Catholic Husband

Love / Lead / Serve

First Words

There’s a curious phenomena in driving that involves your eyes. When you look in a direction other than straight ahead, you will start to drift in that direction. So, if you look for too long at the side of the road, you’ll soon find yourself there. This occurrence is intriguing because the same thing happens with your thoughts. If you think about things that are good, just, holy, and worthy, you’ll find that your days seem to go a little bit better. If you think about things that are near occasions of sin, you’ll find it’s really quite easy to fall into that sin.

Office morale is a major driving force in job satisfaction. Like all workers, I’ve found myself in environments when morale was high and I’ve also experienced the desolation of a low office morale. In the cases when morale was low, I redoubled my efforts to stay positive on the things I could control. What I found is that I was still able to be successful in spite of the negativity around me. During the times that I participated in the low morale, I too slipped into the darkness.

The first moments of the day can really shape the outcome of the next 12 to 16 hours. So if your alarm goes off and you experience nothing but dread, you’re not setting yourself up for success today. Attitude is everything and if you loathe your alarm clock and waking up, your day is really off to a bad start, too.

One of the spiritual habits that I’m hoping to adopt in the next few weeks is giving my first words to God. In those minutes after turning off my alarm clock and slowly waking up, I want to turn that into a prayer. I’m not very good at starting my day immediately with prayer, but I’d like to get better.

The reason that I want to adopt this practice is two-fold. First, each day is a gift and I’m terrible about taking that for granted. Second, I want to start the day by denying my pride. I only exist because God has chosen to hold me in being. I need as much of His help as I can get!

I plan to start with a simple greeting and then perhaps pray a Morning Offering. Of course, I’ll need to memorize the words first, but I’ve always liked how beautiful the words of the prayer are.

Starting our day by giving it first to God is a brilliant idea.