Two things come to mind when I sit with those words.

The first: how often do we forget that we are in the presence of God? That the Holy Trinity dwells in our souls — right now, in this moment?

The second: that fact is true whether we’re in good times or bad. To St. Bernard’s point, hard times with Jesus are still a lot better than good times without Him. And of course, we don’t have to choose — we have the opportunity to be with Him in all of it.

We just have to remember.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to remember that You are with us — in the good times and the bad, in the ordinary moments and the hard ones. Never let us forget that You are here. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

What that means practically is this. No matter our state in life, our vocation, our age, or our season — we have duties. To God, to our neighbor, to our family. And then there are the small tasks that fill the rest of the day. The ordinary stuff.

If we can do those tasks with great love, we can turn them from something simply human into something supernatural. Something with effects beyond this life.

St. Teresa of Calcutta put it simply: “Do small things with great love.”

I think you could tweak that slightly: do all things with great love.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to do everything today — the big and the small — with great love, for love of You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

Three of my kids are playing soccer for the first time this year, and it’s been great to watch. My 10-year-old is playing with girls who’ve been at it for years. My 9-year-old is up against boys who clearly know what they’re doing. My 7-year-old is still at the age where everybody just runs around in a pack — which is its own kind of beautiful.

What’s been especially fun to watch is how they respond to failure. Getting the ball stolen. Completely flubbing a kick. Realizing they’re not the best one out there. Every practice, every game, is a lesson in beginning again.

When I came across this quote, it clicked. Because that’s the spiritual life too.

Chevrot wrote it in the context of Simon Peter — and Peter is the perfect example. He gets a bad rap, because he dropped the ball so many times. But he was the one actually going up against the challenges. Failing, getting back up, trying again. It’s not surprising that he became the first pope. He’s the model precisely because he knew how to begin again.

We’ll face the same. We hit snooze and miss our prayer time. We fall to the same sin for the umpteenth time. We face some trial we’ve never encountered before and don’t handle it the way we wanted to.

Begin again. Learn from it. Try once more.

Let us pray. Lord, when we fall help us to get back up. Give us the heart of Peter: willing to fail, willing to try again, and never too proud to begin. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

I recently came across this prayer from St. Thomas Aquinas. When you read it, it will probably sound familiar — what Aquinas wrote is, in a sense, the original. The version most of us grew up with was adapted from this one to rhyme, and became one of the first prayers many of us were ever taught.

God has committed each of us — personally, individually — to the care of a guardian angel. Not a watchdog. Not a boss. A guardian. Someone to protect, to help, to lead.

That’s another example of His merciful love for us.

Your guardian angel is with you right now. Spend a few minutes with that this month.

Let us pray. O angel of God, to whose guardianship I have been committed by Divine Mercy, enlighten and guard, rule and govern me. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

I’ll be honest — sometimes I can feel like Christ is playing a game with me. Like He’s tapping my left shoulder and standing on my right. I turn around, and He’s just out of my periphery. Always close, but never quite where I’m looking.

But when I sit with the image of Jesus laying hands on someone, what comes to mind is a parent cradling a child’s face. Not a grandparent pinching cheeks — but gently, two hands on either side, holding that face still. It’s so intimate you can’t help but look into each other’s eyes.

That’s how close He was to the people He healed. That’s how close He wants to be to us.

He’s not playing games. He’s not just out of reach. He’s asking to be intimately close — healing, helping, teaching, loving — the same way He was two thousand years ago.

Spend a few minutes with that image today.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to be still enough to feel Your presence. Draw us close to You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

It’s called a success floor — the minimum you’re going to allow yourself to do and still consider yourself on track. You see it talked about in business and health, but I think there’s a parallel here for the spiritual life. “Successful prayer life” might not be the right framing — maybe “fruitful” is better. But the question is the same.

What’s your fruitful floor?

Most of us have a plan A. Something like: get up early. Morning prayer. Daily Mass. A Rosary. An examination of conscience before bed. Good plan. But some days that plan flies out the window entirely.

So what’s the minimum you’re going to hold yourself to? The floor you’re not going to go below, no matter what the day throws at you?

Maybe it’s a morning offering. Maybe it’s an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be before your head hits the pillow. Whatever it is — name it, and hold yourself to it. So that you don’t wake up weeks from now and realize you haven’t prayed in a long time.

Let us pray. Lord, on the days when we can give You much, may we be generous. And on the days when we can only give You a little — help us to give that little faithfully. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

But here we are. Turning over a new leaf.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself — and it applies directly to writing these reflections — is that I need mental and sometimes physical space to think clearly. That’s not a groundbreaking insight. But it does point to something worth considering in our prayer lives.

It’s hard to sit in quiet, still prayer when we’re surrounded by chaos. Which suggests a couple of things.

First, it might mean getting up early — before the house fills up, before breakfast and work and the demands of the day get underway. That early morning quiet is hard to replicate at any other point in the day.

Second, our actual prayer space matters. As clean and clutter-free as we can make it. Some people function fine in a cluttered environment, but I think most of us pray better when the space around us isn’t competing for our attention.

As I get back into writing these reflections, that’s what I’ll be working on. I’d encourage you to take the same look at your own prayer space.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to create the space — in our homes and in our hearts — to hear You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

One thing we all share: we can, should, and have an obligation to pray.

At least speaking for myself, I tend to think of myself on the receiving end of God’s graces. During our own times of trial and temptation, we receive help from people we’ll never know — whose prayers are quietly at work in our lives.

But there’s another dimension to prayer that I don’t always think about: our prayers can obtain grace for other members of the Body of Christ. Not just the people we name in prayer, but people we’ll never meet, people in purgatory.

That moment we stick it out in morning prayer, or pray a Rosary we don’t feel like praying — God can use those offerings, those small sacrifices, to benefit someone else entirely.

We have an opportunity to be not just prayer recipients, but prayer warriors.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to pray not just for ourselves, but for the whole Body of Christ. Use our small offerings for the good of others, known and unknown. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

Talk to God about your kids more than you talk to your kids about God.

With five kids ten and under, I have no shortage of behaviors I’d like to curb or habits I’d like to help form. And by the end of the day, I notice how many of my interactions have felt nitpicky. Correcting this, redirecting that. It adds up.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on: when do I need to say something — and when do I need to keep my mouth shut and bring it to the Lord instead? When do I need to trust that He’s got this, and that my job in that moment is to pray, not to lecture?

My vocation as a father is real and it matters. But it isn’t only about getting my kids to chew with their mouths closed or even to make good decisions. It’s also to pray for them. To bring them to God. To ask their guardian angels for help.

That’s part of the job too. Maybe the most important part.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to bring our kids — and the people we love — to You before we try to fix them ourselves. Give us wisdom to know when to speak and when to pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

Depending on our upbringing — depending on what fatherhood looked like for us, good or bad — it can be easy to keep God at a certain distance. We know He is our Father. But there’s a difference between our Father and my Father.

In my own prayer recently, that distinction hit me. How personal this relationship actually is. Not just a Father to humanity, not just a Father to the Church — but my Father.

In Scripture, Jesus calls God Abba. It’s an intimate word. Some translate it as Daddy. Maybe Papa, or just Dad, would be more relevant to us. Whatever word carries that weight for you — the word a child uses when he knows he is loved and safe — that’s the word.

If that’s never come naturally, that’s okay. However we get there, that’s the invitation: to approach God not just as the Father, but as my Father.

Maybe sit with that in prayer today.

Let us pray. Father — thank You for claiming us as Your own. Help us to know You not just as the Father, but as ours, as mine. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us

For those of us who are parents, it’s easy to get caught up in behavior, in getting kids to listen, in the daily management of a household. And all of that matters. But so does this: do our kids know that we delight in them?

For those who aren’t parents, there’s still something here — maybe something even more personal.

This is how God the Father looks at us. He delights in us. In you. Not just when you’re behaving well, not just when your prayer life is consistent, not just when you’re getting it right. He delights in you because you are His.

Maybe you’ve never experienced that from a human father. Maybe that kind of delight has always felt just out of reach. It’s worth bringing that to prayer — to sit with the fact that the God of the universe looks at you the way a father looks at a child he can’t help but love.

The Father delights in you.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, help us to receive Your love. Thank You for delighting in us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

I’ve had seasons where things were tight — financially uncertain, professionally unstable, not sure how it was all going to work out. In those moments, the question that kept coming up was simple: who are you trusting? When the security isn’t there, you find out pretty quickly where your trust actually lives.

But I’ve also had seasons where things were going well. Some ideas started to land. A little more stability, a little more success. And I found the question didn’t go away — it just changed shape. It became less about trust and more about worth. Where do I find my worth? In the success? In what I’ve built? In the stability itself?

I think that’s actually two different ways these Gospel stories can reach us.

When times are hard, they ask us: who are you trusting?

When times are good, they ask us: where are you finding your worth?

Let us pray. Lord, help us to trust in You alone — in plenty and in want. And remind us that our worth comes from You, not from anything we could ever earn or own. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

But honestly, it’s not unique to big families. It’s just what happens when you live with other humans. There can be conflict, tension, disagreement.

Something we’ve been coming back to lately — relevant for kids, but really for anyone — is this deep human need to feel seen, heard, and loved. And how often the way to communicate those things is surprisingly simple.

Eye contact. A smile. A pat on the back. A hug.

It doesn’t take much. But sometimes the littlest things make the biggest difference.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to see the people around us — really see them. Give us the small gestures of love that remind them they are not invisible. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

What struck me over the past couple of months is how many parables and miracles we heard at Mass. And how familiar they’ve become. So familiar, in some ways, that they can start to feel — ordinary.

But look at how our Lord teaches. Look at what He uses. Farmers and seeds. Fishermen and nets. A woman searching her house for a lost coin. He performs miracles around food, around storms, around the weather. The stuff of everyday life.

It’s a reminder that our faith is not meant to be lived separately from our ordinary life — our work, our home, our families, our daily needs. The Lord belongs in all of it. He’s not just waiting for us in the extraordinary moments. He’s present in the ordinary ones.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to find You in the ordinary — the small moments of each day. Open our eyes to Your presence right where we are. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

I prayed it every day for four years, and then seemingly forgot about it for over a decade. I’ve been rediscovering it lately.

One of the real differences between childhood and adulthood — is what it actually means to be generous. As a teenager, those were just words. As an adult – married with kids, or single – they land differently. There are more responsibilities, more opportunities to give of yourself. And you learn what that actually means.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve You as You deserve to be served, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek rest, to labor and not to seek reward. Except that, knowing that I do Your will. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

It’s easy to build a list. Daily Mass. A daily Rosary. Adoration. The Divine Mercy Chaplet. The Angelus. Bible in a Year. This spiritual book, that one. All of it good. All of it worth doing.

But there’s nothing that says we have to do all of it every single day.

There’s such a thing as a daily routine — but also a weekly routine and a monthly routine. Some practices are meant to anchor every morning. Others are better suited to once a week, or once a month. The goal isn’t to check every box by sundown. The goal is a sustainable life of prayer that actually grows over time.

Not everything all at once.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to build a prayer life that is faithful and sustainable — one that draws us closer to You, day by day. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

“When we meet again, I can promise you that there will be no wasted moments. Every minute spent with you will be nothing less than a gift to be cherished. I have found that it isn’t necessary to be always doing: talking, eating, walking, dancing, swimming. There are many times I want only to know your presence, to hear you moving around, to see you next to me. There are many ways of loving. Perhaps the simplest are the most satisfying.”

There’s something here for our relationships — marriages, friendships, family. But there’s also something here for our relationship with God.

We can feel like prayer has to be productive. That we need to be doing something — reading, reciting, interceding. And none of that is bad. But sometimes, loving God looks like simply sitting with Him. Acknowledging His presence. Letting that be enough.

There are many ways of loving. Perhaps the simplest are the most satisfying.

Let us pray. Lord, help us to simply be with You today — not just to do, but to rest in Your presence. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

The Transfiguration has always been one of the easier ones for me. It’s miraculous, yes — but it’s also intimate. Awesome in the truest sense of the word.

If you have time today, read the Gospel account. Place yourself there. Be with Peter, James, and John on that mountain. Be in the Lord’s presence as He appears in His glory — however your imagination depicts that. Let yourself encounter Him in His humanity and in His divinity, all at once.

Just be there with Him.

Let us pray. Lord, give us a glimpse of Your glory, and draw us closer to You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

In our world today, these words are deeply counter-cultural. The secular world peddles the exact opposite — love without sacrifice. Love without consequence, without demands.

But if we’re honest, that desire lives in us too. In our marriages, in our relationships with our kids. Loving others is hard, and when it stops feeling like sunshine and rainbows, it’s tempting to check out, make excuses, bend the rules. We fall for the lie that love can exist without sacrifice.

Now — what about when it comes to our faith?

We want our prayers answered. We want blessings. We want salvation. But are we willing to pay the price for those graces? Are we willing to change our ways?

In other words — we want Christ. But are we willing to accept the Cross?

Let us pray. Lord, give us the courage to love the way You love — without conditions, without holding back, even when it costs us something. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.

Courage doesn’t mean we aren’t afraid. In fact, an action isn’t truly courageous unless fear is present. The courageous person does the right thing because it’s right — even while afraid to do it.

In a similar way, we might assume that living a holy, virtuous life means eventually outgrowing temptation. That if we just grow enough spiritually, temptation fades away. That’s not true either. Spiritual growth only happens in the face of resistance. The saints are a testament to this — the holier they became, the fiercer the battle.

We will be tempted every day. We will be tempted until our final breath. The question is what we do when temptation comes. Do we strike back with a virtuous act — courageously, even when it’s hard? Or do we give in to the vices that poke and prod us?

Let us pray. Lord, give us courage — not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in spite of it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Keep fighting the good fight. Our Lady of Victory, pray for us.