Tag: Goodness

Inspiration

Adore

Smitten With Goodness

Do you ever have a word jump out at you in various places and contexts? Lately, I keep noticing the word adore. It keeps surfacing. Like in the beautiful image above of Mary holding her Son, in the quiet act of adoring Jesus in prayer. Or in an article I recently read about the neurobiology of “glimmer” and gratitude. It feels like the Spirit is drawing a circle around this word, this action: when we adore, we don’t just observe; we receive and release. We make meaning. We transcend what is immediately before us.

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Inspiration

Stepping Into the Water With Us

Smitten With Goodness

As the Christmas season draws to a close, the Church leads us to the Jordan River—quiet, dusty, and crowded with sinners seeking a new beginning. And there, astonishingly, we find Jesus. The sinless One stands among the broken, the weary, the repentant. He joins the line of those longing for mercy, not because He needs cleansing, but because we do.

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Inspiration

Remaining in the Love That Remains in Us

Smitten With Goodness

John’s words in 1 John 4:11–18 draw us back to the very heart of the Christian life: love. Not the fragile, shifting kind we often encounter in the world, but the steady, self-giving love that begins in God and flows through us. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.” It’s both a command and a revelation. We love because we have first been loved.

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Inspiration

Are We Living the Life of Christ?

Smitten With Goodness

A Gentle Examen for the New Year

Every so often, the Spirit nudges us to pause, not to judge ourselves harshly, but to look honestly at the shape of our lives. Are we living in a way that reflects the One we claim to follow? Are our habits, our reactions, our desires slowly being formed into the life of Christ?

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Inspiration

Beginning the Year with a Special Love

Smitten With Goodness

New Year’s Day has a way of softening us. The world feels a little quieter, a little more open, as if we’re standing on a threshold with the chance to begin again. In the Christian tradition, this day is also a celebration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is seen not only as his mother, but as a mother given to all of us.

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Being Loved

A Moment to Pause, Give Thanks, and Begin Again

Smitten With Goodness

As the final hours of the year slip quietly toward midnight, something in us naturally slows down. This moment—this “hour”—has a way of gathering up everything that came before it: the joys and the disappointments, the surprises and the sorrows, the ordinary days that passed almost unnoticed. It invites us to look back with honesty and to look forward with hope.

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Being Loved

Your New Year Invitation

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Remember Your Dignity: A New Year Invitation

As we stand at the threshold of a new year, the Church offers us a quiet but powerful reminder, we are not who we once were. In Christ, we have been brought from death to life, from darkness into light, from old ways into a new creation. This is not poetic exaggeration—it is the deepest truth about us.

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Being Loved

The Promise That Still Holds

Smitten With Goodness

A few days after Christmas, when the wrapping is gone and the house grows quieter, the mystery begins to deepen. As Catholics, we don’t rush past this moment. We linger. The Christmas Season stretches before us like a long inhale—from the Nativity through the Epiphany and into the Baptism of the Lord—inviting us to keep contemplating what God has done, the promise made…the ultimate pinky promise!

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