Through Him, and with Him, and in Him...

Sometimes the deepest answers arrive in the words we've heard a thousand times.

Jul 14, 2026

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…