Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Have you ever had a year when you felt you completely missed out on Advent?

You wake up on December 23rd and you're thinking,

oh my, where did all the time go?

I can't believe it's almost Christmas

and all in December I've been doing all these end of the year,

project shopping, running around, cleaning, cooking, getting ready for travel,

all these preparations, but I didn't prepare spiritually.

I didn't prepare for what's most important.

Well my friends, I want to help us enter into this season and not let

the time go by. I want us to really enter into this great gift the church gives us

every year to prepare our hearts for Christmas to help us stay focused. That's what I'm doing

this podcast. They're gonna offer us three practical ways we can jump-start our

advent and then over the month of December I want to really focus on evidence

and help us to stay focused on this season. So if you want to join me in this

Advent journey and you may have family and friends that want to join us as well, stay tuned

as we're going to be looking at the season of Advent. But first of all on a personal note, I thought about this idea of preparation and I want to share with you an analogy from my own personal life.

When I come home from work, there are two different ways I tend to enter

into my house and engage with my family. One way is I'm really busy and I'm

thinking about all my projects at work as I'm driving home and I'm making phone calls and I'm very much in work mode and I walk through that door when I get home and I really want to encounter my wife and encounter my kids and enter into their life,

but I'm on this work mode and very intense and I can just tell, I'm trying to ask them how they're doing,

but I'm not fully present to them. I'm not

...