedom is in him. Our hope is in him, and I’m a big fan of music. 

I’m gonna be coming out with some more just lovely prayers and meditations set to music because I think in this modern age where our brains are so like they’re just chattering so much, it’s hard for us to quiet them down, and I think the music really helps with that. To settle our brains. 

And Hallow has a bunch of lovely ones. If you wanna go look at the Hallow app or the Amen app. It’s a similar thing, but from the Augustine Institute, but I’m gonna come out with some ones here. My guess is in October specifically for moms.

But I want you to know that it’s possible. To take care of the things that are in your life, the people, the home that you have. If you have a job, your marriage, your body, your prayer life. It’s just really possible to do all of those things from a place of peace. And you’re gonna lose your peace, but you can bring it right back. 

And the more angers you have throughout the day, like the angelus, like the liturgy of the hours, the lighter the work is going to feel. Because if you only go three hours in between, you know, connecting with the Lord and really just feeling in your heart how much he loves you and how safe you are and how protected and how much he provides for you.

And then the world kind of pokes at you and creates those anxieties and fears, but you’re only ever three hours away from coming back to him. The load is not as heavy as if it’s been seven days, and now we’ve got seven days of, you know, cortisol and stress and anxiety built up, and then we’re asking him to clean it out and come back to him.

So I wanna encourage everyone to begin putting their phone away anchoring to the Lord. And one of the things that I think is so beautiful about Catholicism are just the many, many, many devotions that you can choose from. 

I love the St. Bridget prayers. I love the rosary. I love the Divine Mercy Chaplain and the Angelus is very short, even just praying the Our Father, if you slow that down and just really meditate on the words of the our Father and say it three times very slowly, it is the power to change your life.

Be not afraid. Be anxious for nothing. Peace be with you. My peace I leave with you. This is what he wants for us, not this monkey circus that the world is giving us. And I love the fall because it’s such a wonderful time to reset. To reset and come back to order. There’s kind of like the loveliness and the free spirit of the summer.

Which might be a little chaotic, but the fall brings back structure and rhythms. And I want this fall for you to minimize your screens and increase the anchors that you have to the Lord. And if you want to do that with me, I want you to come join Mary’s heart and Martha’s order. It is now open. We start September 10th.

I have my, it includes some things for you to do before then you don’t have to do them, but I just, you know, for some of you who get excited and you wanna sign up right now, you’ve got a couple weeks until we actually start. So I’ll have some things for you to do, but you could also start on September 10th and you wouldn’t have missed anything for the challenge.

We’re doing four Martha Challenges, which are really practical things like cleaning out your car and setting your car up as your own personal assistant so that it can help kind of save you when you’re out from the house. I think cars are really helpful and we really under utilize them, as being our assistant and leaning on them.

And then we have three Marian challenges now, of course, in Mary and Martha. The Mary is the Mary of Bethany at the foot of Jesus, where she has chosen instead of preparing the meal to sit at the feet of Christ and to listen to him and soak up his teachings. 

But I think in order to be more like Mary of Bethany, we need to be more like our blessed mother Mary. She’s the perfect example for that. And so our Marian challenges are really related to Mary the mother of God so that we can look like Mary a Bethany at the feet of Christ. 

And I’m gonna encourage you to pray for 10 minutes a day and to plan for 10 minutes a day. And so our morning audio has a lovely prayer and some music and then a lovely chime that lets you know that it’s been 10 minutes and then you’re gonna drop into this prayerful planning with Christ.

I think so many of us are planning our to-do list from our masculine energy, from our, I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough resources. I’m super stressed, energy, and we’re not great thinkers. And I think that often blocks our ability to hear the Holy Spirit. Now, can God overcome that? For sure, and sometimes he does.

But when we feel very close. To Christ and very held by God the Father, and open to listening to the Holy Spirit. And then we plan our week or our day, you’ll get so much more clarity. You’ll have these ideas that just feel quite frankly, divinely inspired and it will help you. Organize your life better, which is the Martha thing that we all want.

We don’t actually want to be drowning. We don’t want to think that we’re a hot mess. We want to be prepared. But I think the reason that we’re not prepared is because we’re living in reaction land instead of praying in a cloud of grace where the Lord is guiding our pencil as we’re making the plans.

And then, with your newfound time, and you will have more time. I promise you, if you do what I teach in this challenge, you will have more time because you will not be emotionally a mess. It actually takes quite a bit of time and energy to be an emotional mess, and so when we quiet that down, at first it feels weird.

You’ll be like, Ooh, I feel weird. Something’s wrong. What should I be doing right now? And you’ll have to retrain your body to go, oh, this is what calm feels like. This is what being emotionally regulated feels like. It just feels quiet. And then you can decide what to do with that time and that energy. I’m going to recommend anchoring yourself to Christ more throughout the day.

Now, do I think overnight you should become someone who prays the liturgy, the hours, and the rosary, and the Divine Mercy Chapel and the Angelus and ghost to daily mass and adoration? No, I do not. I think that in that 10 minutes of praying and 10 minutes of planning, you should ask the Lord. Lord. What do you want me to do? What would you like me to add? How can I bring my heart to you? 

And then do that, but let’s decrease the amount of time we’re touching our phones. There’s no peace to be found there. My friends, just the world, just chaos and anxiety and stress. And now you know, I’m not team get rid of the phones. I like my phone, I like Google Maps. I like being able to text people, but it does not own me. It sits on a shelf somewhere.

And I do not touch it very often, and it has taken me several months to get there, but the reward is so great. 10 minutes of praying, 10 minutes of planning. And then each of the seven weeks of the challenge, we’re gonna do either a Mary Challenge or a Martha Challenge. It’s super fun, by the way, we did this last year and it was so fun. 

The energy of the group is really, really high and it’s just so encouraging and one of my favorite things that I didn’t know was gonna come out of this challenge when we did it for the first time last year, was just the sharing of mom hacks.

Right Moms just sharing, oh, here’s what I did and here’s what we solved, and here’s a really cool thing that helps in this area of the house. And so that was just kinda a surprising benefit of this challenge was just the sharing of mom hacks. But I really do think a good hack can make your life better.

But the ultimate hack is what the challenge is about, which is 10 minutes of praying and 10 minutes of planning. And eventually I would love for everyone to do that twice a day, once at the beginning of the day and once at the end. But just once a day is what we ask. We’re just gonna start with 20 minutes a day. You can give me 20 minutes a day for the hope of having more peace and order in your life. 

And it is always anchored in Christ. Our peace comes from him. It actually doesn’t come from time. Or planners or check boxes, it comes from him. But we’ve got to give him the space and we’ve got to set down the things of the world in order to receive the peace that he has for us. 

So please, my friends, dial down the noise of the world and dial up. Your ability to hear the Holy Spirit and to receive grace, and to live in peace and joy and gratitude and awe, let us be in awe of him and he’s bringing this challenge at the perfect time for you. You will have that feeling like, yes, this is exactly what I need right now. 

So you can click a link in the show notes. You can go to catholicmomcalm.com/marymartha. anywhere that you find me, you’ll be able to find a link to this. We start on September 10th. I am very excited. It’s cheaper if you sign up before August 31st, so we have early bird pricing until August 31st. So definitely sign up before then. 

And this year for the first time ever, we also have the option of you can upgrade it to get a physical notebook. We made this just absolutely beautiful notebook. And for those of you that just love physical things and planners and you want a paper, and I’m one of those people, we’ll ship that directly to your house. 

So I love you. I am praying for you. I am on a mission for moms to stop being so mean to themselves and to enjoy this life and to feel more peace. He did not put us here to feel like a wreck every day, all day. Let’s stop doing that. 

All right, my friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.