Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat the host and the content director

here at Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. As 2019 winds to a close, many of us are looking

forward to the new year and are making resolutions. Maybe it's to get more exercise, to lose

weight or to pick up a new habit. Well, in today's episode, we're going to hear from Bishop

Barron on three new years resolutions you might not have considered yet. It's a fairly

short clip, so I hope you give it a listen. And then Bishop Barron will be back with us

in studio to kick off the new year. Enjoy.

I think as the new year begins, an awful lot of people engage in resolutions about their

health, about their physical well-being, and people get back to the gym and all that.

Nothing wrong with it. But I want to suggest some spiritual resolutions at the beginning

of the new year. And the three I talk about, first of all, our prayer, secondly, forgiving

an enemy, and thirdly, comforting the afflicted. And let me say something about each one of

those. Prayer. Almost everybody, even with a vague interest in the spiritual life, will

say something like, you know, I don't pray well enough. I should be better in my life

of prayer. It's a bit there like physical health. Most of us thinking, I should be healthy

or I should exercise more. And I would say that's probably true. Most of us don't pray

as we should. Thomas Merton, the greatest spiritual writer of the 20th century, said, when

someone asked him, what's the one thing I can do to improve my prayer life, said, take

the time. It's a very simple response. Nothing arcane about it. Take the time. How do I improve

my health? Well, exercise every day. I don't have time. Take the time. Put it in your

schedule to get on that extra cycle or whatever it is. Same with prayer. I don't have time.

If I pray, I squeeze it in. At the beginning of the day or the end of the day or I'm distracted

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