The reception of confession is a powerful tool I have utilized in the past couple months to help combat my scrupulosity.Ī second lesson gained from You Are Special is that it is my own pride and limited world outlook that prohibits me from experiencing a foretaste of Heaven in this life. He allows every day to be a new opportunity to love Him and to love my neighbor.

God mysteriously stirred the story of the Wemmicks in my long-term memory bank to remind myself the true meaning of life! Let me explain:Īn obvious allegory for the Christian life, I am reminded that any good reward I receive at work does not increase or decrease my dignity as a human person or as an adopted son of God. This is a story that I relate to more and more with each passing year. Eventually, my thoughts landed on a book from our living room bookshelf-Max Lucado’s You are Special. Focusing on the virtue of humility got my mind thinking. I am grateful I came across the saint’s words as I began a fresh week. Saint Teresa of Avila once said, “There is more value in a little study of humility and in a single act of it than in all the knowledge in the world.” I would do well to heed this advice. I get to be so goal-driven and task-oriented that sometimes I miss the entire purpose of my job -to help others! Over the past couple weeks, I sought out acknowledgement from the superiors in my department and I got a little frustrated when I did not constantly receive “corporate praise”.

Unfortunately, my control-everything mindset does not simply reside in my home-life-it seeps into the workplace as well.

Obsessing over Human PraiseĪs a person with OCD, it is a daily battle to combat my compulsive urges for order and stability. Days when I struggle with patience, I sometimes reduce my children as tasks to be managed and the ultimate goal is getting them to bedtime by the arbitrary deadline I impose on the family. Admittedly, I have seen the danger of the reduction of humanity which results in a loss of dignity of the individual person. John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae reminds us, “when the sense of God is lost, there is also a tendency to lose the sense of man, of his dignity and his life in turn, the systematic violation of the moral law, especially in the serious matter of respect for human life and its dignity, produces a kind of progressive darkening of the capacity to discern God’s living and saving presence” (no. Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on November 14, 2017.

I am special max lucado