Living Life with Passion and Purpose

The title of this blog is the title of the 1 day conference my wife and I attended with Matthew Kelly last Saturday. We had a wonderful day with about 1,000 other Catholics, and as I told Nuke earlier today, God was definitely in our midst. I'm not sure I can do the day justice in a blog, but I'm going to try to hit the highlights of the day. This is going to be really long, so please forgive typos. I'll try to proof read it as best I can.

After some opening remarks by Matthew Kelly, and a song by Eliot Morris, we got down to business. We had 6 hours and 4 sessions to cover, plus we had to squeeze lunch in there.

Session One was called the Voice of God. We discussed the 3 ordinary voices of God, those being Legitimate Need, Talent and Ability and the Voice of our Deepest Desire. These voices made a lot of sense to me, but what surprised me was the discussion on Talent and Ability. Matthew made the point that our Common Talents are far more powerful than our Unique Talents. Our common talents give us greater ability to be affect other people's lives than our unique talents. With our common talents, we can all answer the call to love God and each other a little more.

Session One continued with a strategy that Matthew uses to discern the voice of God. First, you have to enter the Classroom of Silence, which is 10-15 minutes of total silence. Second, you have to frame the question to God, and you can't change it. The question should be a Yes or a No type question. Once you have the question framed, you should enter the classroom of silence every day for 30 days, and at the end of your silence, ask God the question and then write down His answer. Then, write down what was going on that day, so you can evaluate whether the answer was from you or God. If you don't have 30 days, you have to do it more often to search for the answer. After whatever the specified period of time is, you should have an answer that you can be very sure is from God. If the decision involves more people, get the other people to do the same thing. Matthew can't promise that this will work for everybody, but it is a process that has worked for him throughout his life.

After some more music from Eliot Morris, we started Session 2, which was called "The Jesus Question." The theme of this session is, how do we answer the question that Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?". This session focused on how we, as Catholics answer that question, and further, how we live it out, specifically focusing on the fact that Catholics believe the Eucharist is Jesus' body and blood.

This session eventually moved into Bible reading, which is the next step after answering the Jesus question, and this is where Matthew stressed that we live an average of 77 years. In 77 years, we better read the only book God ever wrote, because He will ask. We make time to watch all kinds of things on TV and read all kinds of books, but we can't make 10-15 minutes a day to read the Word of God. The suggested strategy for Bible reading, if you haven't been doing it, was to begin with the 4 Gospels, and read them over and over again for a year. Then spend the 2nd year reading the New Testament over and over again. Once you understand these parts of the Bible, the Old Testament and it's ties to the New Testament make more sense.

Finally, this session ended with coaching. We have 2 methods, as Catholics, to get coaching. We can read good Spiritual books. In addition to Bible reading, Matthew suggested reading a good Spiritual Book for 10-15 minutes a day. This can be a book about a Saint, or just something like "Rediscovering Catholicism" (my example, not his). The other method for coaching is Reconciliation, where the Priest absolves our sins and coaches us on better behavior.

Session 3 was an interactive session. We were looking at our Spiritual History, so Matthew asked us a series of questions around a topic, and we were asked to write down how we did on that topic at various stages in our life. This was eye opening for me. I only really got serious about my faith in the last year or so...I mean really serious. I had tried things off and on for the past 5-6 years, but the last year has been much more serious. I found that, for the first 30 years of my life, I was pretty darn selfish and probably pretty difficult to live with. I resolved to do a better job in the next 30 years, should God give me 30 more years.

The final session was called "Setting the World On Fire." In this session, we learned a new method to quiet our minds for prayer. As a group of 1,000 people, we entered the Classroom of Silence, and were asked to sit completely still and focus on the image of a rose. If we got an itch or an urge to move, we were told to ignore it. If a stray thought popped into our head, we were told to refocus on our prayer. The idea was to force ourself to ignore the outside world, bascially building our spiritual muscle. This focusing was to quiet our minds, which is very difficult. But after 2-3 minutes, I did feel like my mind had quieted a bit. I tried this again last night, fully intending to spend 10-15 minutes, but I must have done a really good job quieting my mind, because I dozed off. I'll have to practice.

Finally, Matthew closed with some motivational words. We all have it within us to change our habits and become the person God wants us to be (the best-version-of-ourselves). As we make these changes, we become more holy, which makes us more appealing to those around us. One person can make a difference in his home, his Parish and even in the world, by living genuinely, striving every day to be the person God wants us to be. And that's really the goal of all this, to become the person God wants us to be.

Just a wonderful day. I learned so much and I'm working to apply it. I bought a couple of books this weekend and I'm looking forward to reading them. I'm working to become a better-version-of-myself, and I hope that I can help others do this in their lives as well, starting with my family and friends. I know I didn't do this conference justice with this blog. If anyone out there gets a chance to attend a Matthew Kelly event, I highly recommend it.