Through Him, and with Him, and in Him...
Sometimes the deepest answers arrive in the words we've heard a thousand times.
Sunday Morning.
I sat alone in my tiny office with the windows thrown open, watching the new day begin. The early sun climbed into a clear Marian-blue sky. A pair of seagulls, arguing or trading jokes, I couldn’t tell, filled the silence with their calls, while a warm breeze bent the branches where the squirrels who devoured my wife’s basil plants had made their home.
After weeks of intensity, the travel, the articles, the events, the constant movement, I found myself simply grateful for the stillness.
As I prayed the Morning Prayer, my thoughts kept returning to the GIVEN Institute Women’s Leadership Forum. There was a spiritual depth unlike anything I had encountered before. At its heart was something both profoundly simple and endlessly rich: our identity begins not with what we do, but with who we are before God.
For the women gathered there, it was an invitation to receive the Father’s love as beloved daughters, then to let every vocation, every relationship, and every act of service flow from that gift.
More than once, conversations turned to a question I asked almost instinctively: “Does something like this exist for men?”
The answers usually came with a smile and a shrug. “If there’s not… there ought to be!”
The question lingered long after I left Washington. But another soon rose behind it: What would it actually look like to live every part of life from the gift of God’s love? To let every relationship, every decision, every joy and every sorrow flow from Him instead of from ourselves?
I sort of understood the idea. But I wasn’t sure I understood how to live it.
Then, during prayer, six familiar words came quietly to mind: Through Him, and with Him, and in Him.
We’ve heard them countless times at the conclusion of the Eucharistic Prayer. But this time, I heard them differently. Not only as the words the priest prayed as he held high the Blessed Sacrament and Precious Blood, but as an invitation.
To live…
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
To enter our work…
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
To love our families…
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
To endure every cross…
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
Every decision.
Every joy.
Every heartache.
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
Everything.
Through Him, with Him, in Him.
The question I had carried for weeks suddenly became wonderfully simple. Perhaps the Christian life isn’t first about trying harder. Perhaps it’s about learning, little by little, to live every moment through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ.
Those words, born of the heart of St. Paul’s theology, became something more than the conclusion of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. They became a prayer. A way of seeing. A way of living.
Because when we live through Him, with Him, and in Him, we don’t lose ourselves. We become fully alive. Truly free. And we finally discover who we were created to be.
Each of the events of the past several weeks had its lessons.
But this one…
This one could change everything.
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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff
I love this thought, Jeffrey! I was praying with the same idea during the conference. Thanks for making time to chat with me (this is the Canadian gal with the rented scooter), and for continuing to highlight the spiritual riches of our week together!
The question of whether there was something like the GIVEN forum for men came up in one of my conversations, too! Perhaps this should come to fruition.