 Bill's checks in the mail. I wasn't sure who he was talking about. I honestly can't promise we could ever be as good as he thinks we are, but we'll try. And we do have to stand here tonight on this stage. It's a great honor. The last time we came anywhere close to standing on this stage was a year ago when our oldest daughter graduated from the counseling program here at Franciscan University. A year after her brother graduated from the master's in counseling program here at Franciscan University, we're heavily in gratitude to this university for helping us as a family and as an institute to serve all of you and the church. So thanks be to God, and thank you, Franciscan University. And it's very humbling to be here in so many ways. I've got to ask, is Dr. Alan Trekk here? Nancy, you guys? Well, Alan did our marriage prep. And I don't know if you know from there with Dr. Alan Trekk's work, but he fixed your here. And just Alan and his wife, Nancy, just tremendous blessings to us. So we're very grateful for their work and all the work that Franciscan University does. But I have to say that the coolest thing about being invited to speak here, I don't know, you know, Bill mentioned that we live in Steubenville. And when you come up on campus, it's impossible to find a parking space. Being invited as speakers, we both got our own parking space. It was so cool. We were joking last night like we were trying to figure out whether we should both drive up separately. In the end, we decided to just take one car and park it diagonally in Cackle. Ha ha ha ha ha. All right, before we get started, I promised our social media person that I would get a picture of all of you. So everybody say, Jesus. One, two, three. There you go, perfect, thank you. All right, so that's it. We're gonna ask you three questions. Now, it's kind of one of our things. We have an ongoing contest to see who the rowdiest bunch of Catholics is in the whole country, really, in the world at this point. But now you've had Bob warming you up, so you better be the best. All right, so we're gonna ask you three questions. We just want you to shout out a yes or a no. Tell us what you think about the answer to this. But number one, do you want to supercharge your ministry? Yes! Oh, they are good. We usually have to ask people to do that twice. We don't. Good job, all right, so that's number one. Number two. Okay, do you want to fill your churches with vibrant, believing Catholics? Yes! Yes, and big question here. Do you want to heal families and help them fall in love both with God and each other? Yes! Awesome, awesome, praise God. Well, look, in order to do that, we have to find a way though to actually start partnering with the families that we serve. That's right, we have to find a way to empower families to become the heart of the new evangelization, and we're gonna help you take a look at that tonight. Because you know what, in reality, I think that we're up against a big hill when it comes to that idea, right? Because the world has really lost the sense of what family truly is. In essence, I think the world's view of family is any group of individuals living under the same roof ensuring a data plan, right? But the church says something more about family life, and we are blessed and privileged to proclaim that Catholic vision of family life to the families that we serve into the world at large. It's true. This vision that the church lays out for us is so different than what average people think family life is and so much better than what the world is telling people family life is. In Familiaris Consortio, we're reminded that the family is the building block of civilization. In paragraph 21, it says, parents should exercise their unrenounceable authority as a true and proper ministry. That is, as service to the human and Christian well-being of their family. Now, this is a really powerful statement. The idea that family life itself is a ministry. That's a particularly Catholic insight. The idea that marriage and family life is a ministry. Well, you know, when we think about ministry, we usually think about doing, you know, churchy stuff you do at church, right? Being electors of ministry, being increased minister, being a DRES minister, you know, doing charity work as ministry. But we don't often think of marriage and family life as a ministry. But what is ministry when it comes right down to it? Ministry is any activity that communicates God's love to another person. That's what ministry is. Any activity that communicates God's love to another person. And Pope Saint John Paul the Great is saying here that parenting is that foundational primordial ministry whereby moms and dads communicate their God's love to each other first and then to their children and together as a family, bring that love out to the world as they take their show on the road, right? And over and over we see that theme coming out again and again, not just in Familiaris consortio, but in Lubengensium, where it talks about how the family is, so to speak, the domestic church. And parents, by their word and example, should be the first preachers of faith to their children. In Evangelium Vite, Pope Saint John Paul the Great lays out what I think is probably the mission statement for all Catholic families. By word and example, in the daily round of relations and choices and through the concrete actions and signs, parents lead their children to authentic freedom, actualize the sincere gift of self and they cultivate in them a respect for others, a sense of justice, cordial openness, dialogue, generous service, solidarity, and all the other virtues that help us live life as a gift. What a great mission statement for what Catholic families are called to live out in their relationships in the home as well as in their relationships with each other. And again and again the documents of Vatican II, you see these themes of domestic church in family as ministry, parenting as ministry, and it's a powerful unique insight that the church offers to the world. But of course that leaves you as ministry professionals responsible for prevent, I can't talk tonight, that's not good, responsible for presenting this brand new vision to them, certainly not the 2,000 years of the church, that family life is and call Catholic families to be models of this kind of family life. The church's model of family life is the blueprint that we must be encouraging Catholic families to live out. Where a family is, number one, the domestic church, where the faith is experienced as the source of the warmth in the home and where Jesus is experienced as an active, involved, loving member of their day-to-day family life. Number two, oh excuse me, number two. Go ahead. Family life is the forage of intentional discipleship. And we have a tendency to think that intentional disciples are just grown-ups, and many of those are grown-ups who have fallen away from the church for a while and we've gone out and found them and dragged them back. Well, that's a therapeutic approach to ministry. We need to be taking a formational approach to ministry where we expect families to practice intentional discipleship in the home and raise their children to be intentional disciples from the ground up. That's the model in acts, that's the model God calls us to today. Number three is the family is the primary. I'll take some applause for that. Praise Jesus. Number three is the family is the primary engine of evangelization and social change. The family, not the institutional church, is best equipped to identify and meet the needs of the people on the margins. There are a lot of people hurting, we know it, but there are a lot of people who will never darken the door of a church. They'll never be a recipient of the great ministries of the church, but they are our brothers, our sisters, our aunts, our uncles, our cousins, our neighbors, and our coworkers, and families can reach these people in a way that the institutional church could never do. As domestic churches, Catholic families are outposts of evangelization and social change, and you, my brothers and sisters, who take on the great work that you do, have the power to enable families to do this in a way that no one else in the church can. Yeah, all right, amen. But let's face it, okay, those are all beautiful sentiments. They all sound great on paper, right? The reality is it's difficult, and a lot of times we, at best, think of the families we serve as passive beneficiaries of pastoral services, or let's face it, rocks around our neck, right? I mean, because they get in their way, they complain, they just drop off their kids for babysitting, they don't take it seriously, complain, we hear all the time. They wanna be rubber-stamped. It can drain you, we understand. But the reality is those things that we complain about all the time in pastoral ministry and parish ministry, those are opportunities. That's a challenge that the Holy Spirit is giving us to say, what are you going to do to form these folks who are hungry? You know, who are here, who are bringing their children for whatever reason, they don't even necessarily know why, but the Holy Spirit is speaking to them, and we have the ability, through God's grace, to bring that to light for them. So this whole, but the challenge, there is kind of an inertia in the church about family ministry. In general, we just came from the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers Conference in Lafayette, Louisiana, where we were speaking to this very thing. And this idea of family life as a ministry, or families as partners in ministry, is really new to Vatican II and the universal call to holiness. In the early church, for the first couple of hundred years, there was this idea, of course, baptizing entire families, having the mass in the home, and you would see this kind of coming out of the role that family played in sustaining the church and spreading the gospel. But then it kind of falls out of fashion for about 1500 years, until Vatican II comes along and you start seeing these themes again, where it's not just the religious and clerical class that are called to holiness, but everyone is called to holiness, and families and marriages in particular are a unique way that God manifests his love in the world. But even so, even though there's been a lot of beautiful writing on the higher level of that theology of marriage and family life, there's still no practical, systematic Catholic theology of the domestic church, per se. For instance, most of what we think of as Catholic spirituality is borrowed from that monastic and clerical tradition. And it's beautiful, but a lot of it doesn't really fit very neatly into the messiness of family life. I mean, how often do we here on the radio program or in our counseling work, you know, I used to have this great prayer life until I got married and had kids, right? Yeah, and you're chuckling because you identify with that in some degree. Why? Because it's really hard to sit and meditate with 10 kids crawling all over you, right? It's really hard to do a lot of those things that we think of as quote-unquote Catholic spirituality in the mess of family life. We need... And it's really hard to feel holy for five minutes when the person standing next to you, no matter how tall or short they are, is getting on your last nerve and you can't get away. We're throwing up on you, right? Yeah, exactly. But the reality is family life is a domestic church. It is a religious community of its own kind with its own character and its own strengths. We need to work together to do a better job of articulating what that dynamic, domestic church-based spirituality would look like, but it's definitely there, and I believe the teachings are there to be able to tease that out as we go. We're gonna suggest some different ways to move forward with this idea and help families become what they are. And I just wanna add to what Greg is saying. Not only do we have monastic tradition as sort of the lead in the church so that domestic churches, families, don't really understand where their sense of holiness comes in, but we've got a lot of good Catholic families out there who are hungry, who desperately wanna serve Jesus and have him dwell in their home, but there's not a lot yet, as Greg was saying, of good theology on how to do this. We're part of an initiative to start a lot of this and we're excited about it, and we're hopefully, by next year, be able to really tell you what that's all about and make it open to you. But our Catholic brothers and sisters, mostly our sisters, are going to different sources to try to figure out how to be holy in their marriages and with their kids. And those sources are often evangelical Christian sources, which they're enormous. You know, you put how to raise your kid in Christ into a search engine and you're gonna get a lot of evangelical stuff. The other place they're finding it a lot is in the Mormon church because the Mormon church knows that people want holy families, that people want solid families, and so they're putting it out there. They're saying, you wanna connected family? We've got all this stuff for you to be part of. We've got family home evenings where every Monday night, we get together with our family and we play games and we teach about our faith and look how connected we all look. Look at these great families. Look at these great marriages. And our Catholic parishioners are looking at those sources online. And they're not becoming authentically Catholic families because they're trying to cut and paste what they're finding elsewhere. They need you to fill in that gap. And when you are the one on the front lines of, oh, you want your baby baptized? Oh, you want your child to receive their sacraments? You're it. You're the representation. You're the person they're barely opening the door to to help them become the holy families they're called to be. But we'd like to suggest that forming people, children, especially in the sacraments, and even supporting their families in that sacramental preparation can't end with the rituals that happen in the four walls of the church building. It has to, we have to teach them how to live that out in the domestic church and celebrate that at home so that our families can be those three things. Dynamic domestic churches forges of intentional discipleship and outposts and primary engines of evangelization and the social change. But in order to do that, we would like to suggest as a starting point for your own creativity because you know your community's best and you know how to communicate this effectively to the people you serve. We'd like to suggest three habits that will help families live out this vision that we've been articulating in the first part of our talk. Number one is we need to teach families to celebrate a meaningful, dynamic, and family-friendly prayer life. A prayer life that allows parents and children to experience Jesus in a personal way and to receive the grace that allows a family to learn to love each other as God loves them. Secondly, we need to teach families to celebrate a sacramental worldview in their home, to be able to see all the mundane, boring, frustrating tasks of family life from doing dishes to changing diapers to paying bills and all the rest as moments of grace where God really is reaching out to them, communicating his love, his providence, his mercy, his care, and calling them into deeper communion with each other and with him as well. And number three, we need to teach families to discover their mission and their charism that will allow their family to make a positive difference in each other's lives and the lives of those around them. So let's look at each of these things in a little more detail, starting with number one, a meaningful domestic church-based spirituality and family-friendly prayer life. You know, a lot of people don't like to pray with anybody else, especially a family member, because they think that their prayer life is a private thing. But we have to help people understand that prayer is a very intimate thing. It's a very personal thing. It can even be a very vulnerable thing, but it is never a private thing. No, in fact, Catechism 2565 says that prayer is Christian insofar as it is communion with Christ and extends throughout the church which is his body. In other words, prayer is always communal. We are never less alone than when we're praying. It's never a less private moment in a sense than when we're praying because when we pray, we pray with the entire communion of saints and angels and the entire body of Christ. We're never less alone than when we pray. As Lisa just said, prayer is certainly personal. It is definitely intimate and it is vulnerable, but it is not private. It is communion building. And when people say, you know, I'm really uncomfortable with this idea of couple prayer or family prayer, what they're really saying is I have a hard time being vulnerable. Now that's okay, it's good to admit that, all right? But we have to kind of acknowledge that that fear of vulnerability stands as a block to intimacy, both on the human level and the divine level. If we're not willing to be vulnerable with each other, with our children, with God, it's like being surrounded by air, but walking around holding our breath. What good does it do us? We can't breathe it in, we can't experience it, so we pass out exhausted and burned out. And the same thing's true when we don't have a prayer life as a couple or as a family, God is pouring out His grace, trying to teach us how to love each other with the love that comes from His heart, but we can't absorb it unless we're willing to sit down together and be vulnerable with each other in the presence of that master who is teaching us those lessons of love. And it's Catechus, we ask you to help these families baby step into that vulnerability to be able to open the door to more than just saying words at God. Too many Catholics think that praying is just saying words at God. I said my rosary, I said my divine mercy tablet, I said my novena, and we hope that the words that somebody else has given us will bridge the gap between us and God. And through God's grace, it usually does, but it can be deeper, it can be better, it can be more personal. When you as Catechus begin to teach at every opportunity you have with these people, whether they're walking in the door for the very first time with an infant that they wanna have baptized, or on and on when you see these kids in Vacation Bible School, when you see them at whatever you're doing as part of your job. Make that an opportunity to show them how to pray a little bit differently, a little bit more vulnerably, a little bit more from the heart and help them to walk through that. Not at all. And that's not knocking formal prayer, I wanna be clear about that. Not at all. We're not picking on the rosary or the our fault, I mean, good heavens, the Lord's Prayer is the Lord's Prayer. It doesn't get any better than that, okay? But having said that, it's only possible to experience the deep, rich meaning of those formal prayers if we know how to bring our heart to them and be vulnerable in them. So for example, let's say that you've got people who love the rosary. Help them to understand that it's not just saying the words, okay? It's really meditating for that full 10 Hail Marys. On what is God trying to say to me through this? What virtue is he trying to call out in me? How would I be feeling if I was Mary in this situation, Jesus in this situation, Peter in this situation? Whoever that is and meditate on that in a way that leads them more into the wisdom and grace of Christ. You know, Pope John Paul II once said that the antidote to all Eastern religion, all forms of meditation has been with us for centuries and that is the rosary when we know how to pray it, not just say it. And you know, this whole idea kinda cuts the heart, you know, when you talk about doing this in family life, when you describe that, Lisa, I know lots of people feel overwhelmed because like, oh my gosh, you know, now this is gonna be a 12 hour rosary. 12 hour rosary. I mean, it was hard enough to get my kids to sit still for a 12 minute rosary. Now you're gonna, but that's not the point. The point is, if you can do five Hail Marys reflecting on this mystery in a meaningful way, that's better than anything else that you would do. One decade where your kids, even if they're tiny, can color the picture from one of the amazing coloring books that are out there on the rosary and you ask them, how do you think Mary felt in this situation? How do you think Jesus would feel? How would you feel seeing Jesus go through that? It takes five minutes, but it draws your family closer into the experience of Christ and the fact that he went through everything that we went through and he wants to love them through it. In our books, Discovering God Together, the Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids, and in our newest book, that just came out in April from Word Among Us Press, Praying For and With Your Spouse, The Way to Deeper Love, we try to articulate what would a marriage and family-based spirituality really look like, that fits into the messiness of family life and actually is meaningful and dynamic. And we try to walk people through how to cultivate their own ways of doing a family-friendly morning prayer, how to do family blessings, not just the parents, the children, but the kids to the parents as well. We have a story we can tell about that if we have time. A meaningful Grace at Meals, relational bedtime prayer, and the idea of even introducing things like active contemplation through scriptural meditation that's family-friendly. But let's go back to that idea of family blessings. I really want you to tell that story about that because I think it's so powerful. Well, this is something that we have practiced in our family for a long time where when I'm waking the kids up in the morning, I'll go through and just wake them up. Once I know that they can hear me past the yawning, I'll just say, Lord, please bless Lilliana today, give her a great day, help her to know how much you love her and how much I love her, help her with whatever's going on in her life right now, and just give her joy today and let her know that you're in her life. And I always did things like that, and sometimes we would ask our kids to do that for us at bedtime or before we went to work or something like that. But there was one day where the idea of families blessing each other, God decided to make it really, really real in our home. And it was a day where I was having a really lousy day. There's just no mincing words. I was having a lousy day with the kids. They were cranky, they were whiny, they were fighting with each other. The dinner was boiling over on the stove. I was trying to get things ready for him to come home from work. It was a hot mess. And I was standing at the sink and over my sink is a window and I managed to look out at the trees and lift my eyes to the sky and say, blessed mother, please pray for me because I can't take it another minute. And thank God, the Holy Spirit just whispered in my heart and said, oh really, okay, Mary's praying for you, but how about getting them to pray for you? And I felt it so deeply. I ran out the sponge, turned off the water and I said, kids, come over on the couch. Well, they thought they were in for it. The look on their faces, they went pale. And I sat down and I took a deep breath and I said, guys, I can't do this another minute. This has been a really crummy day and I don't wanna be the cranky nasty mother that is about to unload on you. Can you please pray for me? Now at the time, my oldest were about five and three years old and suddenly their little hands crept over one on my shoulder and one on my knee and I started to hear the words, God, please help mommy feel better. And the other one said, please help us behave better so we don't make mommy mad. And the other one said, Lord, please help us love you and love her. And boy, did the water work start. And in that moment, the Holy Spirit came over our family with a sense of peace, like I cannot even begin to explain to you. Not only because my kids loved me enough to lift me up to God, but because in that moment, they learned their power as ministers of Christ. They learned that they could affect change in our family with the help and the grace of God and that even their parents were nothing more than disciples on the road with them to Christ. And when you bring that kind of prayer life, simple, spontaneous, full of love, heartfelt into a family, as you can teach your families, it changes everything. And I am very humbled and very blessed to say, my kids have never strayed from God. They are dynamic, faithful Catholics to this day as adults, because as tiny children, they learned how to pray and open their hearts to God without judgment, without expectation. And you need to be able to share that and teach that to other Catholic people because it's not taught in the classroom and it's not taught many places, but you have that ability to share that with those you serve. And it all begins with an invitation. You know, when those people come to you for marriage prep, you know, turn off the DVD for a second and put down the book for a second, I promise you can pick it back up. But I want you to then ask them, have you guys ever prayed together? And you're gonna get this deer in the headlights look. Oh God, what's coming next? And then just say, well, you know, if you haven't, let me just show you how. And you ask them to just close their eyes and imagine talking to the person who knows them best and loves them most and just to share their heart. And then you start, you know, Lord, please bless this couple. You know, let them know how much you love them and let them love each other with the love that comes from your heart and help them know all the things that you have in store for them and all the blessings that you want to give them and let them live that out in their lives and in the world, amen. And you say, you know, look, that was 15 seconds. But it's 15 seconds a day that's gonna change your life. You can do the same with the kids where you just ask them after when mom and dad are picking them up, you just ask mom and dad to stay and just say to the kids, just take a minute and pray for mom and dad right now. And just enter into the chance to let them share prayer together in little bits and pieces because it will begin to change every moment of their lives. Let's go to the second habit, a sacramental worldview. You know, a sacramental worldview means recognizing that family life itself is sacred, that God is speaking to us and loving us through those mundane tasks of everyday life and that family life is a ministry that allows all the members and calls all the members to grow in love and grace. Now, in order to do all this stuff, you gotta have time as a family to be together, which is kind of counter-cultural because a 2017 study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that about the family spend on the average about 20 minutes together every day. Now, you can't disciple your kids in that kind of contact, especially if it's all, you know, pick up your shoes, hurry up, get on the bus, what are you doing? You know, and then you're talking to each other, you know, from the back seat of the car and that's part of the reality. But the point in this is that we have to encourage our families to be intentional about family life because what I just described is the kind of family life that happens when we're not really thinking that family life deserves time and energy and effort. It's the kind of family life that happens when we think, well, family life is gonna happen after everything else is done. And that's when you end up with the kind of family that's a group of individuals living under the same roof and sharing a data plan. And that's when you end up having regrets because you say, I always wanted to pray more with my kids, I always wanted to connect more with my spouse, I always wanted to have that kind of family and there was just never time. We have to learn to prioritize these rituals of connection that will allow families to really understand how sacred they are. And there are two habits under this. Lisa just mentioned the first one, rituals of connection. The other habit that we encourage families to practice as a way of cultivating the sacramental worldview is what we call the corporal works of mommy and daddy. Now, we'll explain both of those in just a minute, but let's start with this idea of rituals of connection. These rituals of connection are really the four sacred pillars of family life, of the domestic church, okay? They're working together, talking together, playing together and praying together. And I see it, you're all going, when in heck am we gonna have time for that? It's sure, working, playing, talking and praying. Oh, and by the way, all the notes that you're taking here have been bound and put together in a wonderful book called Discovering God Together, The Raising Catholic Kids. It's available in the bookstore, sorry. Just put it out there, save your hands, you know, it's our service to you. And you can get it all there instead of having to madly take notes as we cram it into the little bit of time we have. Working, talking, praying, playing, those four pillars of the domestic church, four sacred rites of the domestic church, making not just, well, both daily appointments and weekly appointments to work, pray, talk and play together. Now again, you know, you were just saying, oh, that's gonna take forever. But it doesn't have to, not at all. In fact, it just takes a few seconds or a few minutes to begin, for example, to begin the day, you know, with a morning prayer, like you know, you go and bring your kids together, maybe instead of just screaming at them, get out of bed, get moving and run off to brush your own teeth, sit down for a minute. Say, hey guys, how you doing this morning? Let's just thank God for this new day. Lord, just thank you for this day and be with our family and help us to really love each other and take care of each other. And hey, Johnny, what were you concerned about with this? Or bless Sally's test or whatever, you know, just bring it to God right there and take that minute, literally a minute, to just connect with each other and with God. And what a difference, what a different tone that sets for the rest of the day. And that was a minute. What about a working ritual? Well, cleaning up the table after dinner together, you know, setting the table for dinner or cleaning up the family room before you go to bed, but doing it together. And well, that's just a chore. What could that possibly do for family life? What it does is it cultivates stewardship. It builds a sense of trust. I was sharing this afternoon in our workshop, I was working with a couple that truly hated each other. It was doing counseling with, you know, a lot of couples, they at least try to behave themselves in front of me. This couple were so angry with each other that they couldn't say one word to each other without the other one ripping their face off. It was ugly. So I said, look, I don't want you guys to talk to each other. Here's what I want you to do. Every day I want you to clean up the dinner dishes together. I just clear the table, wash the dishes, put them away, just clean up the kitchen. Don't say anything to each other. Just do that. They thought I was crazy. At the end of the week they came back, they'd done it. And the wife was like, you know, this sounds silly, but this really helped me trust him more because I could count on him to be there. There was just something about him showing up, even when we didn't want to be there for each other to do it and to show up for each other. And when he handed me a dish, I felt like he was in it with me. And it gave them something to build on. And if you do that every day as a family, even just one little thing like that, you're saying, I want to show up for you. I want to help take care of you. I want to make your life a little easier or more pleasant using the language of the body and showing up for each other in powerful, important ways. This is very different then. You go do this chore and you go do this chore and you go do that chore and then you can have screen time. You see the difference? There's the drawing together or there's everybody go do your individual thing. It doesn't take any longer, but the fruit is so much richer. A play ritual. You know, I mean, play a couple of cards of Uno or something. Take a walk around the block. You know, just share a laugh, just wrestle on the floor with your little ones, whatever it is. And it takes five minutes, okay? But it's five minutes that pays a huge dividend. That's why Pope Francis tells families waste time with your kids. And if you want to teach parents how to keep the hearts of their families, their children, and to be able to mentor and disciple their kids through those really difficult teen and young adult years, have them do this kind of thing. Because if not, who's playing with them? Who's doing stuff with them? They're friends. And their friends are even more clueless than the kids are, than your kids are. Because at least they maybe go to mass occasionally. But they're going to take direction from the people who do these things with them that they can count on and that they can trust. So teach the people that you counsel to be those people for their family. Those rituals of connection make your family a sacred space that feels safe, that feels close, that feels intimate, that says you are important enough to make time for. And I have to say, this might sound like, oh, they're so religious, they're at Franciscan, listen to them say all this. You know this is intuitively true. And I can tell you when you know that this is intuitively true. And that even the most secular of people intuit that this is true. When God help us, the next and the next and the next school shooting happens. What do you hear even the most secular of news anchors say? Go home and hug your children a little tighter tonight. Why are we waiting till our kids are being slaughtered to realize that they are sacred gifts from God and to go home and hug them tighter? Let's not live in regret. Let's love these kids and hug them a little tighter and play with them a little more and work alongside of them and pray with them every day so that they know how loved and cherished they are by their parents and by God. So when you're doing sacramental prep, for example, with families, one of the things you can say to them is, look guys, and this is something that any family can do regardless of their theological or spiritual preparation. You can say, you know what guys, the best thing you can do for us to help your kids learn what we're trying to teach and really live it is to create those rituals of connection around working and playing and talking and praying together because that helps create the fertile soil for the seeds that we're planting to grow in because when you do this, this is when your kids will experience the faith as the source of the warmth in their home. They're gonna look and say, there's something different about my family. We take time to be with each other. We take time to really kind of honor each other. We take time to work through things with each other and take care of each other. And I have to say this is something that you can model. You know, you are in charge of an awful lot of what goes on in your parish life and your diocesan life. Throw parish game nights for the whole families to come to, everybody bring their favorite game. You know, have pizza nights. Do things that allow families to come together. Don't always separate. It's a men's group, it's a women's group. The children are being watched over here or this is for the kids and the parents just drop them off and go off to the supermarket or the gym and then pick them up later on. Do things occasionally that are for the whole family. I mentioned this afternoon, we had a great pastor who lived by the phrase, when we meet, we eat because he knew he could get his parishioners in the door. He could cataclyse them. He could teach them to love Jesus with all their hearts because he fed their bodies. And he knew that those meals that he had in his parish would help make the meal that he consecrated every day make a lot more sense. And when we do this in our parish families and we become a parish family, families take that home and begin to understand that as well. The second suggestion we have for cultivating this sacramental worldview in the family life is again, what we call the corporal works of mommy and daddy. And I want you to tell that story. Well, if you want, we're getting very low on our time here but if you want to know it, there's a book called Don't worry about that time. There's a book I wrote called The Corporal Works of Mommy. And the Corporal Works of Mommy, the book The Corporal Works of Mommy, came into being when my son Jacob, who's my oldest, was seven years old and I was preparing him for his first Holy Communion. And when I was preparing him for his first Holy Communion, I knew that I could only get a word in edgewise to my son who ended up being the morning drive time guy on Sacred Heart Radio because he talks so well by feeding him and keeping his mouth full of food. So one morning I was making him breakfast. He was already eating a bagel and I was making some eggs. And I started to go through the corporal works of mercy for those of you who can't remember back, feeding the hungry, giving thirst to the thirsty, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked and on. And he looked up at me mouthful and says, mom, I should really call this the Corporal Works of Mommy because this is the stuff you do all day long. I had the same reaction. I said, oh, what a clever boy. And then about two minutes later, I again, thank God he dwells in my kitchen. He said, don't you get it? I never want to hear from you again, he said in my spiritual ear, that what you do is drudgery, that what you do is unimportant because it doesn't come with a paycheck. He said, what you do is what I call missionaries to do, what I call catechists to do every day but you're doing it to the least of these in your home. And you can touch their hearts with me in a way that nobody else can. What you do is vital and it changed my life. Now I already had a good relationship with God but this was profound. And this is something I want you all to know as people who share God with everyone. When you share God with the people who are closest to you, your spouses, your kids, when you are making that 950 second millionth meal of the day, when you are getting up and giving a drink of water to that kid who's asked for five of them already and really the only thing you wanna do is watch Netflix for about five or six hours or hang out with your spouse and it's gonna have a drink of water again. When you are arguing with that kid over what is appropriate to wear and what they are absolutely not allowed to wear. Those are the moments that become sacred when you say, okay, you are not just my kid that's driving me crazy, you're Jesus. You are in the embodiment of Jesus. When you do this unto the least of these, you do it unto me. And suddenly as a mom, I wasn't going, no you can't have another drink of water, get back in bed. I started to say things like, Lord, let me give this drink of water to you and then I'd walk in and say, all right honey, here's your water. Is something bothering you? Are you okay? No? All right, let's just pray that you have a good night's sleep. Now this was your last drink of water and you must stay in bed, but I love you very much and I'll see you in the morning. Do you see the difference? I didn't say, oh well my kids are Jesus, I'll just do any lame brain thing they ask me. But it gave me a sense of how sacred they were and how sacred my role as mother in their lives really is and that is empowering. And that takes Satan who's constantly telling you, your family doesn't matter, the stuff you do doesn't matter, it's only if you were in a paycheck that matters, it's only if a million people out in the world notice you that matters and it dashes Satan against a rock. The rock of the church that says the family is sacred and it's important to do what we do and it's important that you're teaching families what you teach them. And I stand here tonight in awe of all of you because you have taken on this task and I pray for each and every one of you that you can instill that sense of the sacred in the people that you serve because it changes lives. And I just want to put a word out there for all the dads too. This is not just a mom thing. We call it the poor, poor works of mommy and daddy. The reality is men have a tendency to think that doing ministry is going out and conquering the world for Christ. It's really bringing your home to Jesus. It's being that first disciple in your home and allowing God to love your children through you and to bring the father's love to your kids through those ways that you pay the bills and wrestle with your kids and help your wife and listen. And that's why I did a book called The Be Daditudes, Eight Ways to Be an Awesome Dad where we take a look at each of the Be Attitudes through the lens of fatherhood and talk to dads about how to be fathers after the father's own heart through that what Pope Francis called the blueprint of Christian living, the Be Attitudes. And so there's this whole beautiful spirituality to family life if you know where to look for it. Mother Teresa, and this will be the last thing we say before we go on to the last thing. Mother Teresa had a wonderful quote, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, said, if you wash the dishes, don't wash them because they're dirty. Don't wash them because you were told to. Wash them because you love the person who will use them next. All right, and that I think is such a beautiful, simple understanding of this idea of what it takes to create this dynamic domestic church and this domestic church-based spirituality that allows us to see that families really are saint-making machines. And if I can just go back to what we were talking about at the beginning where our church has had too much of this monastic life. So I had a woman who called, more to life last week and she said, I think I got my vocation wrong. I think I was supposed to be a nun and I'm a mother and this is really hard and I can never pray because we think that unless we can live this very prayerful, timed out life that we're not holy. You wanna know the difference between what someone like Mother Teresa did and she's a saint, she was fantastic, what she did was amazing. But when she would go out, she would set her clock an hour earlier than she'd ask any of her other sisters to go out and she'd sneak out of the convent and she'd go and she would serve those who were suffering. You as moms and dads don't get to set the clock. When that kid comes in and says, mom, I don't feel so well and then throws up on you, it comes whenever it comes. But it's just as holy to be serving that one person or eight people in your house who all come down with the flu as it is to go out on the streets and serve the stranger. As your children grow up and leave the nest, you'll have an opportunity to serve others but start with the ones that Jesus has put right in front of you under your roof. Which is not to say that families don't have a role to play in the world, which brings us to our third habit, that idea of families being the primary outposts of evangelization and social change. And the best way we found to really teach families to do that is to help families discover their mission and their charism. And in both parenting with Grace and several other parenting books as well as In For Better Forever, we talk about what it takes to cultivate a mission as a couple or a mission as a family. And what that basically involves is it helps to order the way families relate to each other within the home. Being able to reflect on certain virtues like responsibility or generosity or joy that are really precious and important to us either in general or for a particular time. And we spend some time like at dinner, for example, saying, okay, we're gonna really work on being more joyful this week. We've been going through a really rough time. We've been kind of at each other. Let's just try to focus on how to be more joyful. Now, as a dad, to be more joyful, I'm going to, when you come and ask me to play this game, it's not my favorite game, but you love it, I'm gonna be joyful about that. I'm gonna play it with you, I'm gonna have a good time, and I'm just gonna really give you that time. That's gonna be my thing to be practicing joy this week. Mom, what do you wanna do to be more joyful this week? Yeah, and then I would go on to say, and when you ask me for this particular thing, instead of saying, oh, I have a million other things to do, I will either stop what I'm doing and be with you, or I'll give you a time set where I can have that date with you and do that thing. But I'll take time to acknowledge what you're asking me to do in a pleasant and joyful way. It's simple things, and then you go down the line with the kids, and you have them at what they can do for whatever virtue you need to work on in your family for that week or two weeks. But then that virtue, that list of virtues or that list of gifts or fruits of the Holy Spirit, become more than just a paper or worksheet that somebody, God willing, tapes to a refrigerator but then forgets about, right? It becomes a living, breathing thing where we're reflecting on a regular basis as a family and what it takes to really be a Catholic family and to live God's love in our home and be a different kind of family. And really, as Catechus, this is something that in sacramental prep you can pass on on that worksheet, but not just a list of virtues or gifts of fruits of the Holy Spirit, but this idea of how they can work on it as a family over time, and pick the things that are unique and unrepeatable for their particular family so that their family can be close and their family can do these things together. The second part of this, the family charism. Now, for our purposes, a family charism basically involves whatever those interests or talents or skills that a family has, how can they use them to build up the kingdom? So maybe there's a sports family, or a musical family, a family that likes to be hospitable. Just for a second, let's put this into context back to that monastic and religious life idea. We have several sisters from several different orders here, and certainly we have priests from different orders walking all over campus at different times. But the Franciscans have one charism, right? But the Dominicans would have another, say teaching. Another order would have working with the sick. Another order would have something entirely different. It's part of what they identify themselves with, and each family is very much the same way. There are particular gifts to each unique and unrepeatable family. And God's called this family together to be a domestic church. Just like there are Jesuits and Franciscans and Dominicans and Benedictines and all the rest, there are Smiths and Joneses and Popchaks and all the rest, okay? And God has brought those religious communities together too to bring his face to the world in their unique way. So those families that have a special gift, whether it's hospitality or music or sports or you name it. Or something even bigger. So is that a word? Sure, it is now. For instance, we have a wonderful lady who's on our show More to Life Every Friday, her name is Rachel Watkins, and she's the developer of The Little Flowers Girls Club. And she happens to be a mom of 11, and she happens to have MS as well. But she really believes in this idea of a family charism and they decided as husband and wife and family to sit down and figure out exactly what that was gonna be and how they were gonna live it out, all 13 of them. And they discerned that God was calling them to joy. Now that is a crazy thing for this family to live out. They have gone through extreme health issues. They have gone through extreme employment situations where the depth of their poverty is hit ground zero. And they have gone through a lot as a family. And yet their charism is joy because God's got a sense of humor. And they managed to constantly use that as a touchstone instead of falling apart through life's crises. They go back to that gift they know they were given for joy. And they managed, Rachel told me one night where, it was a time where she had moved from walking with crutches to moving into a wheelchair and everybody was not doing so hot. But they were like, you know what? Joy, right? How can we do this? And her son Damien said, well, I know what I can do to add joy to this family. And he started blowing bubbles in his milk through his nose. But it made his mom, who was sad that day, laugh like crazy. And then they all got out the straws and they were all blowing bubbles with their nose. And you know what? When they go into a church, all 13 of them together and people see them kidding around, loving each other and yet worshiping together, it does change the culture of the people around them because they're living an authentic charism. They're living what's true to them. And if we help families discern what is for them, they will feel closer to each other, closer to Christ and draw others to Christ through living their authentic gifts. Now they promise they're gonna electrocute us if we go over, so we gotta wrap it up. But I wanted to just let you, we walk through that process of helping couples and families build missions and charisms in several of our books, including the ones that Bill mentioned and discovering God together, the Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids, as well as praying for and with your spouse. But as we kind of come into the final stretch here, I just wanna leave you with a thought. Just imagine, okay? So we've spelled out a lot of big ideas and hopefully some practical ways to live those things out. Now just imagine if all of you guys started trying to do that stuff in your home, okay? And what if you all managed to communicate and convince a handful of other families in your community to start doing this too. Just imagine a parish filled, your parish filled with even a handful of families that we're doing what we're talking about here. Just imagine what an incredible witness these families would be just by existing. I can't tell you the number of times that we've been in a restaurant, just minding our own business, and we say grace together or we're laughing and a waitress comes over and says, it's just so nice to see a family that likes each other. What's your secret? You know what a blessing that is? What's your secret? People like each other, they get along, that's amazing, and it blesses people. If you have families who are living out this authentic call, they'll be blessing others as well and blessing you because your job is going to become joyful and rich and you're going to see your effectiveness and you are going to have partners in ministry in the families that you serve. So let me just ask y'all to join me in a closing prayer and I'm gonna ask you to repeat after me as we do this, all right? And the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. Lord Jesus Christ, help me bring your heart to the families I serve. Lord Jesus Christ, help me to bring your heart to the families I serve. Help me live your vision of family life in my family. Help me to live your vision of family life in my family. So I can lead by example. So I can lead by example. Help me to teach families to experience you. I teach families to experience you in meaningful family prayer. In meaningful family prayer. Help me to empower families to encounter you. Help me to empower families to encounter you in the corporal works of mommy and daddy and in the rituals of connection that they share. Help me inspire the families I serve to discover their mission and charism. So the world will be blessed by their witness and I can help them become what they are and I can help them become what they are. Domestic churches and agents of grace. And agents of grace. Amen. Holy family pray for us. And then the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. God bless you all. Thank you so much for coming.