So first, it is often around perfectionism that keeps us from doing it. We think it has to be done first thing in the morning. We think if I can’t give it a full hour. Then it’s not right or worth it or the way that it ought to be. Something around that. You might have had a routine in the past and maybe it was one that you even really enjoyed, but that’s now the bar. And if you can’t meet that bar, then you’re like, well, I just can’t do it. 

I love that quote. Oh, I don’t know what it is, but it’s something about finding God in the pots and pans, and I really think that. Prayer can look like so many different things, and there are many kinds of prayer. 

There is rote prayer where we are praying a certain prayer over and over again. The rosary is an example of a rote prayer. If while you’re praying the rosary, that’s all your brain is doing is just praying the rosary. It’s a rote prayer. And I think rote prayer is so beautiful. You know, the Protestants really get upset at us about the, you know, rote prayers. But I have found that the rhythm of them can be really, really lovely.

But I have also found that rote prayers do not tell me what God wants me to do for my life. So there’s rote prayers, then there’s praying at God. Or we sit down and we’re like, Lord, and we just, whatever it is that we wanna say, we’re just talking and talking and talking and maybe crying and maybe shaking our fists and, you know, pouring our hearts out to him. And then we’re like, I love you. And then we leave. So that’s talking at God. 

And then there is listening to God discerning something and, and sometimes we’re discerning big things. And let’s say you’re discerning a move. You know, you’re gonna take a lot of time to discern a move and there are gonna be many sessions of discernment. And maybe we’re praying in novena and maybe we’re leaning on a particular saint. 

But then there is the discernment of today, which is, Lord what do you want me to do today? Lord, where do you want the state of my heart to be? And this is the, in my opinion, the most important kind of prayer and the prayer that we do the least.

And there are many reasons why we don’t listen to the Lord. We don’t ask questions and give him space. One of the reasons is that it’s just plain unknown and the brain is wired to be scared of the unknown. 

And this is really important because when women come to me and they, it feels like a confession, like they’re kind of confessing to me that they don’t pray, almost ever. And they’re not praying every day. 

And I could tell that they think it’s like a Mary problem or a Jane problem, and I’m like, it definitely is not. It’s just a human problem. And I’m not saying that it’s okay. We want to pray every day, but you’re not extra special broken on top of just being human. The human brain does not like things that are unknown.

The human brain also doesn’t like pain or discomfort, and one of our fears is that if we begin to ask the Lord what to do in our lives, that he is going to tell us to continue to live in great amounts of pain. And I have rarely found this to be true, by the way, and I have experienced a great deal of pain in my life.

But it is rare actually, that the Lord says to me some version of, you know, tough luck kid. Just offer it up. This is what it is. I have him. I have heard him say, I’m asking this of you today. But that is very different. I think about the bed rest years and just the amount of pain for me and, you know, my marriage and parenting and my body. Like, there was just so much pain in that time. 

And when I would talk to him, he would talk to me about today, but my brain was worried about I’m never gonna stop getting pregnant. Every pregnancy is gonna put me in bed and this is my life. This is my whole life. But it wasn’t, it was three years. It was three really difficult years.

And I don’t know if I would’ve been strong enough, you know, on day one of those three years if the Lord had said, Hey, I am gonna ask this of you for three years or three times in a row, but I didn’t need to know that. I just needed to know. Lord, what do you want me to do today? What do you want the state of my heart to be today?

And I promise that whatever he says isn’t that scary. It isn’t that painful. Oftentimes it feels like relief. It feels like less pain. And so I want you to talk back to your brain. Your brain is gonna be like, whoa, we don’t have time. But the only reason your brain is telling you that you don’t have time is because it’s trying to avoid this altogether because it is unknown and your brain thinks that the Lord is going to ask you to put more pain in your life.

And to be fair to your brain, Catholicism does kind of sound like that. If you read enough books about saints. We’ve been listening to Saints Alive. And I really like that podcast. But you know, it’s just story gruesome story of saints who endured lots of pain. 

But I just think if we got to talk to them, they would just tell us that they had enough strength, enough grace, enough courage for today. And that is how they made it through. That is how they endured. They didn’t even know they were gonna be saints.

So it’s really normal that you would decide that your brain would steer you away from praying when your life gets hard. And so I want you to just love yourself a little bit right now. I want you to say, Hey, I love you. Maybe you even want to forgive yourself. I forgive you for getting busy and not talking to the Lord. I totally understand why that happened and it’s okay. 

But he wants to talk to you today and he wants to tell you something today. He wants to tell you that he thinks you’re beautiful. He wants to tell you that he loves you. He wants to tell you that he’s with you. I hear that probably more than anything else. I love you and I’m with you, and I will tell you that whatever pain you’re experiencing, it feels better when someone genuinely says to you, I love you and I am with you right now.

When we talk to the Lord and we listen to him. You will feel relief. You will feel loved. You will feel conviction. Maybe he is asking you to do something difficult today, but you will feel this sense of I can do that. I can do it today, Lord, because he’s also wrapped you up in a blanket of love and grace.

I know that prayer is the first thing to go. That is a very human thing. When the brain fritz is out, it makes sense that the brain would choose to stop doing this, but you have got to fight for it. Like you fight for water. Just like when we forget to drink water, we get a headache or our tongue starts to feel dry.

We eventually, perhaps not as soon as we ought to, but eventually we go, oh, I need some water. But the state of your heart is the same way, and if you start paying attention to it. It will tell you, oh, it’s been too long. I’m starting to feel dry. I am starting to feel frustrated or sad. And it is because we are not letting the Lord speak to us.

And I will tell you when you dial in this habit, you can do this in five minutes. You have to be calm enough to hear him, so it might take you five minutes to calm your body down and to breathe and to really be calm. And then you can ask him, what do you want me to do today?

I was in adoration recently and I was just so upset. Like I just walked in so upset and I had so much anger in my body and so I just, I told the Lord, I was like, Lord, I’m here but I’m just not ready yet. I’m not ready. I need to calm down. And it took me a while. It really took me a while to calm down enough that I knew that I could hear what he wanted to tell me ‘ cause it’s really hard to hear someone when you’re angry. 

And remember, anger sits on top of feeling not good enough and not loved, right? It’s a blanket emotion. If you just dig deep enough, it’ll be, I’m not good enough. I’m not loved. It doesn’t always take me a long time to calm down. On that day, I was particularly upset. 

But for most of you, living regular, chaotic mom life and it is a lot of noise and chaos. You can calm yourself down in a couple minutes and you can talk to the Lord for five minutes. And it’s why we recommend in our program, 10 minutes of praying and 10 minutes of planning. And lemme just tell you, if you do the planning after the praying, the plans are so good. 

You just have great ideas. You do know how to run your home, you do know how to optimize things. But just like it’s difficult to hear the Lord when we’re very upset. It’s difficult to make good plans when we’re upset. They’re just a bit distorted.

And so when we do this, Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order challenge. Moms come because they really like the idea of the Martha challenges and the Mary challenges. But I will tell you that the real thing that we try to get them to do is to pray for 10 minutes a day and plan for 10 minutes a day. 

And if I could get every mom on the planet to do that, her life would be worlds better. This morning as I was getting the two boys ready for school, we have two boys in school now. There were just a bunch of things that went wrong. 

We didn’t have any bread. My girls make bread, and I don’t know who was in charge of it, but it didn’t get made yesterday, so we had no bread, we had no deli meat. One of the boys tripped on one of the chairs and dumped all of his eggs on the floor. He had a whole plate of scrambled eggs and sausage and dumped all of it on the floor and then cried, and he wasn’t scared. He was just sad, and I stayed calm. 

And then the boys wanted to wake up early because the school that they go to is also a farm. And if you get to school early, you get to do the farm chores. I don’t know how they’ve tricked all these kids into wanting to go to school early to do farm chores, but they have. 

And, but my husband goes to CrossFit in the morning, so we had taken my son’s school folder and last night I said, well, let’s just put it in the car right now so we don’t forget it.So we put it in the car, but then. I hadn’t thought through that we would wanna leave before my husband came back and took a different car. So his school folder was in the car. There were a couple other things. It was a lot. It was a lot this morning.

And I just stayed calm. I stayed calm. I would feel tension in my chest, and then I would breathe it out, and then I would feel tension in my chest. Like when the eggs hit the floor, and then I would breathe it out. And if you had a video camera inside my kitchen, you as moms would’ve been able to see on my face when I was like, oh, Lord, give us some strength right now.

You would’ve been able to see it on my face. But I was very calm. I was kind to the children. I did not raise my voice. I gave them space, and I had planned enough time in the morning to give them space. Because as we’re driving out, which means I’ve done all the things and gotten the boys in the car with shoes and buckles and teeth brushed.

One of them goes, can I go get an apple from the apple tree for my lunch? Which is darling, what a darling thing. And I went, yeah, we have time for that. But the only reason that I’m able to show up as a mom like this is because I talk to the Lord. 

So I don’t have another analogy other than trash cans, but like when the trash can gets full, it’s stinky and gross and it makes the whole kitchen smell and you have to empty it. And there’s just something like that about our souls that as moms, if there’s enough anger and frustration and sadness and despair, discouragement, and we’re filling up this emotional garbage can, it’s got to be cleaned out. And the way that we clean it out is with the Lord.

And sometimes I do pray the rosary or one of the rote prayers just to settle me out, but it is not the same thing as asking the Lord what to do. And I think that there are special graces from some of those prayers. I’m not saying that they’re not important, but praying the rosary every day for me did not teach me to calm down. And to be less frustrated. 

It was asking the Lord what he thought about me and what he wanted me to do today. What are we doing today Lord? Ask that question, and sometimes I will say, tell me about me because I just need to hear someone say, you’re beautiful and I love you, and I’m with you right now. And I believe in you and you can do this and it’s gonna be okay.

And I know that husbands can do that sometimes for us, but they’re not home all the time. And they’re also human dealing with their own human things. So they don’t always have the forethought to say those things to us. But the Lord is always waiting. To say those things to you, and sometimes he might ask you to do hard things, but it’s pretty rare.

I wanna say, if ever that I leave a discernment prayer with more pain than I went in, I feel like I always leave with less. I’m relieved, I feel strengthened. I feel like I can handle what’s in front of me and I feel loved. And it’s so beautiful.

So obviously you don’t need to join the Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order Program in order to pray for 10 minutes a day. You can just do that on your own and it does not need to be in the morning. That’s a perfectionist thing. There’s no right time. There is just a time that you do it. I do think we should do it every 24 hours, and it’d be better if you did it twice.

If you think about that garbage can, the more often we go to him and we clean it out, the rest of your day is gonna be better. He really wants to tell you something. He wants to talk to you every day, and your life will be so much better if you let him, if you give him that space. And it really can just be five or 10 minutes. 

And then if you want. To come learn some other really cool stuff, come join us for this challenge. It’s a seven week challenge, and we have four practical things that we’re gonna do related to your house or your car. I mean, I love cleaning things out and organizing things and systems. 

And then we have three spiritual ones. One of them is creating a Marian Inner voice where you begin to talk to yourself the way that Mary would’ve talked to herself, which wasn’t yelling at herself and telling her that she was bad and not good enough and broken.

The other thing that’s new this year is that we made a bonus of how I train my children to do chores. How you can train your children to do chores with checklists and all sorts of fun things, but most of all, you know me, what you need to think in order to be the kind of parent. That trains their kids to do chores.

I’ve never offered that before. We might offer it by itself later ’cause it’s so good. I was making it, I was like, this is so good. I feel like everybody needs this, but you can get it as a bonus to the Mary Martha Challenge. 

So if you go to catholicmomcalm.com, you can sign up. We’ll have more than a thousand women do this. We might be at 2000 this year, which is really exciting. The challenge starts September 10th. And it is. I’m going to teach you that you do have time to pray. 

And when you pray, I don’t know if this is surprising or not, but the rest of your life falls into place and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t pain or sorrow or challenges, but you just can handle them and you don’t get so angry and frustrated, but it requires coming to the father and cleaning out your soul and that is best done by listening to him. 

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