Most of us do a lot of talking, much of it about other people. Some of our people talk is just practical: “Are you still working on those invoices? Joe’s been waiting for them all morning!” Some of it is pretty personal: “Hey, I heard Joe’s wife walked out on him. Couldn’t take his drinking anymore.” More »

Fred Parker picked up the gun and held it to his head, no longer fighting the dark thoughts that enveloped him. "My life is a mess. My marriage is a pretense. Things are never going to change. There's no hope. . . . " More »

All around you, wherever you live, there are quiet heroes. I’m sure you could come up with your own personal list: A mother struggling to maximize the potential of a child with autism, a husband tenderly caring for a dependent and querulous wife with Alzheimer’s disease. Or perhaps you know people whose love for Christ moves them to do something out of the ordinary—say, a gifted scientist who leaves a lucrative corporate job to teach in an inner-city school. More »

Prayer is not a last resort. It’s not what we do after we read the self-help books, after we go to the specialists, or after we surf the Internet. Prayer is our lifeline to God. This is why Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you” (Matthew 6:33). It’s why he said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (11:28). More »

Every now and again, God’s mercy touches a person in a way that cries out to be shared with others. My mother, Adeline Lapierre, had an experience like this and told about it often. More »

Very early one November morning in 1535, as the light cast soft shadows on the austere Castilian landscape, twenty-year-old Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda stole away from her home in Avila. Her destination—the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in the same city. Her heart ached that morning at the thought of leaving her widowed father behind. “It seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered,” she later wrote. More »

We tend to think that our life experiences or what other people say or do make us feel good or bad. We think that situations determine our moods and our reactions. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable assumption: Gary is depressed because he lost his job. I am angry and frustrated because my kids are misbehaving or my husband works too many hours. More »

The gospel really does have the power to save and redeem. It’s something that each of us can experience. And it’s something that each of us is called to proclaim. As we try to respond to the Lord’s call to go out into all the world, it’s important for us to see how much the Lord wants us to evangelize. More »