We are here on this earth to become saints. We were made for heaven. We do not belong in this world. It is uncomfortable and painful. We are sinners and this world is like a playground or an obstacle course where we are being refined into saints. God has given us a mission. We all have the same broad mission, which is to become a saint, become the best version of ourselves to grow in virtue. And then we are all running our own unique obstacle course. And we have these kinds of submissions within the mission. And a lot of you set goals in January. A lot of you in our program went through our great life blueprint program, which was so fun. And you know, you’ve been focused on a goal all year long. And in December we kind of remember that we’re like, oh, I thought this year was gonna go a certain way. We had plans and intentions and dreams. Now we know the year didn’t go that way because it never goes exactly the way that we think. Some things turned out better than you thought and some things were harder than you thought. But the same way of reviews is to make peace with what is, to really sink into this deep acceptance that you had the year that God wanted you to have. How do we know it’s the year you had?

And so there is no upside to beating yourself up about the year that you had. There is no upside to looking at it with shame or embarrassment or hopelessness or failure or guilt or anxiety. And your brain is gonna wanna do all of that. But there is no upside to doing that. The sainthood way of reviewing your year is first with acceptance. All glory be to God. And then to look for the lessons. You are here, my friend, to learn lessons. And you got to learn a lot of them this year. Whether you started the year thinking, oh I’m gonna lose 20 pounds and you didn’t, you get to sit with that and go, huh, what did I learn? Well I learned that if I don’t have a plan then I just kind of eat whatever and I don’t lose any weight. Maybe one of your goals was to declutter the house, get rid of a bunch of stuff, embrace minimalism, organize things better. And maybe you did one room and you didn’t get to the rest of the rooms. What did you learn? You probably learned a similar lesson by the way, which is that if we don’t plan time to do that in our homes, it often gets pushed to the next day and the next day and it doesn’t get done. You might have also learned this isn’t really that important,

That actually you can continue being a good mom and shepherding these souls even with cluttered closets, that your attention needs to be somewhere else. And you learned that this year you learned a lot of things about relationships. All of you had a lot of discomfort, tension, problem solving, lack of problem solving in your relationships.

And so when God is good and he loves us and we review the year as a saint, it just feels kind of neutral. It feels like being a scientist where you just look back and you go, oh okay, this is what the data says and here’s what I can conclude from that data. And this should be a very peripheral process. You should sit with a notebook and light a candle and pray and ask the Lord to reveal to you what lessons you got to learn. But it’s really important that when we are being taught lessons by the Lord, that we assimilate them, that we, we really are clear on what they were. Being able to articulate them on paper is a great way to make sure that you are very clear on the lessons that you were learning. Because if you’re just walking around and kind of thinking about it, you’ll have some very interesting thoughts and then you’ll forget them and God will go, oh, it looks like we need her to learn that lesson again. Let’s send her some challenges to help her learn that lesson. Again, God in his goodness never lets us fail a test. He always just gives it to us again.

And so if you are feeling down right now, if you are feeling like it wasn’t an air quotes successful year, and first of all everything has still been weird since 2020. I don’t, I haven’t met anyone who’s like, yep, everything’s great, we’re all back to normal. It is a weird world that we are living in right now.

Well we’re the lessons for you. And if you believe that learning lessons is what you’re here to do, then you actually had a pretty successful year. And the more you can articulate those lessons in what you learned, the more you will set yourself up for a foundation of growth and progress moving forward in the next year. But too often we don’t take the time to review things and so we just repeat the same process over and over again. You set the same goals in January and then you live the same way that you always live.

I want you to imagine how Mary reflected on her time. She would’ve attributed all goodness to the Lord. I don’t think she would’ve dwelled on any of the badness. Don’t you feel like Mary was just really present, should not spend a lot of time thinking about the past? I think she would’ve just made peace with most things and just been thinking, you know, I will be done, Lord, that happened. Now what? You can do that too. You can do that about your life. I had a friend and she said, this was years ago, she said, oh, I really don’t like setting goals. I never like doing it. It just makes me feel bad. And she had had a lot of kids in a short period of time and she was kind of wistfully remembering the years when she didn’t have kids and she would set goals like run a marathon and then she could just do it. And she said, you know, now I never know if I’m gonna be pregnant or not and how you know what’s going on with the kids and I can’t seem to get routines in place And and so she said, I just stopped setting goals because it really was so depressing. I totally get that. I totally get that. But that’s how we know when we feel that way that we’re not setting goals from a sainthood place and maybe we’re not setting the goals that God wants us to set.

I still think even though we don’t know what kind of year we’re gonna have, it’s good to set goals and just trust yourself that you will be open to God’s will. Maybe you’ll get pregnant and then you’ll have to adjust your plans for the year. Maybe you know, I have a friend who had to be on crutches for six weeks. That changes the kind of month you’re gonna have. So we don’t wanna plan nothing, right? There’s so many things in the Bible that say that we should plan and make plans, but we also want to be flexible. And this is the sainthood way of setting goals. But then also just reviewing them with love. An acceptance.

What did you learn this year? Why did you need to learn it? And maybe if you already know what you still need to learn, you can set yourself up to learn that next year. A lot of you, God is calling you to learn how to surrender. That is such a big theme in masters. Really learning to surrender to him and not being scared about that. So if you have been feeling kind of like a low level buzzy disappointment or anxiety about your year and thinking you thought it would be different or you’d be further along by now, I just want you to, can anyone guess get out a piece of paper and just write down all the things your brain is saying. Just let it have its big tantrum. Let it tell you how terrible you are and how awful things were and how hard and all the things. Just like let it tantrum, get it out on paper.

Then I want you to write down all the lessons you learned this year. All the ways that God was calling you to grow in virtue, to grow, in surrender, to grow in compassion, to grow in faithfulness. And you did, you grew this year, I promise. And then I want you to prayerfully consider where he wants you to put your focus next year. If it comes from him, it will feel calm, it will feel peaceful, it won’t feel sparkly. And like a car commercial next year we’re gonna lose 20 pounds and clean out the house and teach all the kids Latin. Won’t feel like that.

There will feel it’ll, there’ll be a rightness to it. And you know, this is what we teach in our great Life Blueprint program. And you can go back and listen to the podcast about that. We did a podcast about it. And you can come do that program in Masters. And for those of you that have a business or want a business, I’m gonna be doing a two hour business review and planning workshop on Friday, December 16th. I have an incredible workbook and planner to give you that will help you review your year like a saint and make plans for the next year for 2023. Like Saints make plans, prayerfully with discernment, but also with openness. And I will tell you right now that the only thing you’re really scared of in the goal setting process is the way that you speak to yourself if you don’t hit your goals. Because we’re adults, there’s no homework, no one’s coming to check your paper. I’m not gonna show up at your house and say, show me your goals. Tell me why you didn’t do them.

It’s just for you. It’s between you and the Lord. And if you know that you’re gonna treat yourself with gentleness and kindness and you’re gonna review in this saintly way where you look for lessons, it won’t be so scary to reach goals, to reach for them, to set them to go for it. Because the worst thing that can happen is that you just make a list of lessons that you learned. I want you to really sit with that. The worst thing that happens when we don’t achieve our goals is just whatever you allow yourself to say to yourself. And most of us have been trained to say really, really awful things to ourselves. We’re really mean. It is a set down that we give ourselves. But I want you to know that you control that.

You don’t have to do that to yourself. You can speak to yourself with love and kindness and give glory to God for the good things and ask for forgiveness if there was sin and then move on. Wouldn’t that be a lovely way to review the year? So if you’re not part of Masters sign up, go through the Great Life Blueprint program. Set your one goal for the year. I was just reviewing it with some women today, my goal and their goals. And we were talking about how it seemed incredible to only have one goal for the year, but how powerful it was and how much progress we made and that we did make progress in other areas of our lives. It wasn’t like we only did that, but that we really made market progress on our great life goal.

And particularly if you are in business, sign up for masters just for this workshop. I’m telling you this workshop is worth hundreds of dollars. The planner alone, I really spent a lot of time and put together the exact kind of planner that I would want, that really blends like mindset and strategy and prayer as a business planner. So you could just sit down and know what you needed to work on. And I am debuting that for this workshop. So if you’ve been on the fence, now is a really good time to learn how to love yourself, to learn how to set goals from that sainthood place, that place of peace and trust and surrender and knowing that God will bring you all of the resources when you need them, all of the lessons as you need them, and all of the love that you want. So many of us just have this, this deep desire to be loved and we search for it in many, many places, but we can always find it with the Lord. He loves you so much, he’s with you right now.

He gives you an air hug and if you close your eyes, you can feel it. You can feel so loved and cherished and taken care of by the Lord. He wants you to review your year like that with him, with love. And he wants you to be excited about the next year. He wants you to have awe and wonder at the goodness of the Lord and the mystery of it all. And he wants you to make plans for peace. And I hope this podcast gives you an example of that. And then you can listen to the one we did in January about the Great Life Blueprint, and we have lots of episodes on peace and planning and goal setting and motivation. And that’s what this podcast is for. This podcast is about helping Catholic moms to live their lives with more peace. Everything we do is directed at that. And one of the ways that we have peace is we get quiet and still and we discern the will of God. That absolutely has to be part of your goal setting process because the world offers you comfort, but you are not made for comfort. You were Made for Greatness.