The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?

Unless and until we rest in God, we will never risk for God.

This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.

The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?

Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.

God gave us laughter, I think, as a balm to wash the wounds of our own blunders, as a splint to mend the bones we break in our rashness or vanity.

Sabbath's golden rule: Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life.