In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence.

I ask your pardon for my sins, and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father, and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

This life of ours is a journey back home, a journey that is filled with challenges.

The Lord gave his apostles clear instructions for their journeys,

so that they would be well prepared to handle the difficulties they would inevitably face.

How important it is for us to be ready to handle life's challenges in a deeply Christian way.

More specifically, we need to integrate our intellect, our will, and our heart in such a way that we not only see clearly the goal of the journey, but that we desire it intensely, and we learn to put our whole heart and soul into the daily effort to get there.

We need to consciously work at this. It is not automatic.

Let us ask Jesus for the desire for continual conversion.

For the grace to resist complacency. Saint Bernard wrote a

thousand years ago, whoever does not aspire to be better does not deserve the

name good. The moment a person no longer desires to be better, that person stops being good.

Centuries before that, St. Augustine in the fourth century,

he wrote, always aspire to go higher, to keep improving.

The day that you say, that's enough, I've reached the

pinnacle, no more need to improve, that day is when you are lost, because you will start

going down. And so the need for this constant conversion. With regard to our journey back home, that is, to heaven,

we need to work hard on a daily, very conscious basis,

on the three players, so to speak, our intellect, our will, and our heart.

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