A Restless Life

We are going to look into metal wellness as we are stepping into part two of our three-part series.  And piggy-backing on with our last topic, sleep is key to keeping our mental capabilities at peak performance, as the downtime is much needed and required as we continually add, purge, and modify our knowledge and memory databases.  Maintaining good mental health requires us to take care of our cognitive, social, and emotional abilities.  Staying sharp in these areas will aid with keeping our mind sharp for the long haul.  Exercising our brain takes a similar discipline and a targeted approach similar to muscular fitness, and as we age this becomes more important.  In looking to keep cognitive faculties engaged, we need to pull away from our screens and actively use the brain.   This can take form in reading, doing puzzles, or learning a language, where we are using parts of our brains to inform what we’re doing.   Another more active aspect of traini...

As we begin Lent this week, the readings do a great job of providing context to our journey over the next six weeks.  In the First Reading, Moses recalls their journey from the promised land down to Egypt and their return.  An important note was made in his recollection, and that was the call of the people to their God.  As we prepare ourselves throughout this season, we need to call on God to help us and give us strength, whether in our fasting, abstaining, almsgiving, or other actions that we have taken during this time to strengthen our relationship with God.  This message is echoed in the Psalm, as we sing out to the Lord to help us when troubles comes our way.   In the Second Reading, the context of Lent builds as St. Paul reminds us the bigger picture.  God sent Jesus into the world to die for us, and through His Love raised Jesus from the dead.  Keeping this in mind throughout Lent, and the rest of the year, is a great reminder of the great...

As we begin our journey in Lent, I figured I would put a quick note out about the readings today for Ash Wednesday and post my regular reflection tomorrow for the weekend's set of readings.  Ash Wednesday has always had a certain "specialness" to it in my life.  Growing up attending a Catholic school, it was a day that marked a change and didn't come with the pomp and circumstance of the other holy days - like Easter, Christmas - but was strictly about the message of the day.  Even my grandparents, who didn't attend mass often and weren't overly religious, fasted on Ash Wednesday and abstained from meat on Fridays throughout Lent.  It is weird how certain days with such outward signs (the fasting throughout the day and/or receiving ashes on your forehead) has a draw to those who long to be a part of it. However, that is where the readings come in, as we need to have the right conviction and reasons behind the actions.  As Jesus reminds us, it is imperative to ...

To be the best version of yourself, both for you and those around you, you need to feel good about yourself.  Starting from any other position just doesn't make sense.  You may not be in peak health physically, mentally, or spiritually, but you have to be happy with your direction.  These, to me, are the three distinct components to well-being, and today we’re focusing on the first: your physical health.  A key component to this is having a proactive plan that best suits your goals and gets you to where you want to be.  There are a variety of factors that impact your physical health, but taking the proactive approach to heart, these all fall under my umbrella term of preventative maintenance.  When beginning to assess where you stand and what areas are there for improvement, analyze your habits with regards to diet, exercise, medical upkeep, and sleep. I’m a believer in the old axiom: crap in, crap out.   If you don’t take care to prioritize your nut...

It is humbling to take to heart the words we hear each Sunday.  If you listen closely and reflect, there is always some aspect that we can take and apply.  This week, however, is a strong dose of reality, telling us to truly look inside ourselves.  Since the First Reading and the Gospel are comparable in their message, let's dig into the Second Reading first and come back to those.   St. Paul presents us with the great dilemma that we are in as children of God - we have a finite life in our bodies here and yet we are part of the infinite glory of God's existence.  Through Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, we have had God's immortality applied to our weak and mortal bodies, and that fact should influence all of our thoughts and actions.  The path to victory has been laid out before us, and we only have to choose that life to enjoy the rewards. And that leads us to the First Reading and the Gospel. In Sirach, we are reminded that our thoughts become...

Let's jump right in to this week's readings, starting with the Second Reading.  In this, St. Paul is expressing to us what change is required as we journey through life with God.  The first gift, that of life, was given to Adam and all those who came after, whereas the spiritual gift, that of heaven and ever-lasting life, came from Jesus, the new Adam.  Although our inclinations are to rush towards those higher and greater fruits, we must first be humans.  And if we do that well by being good people who love and live according to God's will, we will be able to attain the promise made to us by Jesus. In the First Reading, we hear about Saul and David.  The story of Saul and David is interesting to read about, as we know that God has left Saul and anointed David as successor; however, to those living at the time, it must have been confusing to have the king determined to put down an upstart shepherd warrior in David.  But in today's reading, we are reminded o...