 I'm Father Dave Pavanka, Franciscan TUR and often times people will come to me and they will ask me about growing in the spiritual life. It's like I don't know if I'm growing, I can't tell if I'm growing in the spiritual life and they kind of want to know or how do you determine if a person is growing in the spiritual life. There's not this like divine dipstick that we can measure, it's like okay yeah you're definitely growing in the spiritual life. But I think maybe there is actually and that way is through the fruits of the Holy Spirit. In Patience 5 the scripture speaks about fruits of the flesh and fruits of the spirit. And the fruits of the flesh are jealousy and envy and sexual impurity and all these kinds of things. So those are the fruits of the flesh but then it begins to speak about fruits of the spirit. Patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, joy, love, peace, I mean these are the fruits of the spirit and I honestly don't think that we pay enough attention to the fruits of the spirit because they're really ways that we can see whether or not we're growing in the spiritual life. You take a moment or two and just pray and reflect it's like how am I doing my spiritual life? How am I growing? Well, ask ourselves are we growing in patience and kindness and gentleness and joy and self-control all of these fruits of the spirit help us recognize whether or not we're growing in the spiritual life. And the thing about it that I think is really really important is that the reality is it's the fruit that most people see. I mean people don't know whether or not I pray in the morning, they don't know if I get up in the morning and pray, they don't know, go to mass every day, things like that. Most of the world doesn't know. But the world can tell whether or not I'm patient, whether or not I'm generous, I'm kind, whether or not I have self-control, whether or not I have anger or frustration or envy, I mean those kinds of things the world can see and I think what we need to be able to do is pray more for the fruits of the Holy Spirit because it's the fruits of the Holy Spirit that attract other people and they say to you how is it that you can have such great joy? How is it that you can be patient when our boss is driving us crazy? You all seem to be patient and you seem to be kind. How is that that you do that? Well, I think that's the fruits of the Holy Spirit is the world recognizes that, people that you work with recognize that, people at the soccer game recognize fruits of the Holy Spirit, fruits of a life lived in relationship with Christ. So my prayer for you is that you go before the Lord and invite the Lord to bless you and invite the Lord to bring forth greater fruits of the Holy Spirit. To the degree that we live in relationship with Christ, our life is becoming more conformed with His, we produce fruit. So my prayer for you this week is that your life would produce greater fruits of the Holy Spirit and that the world would see that and ask you, what is it that gives you joy? How is it that you can be so patient? How is it that you don't gossip? May Almighty God pour His blessings on you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.