Tag: Jesus

Inspiration

Freedom That Lives Beyond Borders

Smitten With Goodness

On this 250th anniversary of Independence Day in the United States, we give thanks for the gifts of civic freedom, voices that can speak, communities that can gather, people who can shape their common life. Yet as Christians, we know that the deepest freedom does not come from any nation, constitution, or historical moment. True freedom lives beyond the boundaries of a country. It is the freedom God offers to every human heart, in every land, in every age.

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Inspiration

The Deep End of Life

Smitten With Goodness

Resiliency is not the hardening of the heart but the deepening of it. It is the quiet courage to move through our pain rather than trying to go around it. The only way out of suffering is through it—through the questions, through the ache, through the places where we feel stretched beyond what we can bear. And yet, as we walk this path, something in us expands. We become more spacious, more grounded, more able to live in hope.

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Inspiration

The Love That Holds Us

Smitten With Goodness

Some mornings a single line from a saint feels like it reaches out and taps you on the shoulder. Recently it was St. Isidore of Seville: “Reading the Holy Scriptures confers two benefits. It trains the mind to understand them; it turns man’s attention from the follies of the world and leads him to the love of God.” There is something steadying in that reminder. Scripture doesn’t simply inform us—it forms us, shaping both our thinking and our seeing.

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Inspiration

When Thoughts Turn to Prayers

Smitten With Goodness

There are moments when the mind begins to wander—toward worries, toward people we love, toward situations we can’t quite fix. At first it feels like ordinary thinking, the kind that loops and circles. But sometimes, almost without noticing, those thoughts begin to lean toward God. They soften. They open. They turn into something more like prayer.

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Inspiration

A Faith That Can Be Seen

Smitten With Goodness

To live our faith is to enter the slow, patient work of helping the world see what it has forgotten. Providing the context of our faith generates opportunity because when we speak clearly, gently, and with conviction, those who question can be lifted, almost without realizing it, out of the secular murk they inhabit. In that clearer air, they begin to notice vestiges of God’s grandeur shimmering through the ordinary. It may take years yet the evangelist keeps praying that the scattered pieces will one day assemble into a picture that makes sense: the reasonableness of God’s designs for the world and for human beings.

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Inspiration

Saying No to Say Yes

Smitten With Goodness

Our passions are gifts. They stir our hearts, move our bodies, and give energy to our days. Yet without order, they can scatter us—pulling us in many directions, leaving us restless and unfocused. The Christian tradition reminds us that passions are meant to be guided, not suppressed. They are to be aligned with love, directed toward God’s dream rather than our own impulses.

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Inspiration

The Union We’re Made For

Smitten With Goodness

Love is always drawing us toward union, and union naturally opens into communion. Yet communion is so easily fractured. I think of the great cathedrals, Notre Dame, Chartres, each one slowly worn down by an atmosphere that seems harmless at first glance. Pollution settles invisibly on stone, and over time even the strongest structures must be repaired.

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Inspiration

The Quiet Power of Intention

Smitten With Goodness

There is a hidden place within us where every action begins—not in our hands, not even in our words, but in the quiet chamber of intention. The saints remind us that purity of intention is what frees us to forget ourselves, to seek first the glory of God, and to trust that whatever we surrender in love becomes, mysteriously, our blessing. When our intention is clear, simple, and God‑ward, even the smallest act becomes luminous.

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