Note on the Author: Jonathan Conrad is commonly known as The Catholic Woodworker. He is a husband and father whose driving passion is to cultivate greater Marian devotion among Catholic men.
I have 1 question for you who have completed your 90 day Exodus journey: does it feel like you’ve reached the Promised Land? Meaning, have you found the full life God has in store for you? If I’ve learned anything from Exodus 90 it’s this. Every one of us has demons, and we will be battling them for the rest of our lives. We are attached to sin in powerful ways. What’s your demon and when are you going to journey back into the desert to fight it so that you can reach the Promised Land of freedom? There’s a good chance you admit that there’s still work to do. Good. That’s the posture of humility that’s required for real renewal. We’re not fully “there” on this side of heaven, but each step toward freedom we take is a foretaste of that heavenly freedom. One of the most important lessons from Exodus is the absolute (i.e. not-optional) daily habit of prayer.
Jesus’ entire public ministry was fueled by prayer. In fact there are more than 25 references to Jesus praying in the gospels, and all of these occasions of prayer preceded some important event in the life of Christ. He spent 30 years praying before he battled Satan in the desert for 40 days. He went to the mountains and prayed all night before returning the next day to call upon his 12 apostles, and again He spent an entire night in the garden praying before His agony on the Cross. So why would the need for us to pray be any different? It’s not. If you want to be a saint then you must pray everyday. Pray that you can have the strength to fight another day, pray that your family may be protected from the evils of this world, pray for God’s mercy, and pray for holiness.
Most importantly, PRAY THE ROSARY.
There is not a single well-known saint in the last 800 years who did not have a strong devotion to our Blessed Mother, especially through the Rosary. This became even clearer for me in Father Calloway’s book, Champions of the Rosary. Read it. As Father Calloway articulates so well, the rosary is the spiritual weapon given to men to fight. It started with St. Dominic, and now it’s a weapon passed on to you. Use it. In every one of Mary’s many apparitions in the 20th century, she implored us to pray the Rosary. Her message seems to be: if we are not praying the rosary every day, we are going to lose the fight. It’s that simple. Great saints like St Padre Pio and Saint John Paul the Great found their strength in the Rosary. If our Lady said it, and these saints proved it so, then we too can find our strength in the Rosary.
So pick a date for your next desert battle, pick up your spiritual sword, the rosary, and start practicing today, and when you reach the desert be ready to face your enemies with renews strength. Exodus is the beginning of the battle, and I think we need to see the Rosary as the main weapon in the war.
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