1. My Journey Home to the Catholic Faith

From growing up Lutheran to exploring New Age spirituality, Carrie spent years searching for truth in many places. After a powerful vision of Jesus, she found new life in protestant Christianity — but the journey didn’t stop there. In this heartfelt conversation, Carrie shares how that same pursuit of truth ultimately led her home to the Catholic Church. This is a story of the supernatural peace of Christ, grace, longing, and the surprising ways God draws us closer to Himself.

Carrieand Sheikh's Conversion Story on Catholic Recon Podcast

Pints with Aquinas 

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If you'd like to share your conversion or reversion story and be a guest on the podcast, please email me @ livingwholeandholy@gmail.com

Transcript

Welcome to the very first episode of the Living Whole and Holy podcast. For this first episode, I wanted to share my conversion story with you and how I came to absolutely love the Catholic faith. I truly believe there were seeds planted throughout my life and challenging situations that God placed me in to eventually bring me back to Jesus.

So I was born Lutheran. I was baptized in the Lutheran Church when I was a baby. My mom was Lutheran and my dad was atheist. So it was a very interesting household to grow up in. I don't have any memories of going to church as a kid because since my parents were not on the same page faith wise, we didn't end up going to church. But my mom wanted my brothers and I to be baptized as babies. So.

Faith wasn't a priority in my household, but I did have a few Christian friends growing up and I would go for sleepovers at their house and I would be invited to church and I remember going and I remember thinking it was neat and I liked it. And I remember my mom really got into her faith again when I was 14. She wanted me to be confirmed in the Lutheran church because when you're that age, it's kind of like a rite of passage. It's a little bit different than the sacraments of the Catholic Church, but when you are confirmed into the Lutheran Church, you can receive Holy Communion. My mom asked me if I wanted to be confirmed in the Lutheran Church, and I said, sure. I had a friend who was Lutheran and her mom would take her and her sisters to church. And that's kind how we got back into going to church because her mom invited us at one point and within that process, my mom had thought it would be a good idea for me to be confirmed in the Lutheran church. I was able to do catechism classes just with the pastor and my mom, so I learned all about the things that the Lutheran church believes through that catechism class and then I was able to receive Holy Communion through being confirmed. And I remember that church very distinctly because they had beautiful stained glass windows. Everything was very sacred and traditional. Not all lutheran churches are that way, but this one was. I remember watching people receive holy communion before i could and thinking, wow, that's really neat. Lutherans don't believe in the real presence of Jesus in holy communion the way that Catholics do, but i do remember the reverence and sacredness of that and it being a very pivotal moment in my life when I could receive Holy Communion through the confirmation. So that's sort of the extent of my religious upbringing. It was interesting because my mom would take me to church with this friend and her sisters and we would not stay afterwards. There was no level of building community. It was just, let's go to church, let's go home. There was no talk about the bible. I don't remember my mom reading the bible. I remember her getting me a bible, but I don't remember it being a big part of our lives. My mom was diagnosed with cancer about a year after that. I was a freshman in high school and it was absolutely devastating. I was very close to my mom. She was the type of mom that really was thoughtful and got to know my interests and she just was very supportive and I really attribute her planting the seed of this baptism and this confirmation into coming back to my faith. So she has been pivotal in that. So when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, she did end up having surgery, chemotherapy. She was very, very sick and it was just a very challenging time for our whole family. And I really attribute my faith and praying to God to getting through it. And I remember praying that God would heal her. I prayed for a miracle for her. And miraculously, she did live 15 years after this surgery. They gave her about a five year chance of living after diagnosis and she did live another 15 years, which is pretty remarkable. But if I didn't have my faith, I don't know that I would have gone through it in the same way. So I went to church through high school. My mom recovered from cancer.

I would come home in here and there when I would come home in college, but I didn't really consistently go to church. I didn't have role models of the faith. When I went to college, I was really focused on achievement, performance. I started really getting into personal growth and self-help. I wanted to be the best version of myself I could be. I ended up making myself a self-improvement project and tried to just improve all these things about myself that I thought I was lacking in.

And at that time, I considered myself spiritual but not religious and started calling God "The Universe." I didn't feel as close of a relationship with God as I once had.

And I lived about 45 minutes away from where I grew up. And so I would see my parents and my family here and there, but I mostly was at college and doing my thing. After college, I immediately went to grad school in Chicago. I got a master's in speech pathology. And this was the first time I was really far away from my family. And it was much harder to be away from them than I had thought.

I didn't just step out of my comfort zone, I jumped out. I was very disoriented and I questioned if I should even be there. That time in my life I experienced a lot of depression and anxiety because I felt very alone. I was in a very rigorous grad school program. I didn't know anybody. I thought about dropping off the program at one point because it all felt like too much.

Out of desperation, one time I was walking down the street in the town where my college was and I saw a sign for a psychic and I said, ooh, maybe I can go in and get some kind of secret answers about what's going on with me. So I went in to see that psychic and she told me, "You are a walking dead spirit."

She wanted lots of money and I ended up leaving instantly and I felt even worse than when I got there. And that's what happens when you start dabbling in occult practices. You open a door.

So I left and I didn't go back, but I did keep seeking. When I was there, I kept seeking God. I was seeking connection with something higher than myself. And I got into New Age meditation. I read more self-help books. I tried to figure out what was going on with me. I was feeling so depressed and anxious. I sought therapy, which was actually really helpful.

But mostly I felt very out of control and very spiritually lost all while trying to finish my master's degree. By the grace of God, I finished grad school and did well somehow, despite having been so lost spiritually. I did end up making some really wonderful friends and had some positive experiences. But in general, I look back at that time in my life and I definitely viewed it as one of the most challenging experiences I've ever had.

I always had a dream of moving to LA and by the time I had lived in Michigan and Chicago for the first 25 years of my life, I was ready for sunshine. And my brother had moved to LA a few years before and I had this dream. I'm like, I'm gonna go to LA. So instead of looking for jobs in Michigan or Chicago, I looked for jobs in LA. And the only person I knew was my brother.

So I ended up getting a job in a small speech clinic. I knew when I got there, I wanted to make friends. I started meeting colleagues that I worked with, but I knew I wanted to make friendships outside of work. So there was this website back in 2008 called Meetup and people use that before the dawn of social media and things like that to meet each other.

And I wanted to meet people with similar interests. So I had really gotten into new age meditation practices prior to moving to LA and LA is the hotbed of new age. So I was in the perfect place for that. And I found this meditation/reiki group that I ended up being a part of for five years. And within this group, there were levels and there was levels of reiki and you would be offered to go on these retreats. There were things like past life regressions, which now I don't believe in past lives, but at that time, it was a way for me to believe that I was healing things from past lives, and that was why I was experiencing what I was experiencing in this life, and it's all very complicated.

So I was involved with that group for five years and ultimately I left because things just started to not feel right. But for the next several years after leaving that group, I kept trying to fill that God shaped hole in my heart with things that I thought would get me there. Like more meditation, more reiki, tarot cards. I was really into yoga. I started doing chanting, mantras, astrology, was following the moon cycles. I thought if I knew what Mercury and retrograde was, I could make sure I wasn't doing anything significant in my life. So I was really in a place of trying to control. Then I started getting into feminine goddess wisdom because I wanted to heal the feminine parts of myself that were unhealed. I was desperately seeking God, but always ending up feeling empty.

And at that time in my life, I was highly insecure, ungrounded. And I was really trying to seek peace through trying to control my future. I thought maybe if I know the secret knowledge from what an astrologer says about my future, then I'll feel good. And I was trying to find my identity in these spiritual practices. And I was trying to find my identity in my career as a speech therapist. And then I even, for a stint, was vegan and tried to make my identity within that and learning how to cook vegan, and then ultimately realized that's the last diet that worked for me. But I was seeking. Everything fell short and it all felt like so much work. I didn't even think of Jesus at that time or that turning to him was an option. I met my amazing husband, Sheikh in 2011.

We connected on all the different New Age practices that we both were involved in and there were many of them. And at that time I had really gotten into Hindu chanting and yoga and was doing it several times a week. And so I thought, I like him. We met through a mutual friend who I met through my meditation group that I was part of. She's still a dear friend to us both today.

We ended up getting married in 2013. So, Sheikh grew up in a Hindu household, but he never connected with the religion. It was mostly just cultural for him. He actually was really into Buddhism for a while and even had a Buddhist group at his college. But he was a seeker. He's always been a seeker.

We ended up having a Hindu wedding ceremony and then we had a non-religious wedding outdoors in a really beautiful venue. We did all of this in one day. It was a very long day, but it was truly beautiful. I wouldn't change it for the world. And I'm really still in awe of how God brought us together and how our journey has evolved since then, because it looks very different than it did on that day. So after we got married, we continued down the New Age road throughout the first nine years of our marriage.

We always seemed to be on the same page spiritually, but nothing filled the void of emptiness that kept happening as we kept trying to grasp at different things to receive more healing, knowledge, and peace. We were seeking control in a very chaotic world. So we turned to astrology, energy readers, spiritual psychology, Eastern meditation, trying to quote, find ourselves. There was no personal relationship with God and we just kept becoming more and more focused on ourselves and our higher selves and all of the things that are involved in that. Just a year after we got married, my mom passed away from cancer. And it was probably one of the most challenging times of my entire life.

We are really grateful that my mom was able to make it to our wedding. And after our wedding, her cancer came back very quickly. And when she passed, there was a huge void in my life. I still miss her to this day. It's almost 11 years since she's passed away. And I still think of her all the time. She had such an impact on my life and was such a beautiful person in so many ways.

When my mom passed away, I really relied on these spiritual practices that actually weren't working. I kept trying to make them work. I turned to my husband, I turned to my friends for support, but that loss was so deep and profound. And it really ultimately left me feeling really ungrounded and just in a state of grief.

Then in 2022, my husband experienced some very mysterious and complicated health issues. He's a wellness director for an integrative doctor. And so he had a doctor helping him try to figure out what was going on with him. He had all the scans, CAT scans, MRIs, brain scans, tried the supplements, and he had no diagnosis. Nobody could figure out what was going on with him.

He was mainly suffering from extreme muscle spasms, difficulty sitting, he couldn't work for a few months, and he ended up having to blend all of his food for two years in order to eat properly. And if you know my husband, he's a total foodie. He's not a trained chef, but he might as well be one because his food is absolutely outstanding. He has such a talent when it comes to the kitchen. He loves feeding people. So for him not to be able to eat properly for two years, was extremely challenging, extremely hard. He experienced a lot of physical, mental, and emotional anguish. And as his wife, this was heartbreaking to watch. I would go to bed at night hoping he would still be with me the next day. We really thought there were moments where he was going to die and we did not know what to do. So we used the best of the New Age practices we had and we would pray. We would cry out to God asking for help because we were desperate. We did not know what to do. We were not getting any answers.

It was Easter Vigil of 2022. We had no idea that this was Easter Vigil. We would come to learn that later. But Easter Vigil of 2022, and I had a profound experience that would change the course of the rest of our lives.

So he was in the midst of just feeling really, really terrible and us again, not really knowing what to do except cry out to God. So we went to bed that night on Easter Vigil and we had visions of Jesus, not the same vision, but we each had independent visions of Jesus. So in his vision, Jesus came up to him and he was in this dazzling white row with a golden sash and just this beautiful figure, so much peace, and he reached out his hand towards Sheikh. And Sheikh ended up thinking to himself after the fact, it wasn't Buddha, it wasn't Krishna who came to me, it was Jesus. It was undeniably Jesus. Reaching out to him, letting him know that he's with him and he can turn to him. 

In my vision, Jesus was standing over Sheikh with his hands over his body saying, "My son, I am healing you." And we both woke up the next morning. I woke up, I think a little bit before he did. And I felt what Philippians 4:7 talks about, which is "the peace that passes all human understanding that will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." I felt about five uninterrupted moments of supernatural peace. Peace that I had been seeking through all of these practices but never finding. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was Jesus who came to me in my dream. So then, Sheikh wakes up and he looks at me and he's like, "I need to tell you something." And I looked at him and I said, "I need to tell you something." And shared with each other about our visions and we both knew it was Jesus. There was no question. And we were just in awe that this happened to us the same night. And we're gonna be in awe later on when we realize this happened on Easter Vigil, the night before Easter, which is the resurrection.

I'm not going to say it was all roses and sunshine after we had these visions. We were very disoriented initially because we believed we saw Jesus and we wanted him in our lives, but we were trying to integrate him into the New Age. And that didn't work very well because he's not compatible with that.

So three weeks later, after experiencing this and trying to integrate what we had experienced, we both got on our knees in prayer and we started crying and we decided to surrender it to Jesus. We wanted an intimate, deep relationship with him. We were not getting that in our other spiritual practices. We had become focused on ourselves and not focused on others. And we were just ready to be done with that. 

What happens when you allow Jesus into your life is the Holy Spirit starts coming in and starts sanctifying you or making you holy. It starts making things distasteful that once were appealing. So we had all this New Age stuff in our house. We had crystals, had oracle cards, we had Buddha paintings, we had tons of spiritual books that did not line up with Jesus. And it was like, I couldn't have it anymore. I didn't want it. It just became very distasteful. So I ended up getting rid of all that stuff, taking it out of the house, and starting in this new, very disorienting place with our relationship with Jesus. 

So one of the things that we started doing was watching conversion stories of people who were New Age, who became Christian, and it brought us a lot of consolation.

We listened to podcasts and we realized we couldn't be the problem and the solution. And that's what happens in a lot of these New Age practices is, you know, we have problems in our lives and then we try to be the answer and you can't, Jesus is the answer. And he's such a simpler answer.

It's actually not complicated with Jesus. It's so much simpler and easier than being on the constant hamster wheel of the New Age. He was always there and always loving us, we just were not letting him in. So from there, we started seeking a church and at that time it was still post COVID and we were willing to start watching some church services online. So since I had been Lutheran, I just started researching. fI ound a Lutheran podcast and then I found that that church had a live stream and they were out of state, but I really, really enjoyed the podcast. So I said, okay, let me go ahead and let's watch one of these sermons. And we loved it.

But as time went on, we realized we needed to find a local church. We wanted to build community with other Christians. And there had been a few patients that had come into Sheikh's work. And one of them went to a local church and he was part of a men's group and invited Sheikh to join the men's group. And Sheikh loved it. He finally felt like he was meeting some men that had the shared values and
could kind of share his story and hear other people's stories. So that led us to joining a local Protestant church. It was not Lutheran, was just non-denominational. It's a beautiful church, beautiful people. We built community, we learned to love worship music, and we ended up joining a small group bible study. And that December of that year, the pastor said, "why don't you guys get baptized?" And I said, well, I was baptized as a baby. Do I need to get baptized again? And he said, yeah, yeah, you know, it's different with Lutheran because we believe in believers baptism versus infant baptism. And I was like, okay, I'll get baptized again. And then my husband had never been baptized, so he got baptized as well. We ended up giving our testimony for the first time in public and I lost it halfway through the testimony thinking about all the beautiful things Jesus had done in our lives in such a short amount of time.

 And then I reconnected with a childhood friend, Kim, and I told her about us getting baptized and she was absolutely thrilled. She is Catholic and she was so, so happy for us. And we reconnected at that point and she's gonna be a pivotal part of our story in the future when we get to the Catholic part.

So we continued going to that church and then summer of 2023 we were friends with a couple who said, hey there's this program and we wanted to see if you guys wanted to do it with us. It's about the different teachings of the church and we think you guys would really like it but we need to do it as a couple and kind of get together, watch videos, discuss what we're watching and I said yeah let's do it.

So it was a program that was put on by a Protestant pastor and it just talked about all the practices of Jesus like prayer, fasting, almsgiving, contemplative prayer, things that sounded very Catholic. And I remember in the program in the videos he would mention saints like Saint Augustine and Saint Irenaeus and early church fathers and he was talking about the early church before the church split away from the Catholic Church into the Protestant and the Reformation and all that.

It was through that program that my husband and I started to think, hmm, why are they talking about saints? And ooh, I like saints. I want to find out more about them. And they were just talking about things that were holy and tradition and greater reverence. And so that sparked something in us. From that point on, we couldn't stop thinking, maybe there's something deeper here.

So, Sheikh ended up doing a lot more research. He read books about Catholicism and started listening to the Pints with Aquinas podcast, which is a very famous Catholic podcast with interviews and theologians and nuns and monks and things like that. And started really getting interested and started kind of feeling like, I might want something deeper. I'm not really getting that in the non-denominational church, even though we were having a great time there. We were enjoying the sermons every week and the people. We just felt like there was a depth and richness that was missing. One day, Sheikh turned on YouTube, and this is where the algorithm can work in your favor. So he had been researching all this Catholic stuff and he ended up seeing a priest doing the Latin Mass and he saw the Eucharist, which is the Holy Communion. He saw a priest lifting up the Eucharist and he just started crying. He was in tears and he just said, that's what we're missing. We're missing that from what we're doing.

He was not the same after that. and then i said, you know what? that's what i was really in awe of when i became lutheran, when i received confirmation, was being able to receive holy communion. and as i said before, holy communion in the Lutheran church is a symbol. they don't believe it's the actual body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.

But in the Catholic Church, there's a whole sanctification process and the priest is able to pray over the bread and wine with the power of the Holy Spirit to make it the body, blood, soul, and divinity. So it was really interesting that he had that profound experience. I had the profound experience when I first was able to receive Holy Communion in the Lutheran Church. So was like a full circle moment. And so then you thought he was really seeking before. Now he was spending three to four hours a day learning about Catholicism. And he even learned about the rosary and he ordered a rosary on Amazon and then ordered me one. And we started praying the rosary together every night. And we felt that peace that we talked about every time we prayed it. And that's the peace of Mother Mary. And what's amazing about Mother Mary is she leads us to her son. She leads us into deeper relationship with her son and i learned that the rosary is a meditation on all of the different aspects of Jesus's life. So when you pray the rosary you get closer to Jesus through his mother. It's beautiful. So Sheikh reached out to our friend Bea, who has such a beautiful voice. She sings in the choir at our church.

And she was the only Catholic he knew and she was so excited. And she sent him more information about Catholicism and the Catholic church and why being Catholic is so amazing. And she introduced us to Father Ethan, who is the priest at the church we go to, St. John Eudes. So we connected with Father Ethan. We told him about our story. We told him about being involved in the new age and he said, can I come bless your house? And we said, yeah. Please. So he came over, did a house blessing, brought some people from the church. We did some prayers together. And after he left, Sheikh and I looked at each other and we just said, this is it. We want to become Catholic. It was so clear. And from there...,this was January of 2024 now. I inquired with the church about becoming Catholic as adults and they have a program called RCIA. So we went to the church and did a bible study that was connected with RCIA. We met a beautiful community of people. We fell in love with the truth, beauty and depth of the Catholic church. And really we started to learn to put our identity not in the world, but in Christ.

And we were still feeling that lasting peace, that supernatural peace that I had mentioned after I had the vision. And the journey of faith for us just keeps getting better and better. And Jesus never promises a life without challenges, but he promises to always be there through it all. And he has.

So we got closer to receiving the sacraments and I was so excited to ask my friend Kim, my childhood friend who has been a Cradle Catholic, if she would sponsor us. Now she lives in Michigan. She has three children. One of her daughters was going to be receiving Holy Communion. So she had a lot going on. She's got a full life. But when I told her I wanted her to sponsor us, sponsor just means support you through your journey of faith. She was so excited. And what was really amazing is she had gone to Rome in January and she had some gifts and she had meant to send them, but time got away from her and it was totally fine because she ended up bringing them when she came to sponsor us. And it was so beautiful. She brought us rosaries from the Vatican. Her mom gave us a crucifix. It was just beautiful and so thoughtful. And she brought us the San Damiano Cross, which is from a church in Assisi. And it was just so special to receive those gifts, to reconnect with her, to have her be our sponsor. God is just so good in that way. And for her to be there with us on that day just meant the world. So we received the Sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation in April of 2024.

And came time for us to choose saints and my husband chose Padre Pio and I chose Saint Therese. And Saint Therese is also the saint of this podcast and I absolutely love her because she's all about making things simple. And she's the little flower and if you ask her to send you flowers, roses, she will and she did for me. And she's just been such a huge part of my life. And Padre Pio is also a very powerful saint. They're just perfect for us. And so we chose them as our confirmation saints. And then when we received communion for the first time, I literally felt like a kid on Christmas morning, but it was so much better than a present because presents are fleeting. They don't last, but Jesus lasts forever. And being able to receive him in Holy Communion the first time with it actually being the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus was beyond special. It was amazing. I will never forget that moment.

So Jesus has been healing my husband. I have to say he's in such a better place than he was. At the time we had the visions, by June of 2024, he was able to eat solid food again, which was so exciting for us.

So we wanted to our marriage convalidated. So what that means is if you are already married but you weren't married in the Catholic Church, you can have a special ceremony to receive the sacrament of matrimony. It's a covenant and it's really special when you can receive that sacrament. And we had not received that sacrament because we got married before we became Catholic. So we decided to see when our anniversary was that year.

We looked at the calendar and our 11th anniversary was on a Saturday. And we thought, wow, that is perfect. Let's see if God wants us to do it on that day. we asked Father Ethan, he was available. Most of our loved ones were available. So we ended up having our marriage convalidation and receiving the Holy Matrimony Sacrament on August 3rd, 2024, which was 11 years after our original wedding. This was such a special day. I just think back to us having our visions and how all the different ways this could have gone. He could have gone one way, I could have gone another. We could have both been like, nope, that wasn't real. But we both obeyed God and we both listened to God. And we undeniably knew that Jesus was there. But we chose. We chose to follow him together. So you could really feel the presence of God during that ceremony. When we sang the Gloria, I was in tears. I felt like it was the wedding that we didn't get to have but always wanted because it was small and intimate and it was really special sharing our vows and it was just the perfect day and I'm just in awe of the man that I'm getting to spend my life with. How beautiful he is, how much he's grown as a man of God, and how much he's leading our family even more in the faith. It's the biggest blessing.

In September, we had an opportunity to share our testimony for the first time in church. So we were at church and it was the evening mass and Father Ethan said, hey, there's a young adult event going on. These young adults are going to be confirmed. We'd love to have you share your testimony with them. And if you want in front of the church. And I said, yeah, let's do it. So we got up there and shared our testimony.

And right after I stepped down from sharing the testimony, God whispered into my ear, you need to share this more. And then he popped into my head the name of a podcast that I really found a lot of consolation in during the moments when I was trying to figure out what was going on and listen to other people's stories of conversion. And the Catholic Recon podcast popped into my head. So I reached out to Eddie Trask, who's the host of that podcast. And I just sent him a short blurb of our story. And he emailed me back within an hour. And he said, yes, please come on my show. I don't get a lot of couples. I would love to hear your and Sheikh's story. And so we set that up for October. So this is a year ago. This is such a full circle moment. So we ended up being on that podcast. then after that, God was like, you need to keep sharing your story. And I had the idea of having a podcast, but I never felt like it was something I could do. I didn't feel ready for it, but he just has kept being persistent. So being on Eddie's podcast definitely planted the seed for starting this one. And I'm really grateful now to be sharing this story more and more with people.

So last December, December of 2024, ended very unexpectedly. I was invited on a pilgrimage to Italy with my church. I knew I always wanted to go to Italy, especially after hearing Kim's experience in Rome. And I thought to myself when she was telling me about it, I'm going to go there one day. And then I ended up getting invited to go much sooner than I had expected. I went to Rome, San Giovanni Rotondo and Assisi.

We ended in Assisi and Assisi has my heart. I love it so much. I felt like I connected with my faith in a whole new level. I really connected with St. Francis in front of his tomb. I just sat there and again, felt that supernatural peace.

It was really neat getting to see the Vatican. It was neat getting to go to see Padre Pio and praying for my husband while I was there. I just felt like being in these holy places really helped deepen my identity and my relationship with Jesus.

I feel like the Catholic faith never gets old. I feel like every day there's something new I discover. And I really mean it when I say that becoming Catholic has been the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm really in awe of what God has done these last three years and what he's continuing to do. I am just surrendering to it and asking him to take the wheel.

I'm learning to grow in holiness and wholeness every day and just so grateful to be on such a sacred journey and to have holy tools that keep us close to him and in his peace.

Thank you so much for being here, for your support on this very first episode. I'm right there with you and learning a growing in holiness every day. In the next episode, I'll share how I found Catholic coaching, how it's transformed my life, how it's increased my faith tenfold, and why I'm so incredibly excited to share the tools I've learned with you. Until then, God bless your week. I'm going to leave you with a quote from Padre Pio on simplicity.

Live simply, eat simply, love one another simply. Do not complicate matters unnecessarily. How do you live simply? You remove activities that are not necessary or that pull you away from your duty. Consider your duty, then move through each day and try to serve only that duty. Have order in your life and in the life of your family. There should be rhythm to each day.

that does not change, rise at the same time, retire at the same time, and the evening, pray at the same time. This creates an environment in which you are free to consider God. Do not think, my friends, that you live in a world where the need for simplicity has disappeared. There should be calm, and if there is not calm in your life, change your life and keep changing it until you feel calm.

The act of sitting and reading these words is forcing you to consider heaven's wishes for you. Pull yourself away from the world even further and spend time in silence. Ask Jesus to show you which activities should be removed. Live simply.