Spiritual Growth Archives - Page 3 of 30

Faith Refreshed - text over photo of water droplets by lemonade glass by Charlotte May on Pexels

Faith Refreshed Online Retreat Week 2: Aligning Ourselves with God

Welcome to Week 2 of Faith Refreshed, an online retreat to help us “hit the refresh button” in our spiritual lives so that we might better see things we weren’t previously seeing and return to our lives and ministry with a new outlook. Throughout this retreat, I am drawing from my best-selling book, A Well-Built Faith: A Catholic’s Guide to Knowing and Sharing What We Believe. We revisit the four pillars of our Catholic faith—the […]

Pop-Up Catechesis: God’s Revealing Moments

Joe Paprocki

During week 1 of our Faith Refreshed online retreat, we are focusing on “God’s Revealing Moments” and how the first pillar of our Catholic faith—the Creed—summarizes what God has revealed about himself over the course of salvation history. In this episode of Pop-Up Catechesis, we explore how sometimes, we may need to “stare our way” into recognizing how God is revealing himself to us in our everyday lives. For more information about recognizing God’s revealing […]

Faith Refreshed Online Retreat Week 1: God’s Revealing Moments

Joe Paprocki

Welcome to Week 1 of Faith Refreshed, an online retreat to help us “hit the refresh button” in our spiritual lives so that we might better see things we weren’t previously seeing and return to our lives and ministry with a new outlook! Throughout this retreat, I will draw from my best-selling book, A Well-Built Faith: A Catholic’s Guide to Knowing and Sharing What We Believe, as we revisit the four pillars of our Catholic […]

Join Me for an Online Retreat: Faith Refreshed

Joe Paprocki

When surfing the Internet, we may occasionally find ourselves on a webpage that is moving slowly or has frozen. In such cases, it can help to hit the refresh button. Refreshing the page basically tells the browser to go back to the server and see if there is anything new, thus reloading or updating the page. Often, after refreshing a webpage, we find ourselves delighted to see something that wasn’t there before. These are like […]

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith video series

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, Step Eight: Be Still

Joe Paprocki

God knew the importance of taking a rest after six days of hard work creating the cosmos! We can participate in the divine life and tap into divine energy by observing the Third Commandment that insists we take a day off from work to remind ourselves that we are human beings, not human doings. As we conclude our reflections on the steps from my book, 8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, I invite you to […]

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, Step Seven: Share Generously and Selflessly

Joe Paprocki

One of the most well-known Gospel verses is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This passage captures one of God’s most defining attributes: generosity and selflessness. What an incredibly generous and selfless act on God’s part to give us his only Son, Jesus, who, in turn, gave his life for us on the […]

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, Step Six: Make Repairs

Joe Paprocki

Some people fix things for a living: cars, teeth, HVAC systems, plumbing, legal issues, electrical problems, and so on. Many others repair things as a hobby: furniture restoration, auto repairs and restoration, gardening, sewing, and so on. There is something innately pleasing about either repairing something or seeing something get repaired. It’s as if something is restored to the “way God intended it to be!” The truth is, God has spent (and continues to spend) […]

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, Step Five: Show Compassion

Joe Paprocki

Often, we come to know someone’s “true colors” as a result of an experience with that person in which he or she speaks and acts in a significant manner. For the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt, they came to know God and his true colors as a result of the Exodus/Passover experience, when God revealed his overflowing compassion for an oppressed people. Throughout Scripture, we find compassion to be a defining attribute of God, as […]

Pop-Up Prayer: Guest Jean Heaton

Joe Paprocki

I firmly believe that 12-step practices can teach us much about spirituality and, specifically, prayer. In this episode of Pop-Up Prayer, I ask Jean Heaton, author of Helping Families Recover from Addiction: Coping, Growing, and Healing through 12-Step Practices and Ignatian Spirituality, to share some insights about how each of us can find strength in prayer when we find ourselves at “the end of our rope” and experiencing powerlessness. For more information about 12-step practices […]

8 Steps to Energize Your Faith, Step Four: Build and Celebrate Relationships

Joe Paprocki

What does the doctrine of the Trinity have to do with our everyday living? Quite a bit, actually! We are all made in the image and likeness of God, and our God just happens to be a community of Persons. In other words, one of God’s defining attributes is relationality. God reveals himself to us as a community of three Persons—the Trinity—whose love is so great and so intimate that God is One. We can […]