Mental Prayer for January 17, What Should I Get Out of Retreat?

Mental Prayer Meditation Helps

Presence of God

Grace I Ask: Dear Lord, help me to realize the eternal importance of making a good retreat.

The Idea and My Personal Application: I am in danger of losing heaven so long as I do not desire to go there more than to have anything in this world: money or fame or popularity - anything. The chief result I should get out of a retreat is the real conviction that my one real purpose for being alive is to serve God and so to gain eternal happiness in heaven. Nothing else is truly important. During the year, when I am so taken up with fun, dreams about a wonderful future in this world, desires for pleasure, I forget this truth. I "retreat" from the world in order to understand it once again so that in the future I will always live for this one purpose. The exercise of the retreat
should make me know my own weaknesses, temp­tations, sins - where I am spiritually "out of con­dition," where I am hurting myself and my work for others. It should make me stronger in over­coming these weaknesses, ready to fight Satan every step of the way, closer than ever before to Christ and His Blessed Mother. It should particularly help me to overcome any really serious personal difficulty or to solve any important personal problem, such as the choice of my state of life, a choice that does or will affect me and through my influence, countless others too. This is what a retreat is for.

I Speak to God: Dear God, you know even better than I do how badly I need to make a good retreat. I want to make this year's perfectly - to do what­ever I must in order to live rightly, to exercise myself in such a way that I will be stronger in resisting the temptations Satan puts in my path.

Thought for Today: "Seek the Lord with your whole heart."
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Adapted from Mental Prayer, Challenge to the Lay Apostle
by The Queen's Work,(© 1958)