If forgiveness isn’t hard, you aren’t doing it right - Dan Meola

Many parents struggle with their children--not because of the kids, but because of the wounds they are carrying from their own parents.  The only path for healing those wounds is forgiveness.  But how do we forgive, especially when the hurts are deep and real?  In this podcast we sat down with Dan Meola, the founder of Life Giving Wounds, a ministry for adult children of divorce.  We talked about the importance of forgiveness,  what it is--and what it is not.  To define true forgiveness, Dan walks us through the seven marks of forgiveness that bring insight to this path to true reconciliation and healing. 

• No matter how you have been hurt you need to let go of the grudge and forgive.  Unforgiveness hurts us, hurts those around us, and prevents our healing. 

• If forgiveness isn’t hard, you aren’t doing it right. 

• Christianity is the only religion that requires forgiveness, even if it is unilateral.  This is impossible by human standards and can only be done by God’s grace. 

• The Seven Marks are:

1. It is specific

2. It is an ongoing process.

3. Can be unilateral

4. Means you still have boundaries

5. It is a choice, not a feeling

6. Enables you to let go of anger, resentment, and to cancel past debts

7. Is only possible with the grace of God

“If we accept that God’s love is unconditional, that the Father’s love cannot be bought or sold, then we will become capable of showing boundless love and forgiving others even if they have wronged us” - Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia

Becoming a husband and father is the biggest change a man goes through in his life.  There is simply no better “life-coaching” than family life!  But when men find their vocation difficult, it is usually their wives that they turn to or who observe this difficulty and have a desire to help.  In this podcast, we hear from women who have questions about how to support and help their husbands overcome challenges at work, at home, and in their personal lives.  So many wives want their husbands to be the best men they can be and overcome vices of sloth, anger, and lust but they aren’t sure how to help.  Sometimes wives can take action, but in other situations, it's best for wives to be supportive and keep their advice to themselves.  When do you know which is right?  Listen in to find out!  

1. Wives need to be very careful when it comes to giving husbands advice or correction regarding his relationship with work.  It is a source of great respect for men, so this topic should be delicately considered. 

2. Men need to be needed.  If wives are doing everything and then complaining that he isn’t stepping up, realize that you are probably doing too much.  

3. Overcoming anger requires introspection and being curious about why it arises within you at certain times.  Usually the “trigger” is not really your child, but something that your child is doing or saying that is touching an unresolved issue in yourself. 

4. We need to take time to think about these things and give ourselves space to consider them and bring God into that situation so He can heal us. 

5. If you have a husband who is at a different place spiritually than you, be patient.  Honor his journey as being different from your own.  

“You’re not just parenting your children… you are parenting your grandchildren”

Have you ever walked through a thousand-year-old castle or along a wall built by Romans nearly a millennium ago? On a recent trip to the UK, we were struck by the longevity of these structures—and the intentionality behind them. They weren’t built to last a season, but centuries.

In this episode, we challenge you to think the same way about your family culture. Are you parenting just for today… or are you building something that will bless your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren?

Family culture is the invisible architecture of your home. It gives your children identity, belonging, and purpose. It's what lasts long after the rules and schedules fade. And if we build it with care, rooted in faith and virtue, it can be a source of strength for generations to come.

• Parenting is more than just what is happening today.  We have to have a long term vision for our family

• Your family culture matters more than ever.  This is where children learn who they are, where they belong, and what they are made for

• If we want to build a legacy, we need to build with stone, not straw or wood.  Set up traditions that can be passed on to the next generation - things that are simple and repeatable. 

• Consider the legacy that you have received from your family, culture, and especially from our Catholic faith.  

• Legacy doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with small, intentional acts of love—right now.

1. Consider writing down some thoughts on the legacy you want to leave. 

2. What’s one tradition, habit, or value you want to start building into your family this week that will move you closer to that legacy?

“Unleashing the heart of the Father is a power the world does not know.”

God wants us to know Him as a father.  We as parents are to prepare the hearts of our children to know the father by acting like him.  So when our children wonder what God is like, we should be able to say to them, “God loves you as I love you, but so much better”.  For us to do that, we need to know what God is like, so we can act as him.  In this podcast we break open the Word of God to share with you how God describes Himself in the Bible and how we can come to know Him better by reading what He has told us!  

• God wants to “father” His people in the Old Testament

  • Isaiah 64:8

  • Jeremiah 31:20

  • Deuteronomy 14:1

• Jesus says he has come “from the Father”  that He is a son

  • John 14

  • Matt 11:25

  • John 16:23 

• Jesus tells us that WE are sons and that God is Our Father too!

  • Matthew 23:9

  • Matthew 6:6  

  • 1 John 3:1

  • Galatians 4:6

  • Luke 12:32

  • 2 Corinthians 6:16-18

  • John 20:17

• Why does this matter?  Because we are to be like Our Father.  We as parents are to act like him, imitate Him, take on His characteristics in flesh so our children can believe they have a heavenly Father who loves them, will always be there and never fail them. 

  • Psalm 103:13

  • Matt7:10

1. How does God want to be a father to us?  To our children? 

2. Are there any obstacles to us calling God “Father”?  Take some time to pray into those this week.  

"Never be embarrassed to love your wife." – Chris McMahon​

What does it take to build a thriving business and a strong marriage at the same time? In this episode, Mike sits down with longtime friends Chris and Molly McMahon—financial advisors, founders, parents of five, and marriage warriors. Together, they unpack the real story behind balancing ambition with family, building a faith-filled home without a perfect blueprint, and making decisions that prioritize your marriage even when the world says otherwise.

From the mess of early parenthood and maxed-out credit cards to spiritual renewal and raising adult kids with a legacy of love, the McMahons share wisdom from 36 years of marriage. Get ready for candid stories, practical advice, and heartfelt encouragement for couples trying to do it all without losing what matters most.

Topics include:

• Why full transparency is non-negotiable in marriage

• How to prioritize your spouse even in seasons of hustle

• Reclaiming Sundays and breaking free from the “frantic family” pace

• Making faith central—even in business

And don’t miss your chance to sign up for the Family Board Meeting, a transformative way to lead your family with intention: messyfamilyproject.org

• Put your spouse first.  Connect with them and make them a priority no matter what is happening at work. Talk about your spouse with love and respect always to others. 

• Be a witness in the workplace.  Put up a sacred image, hold a high standard for yourself and be bold about sharing your faith. 

• Never accept the standards of the world for success.  If you feel like both of you “have” to work to get ahead or buy a house, don’t accept that!  Think outside the box

• Make time for the things that matter.  Be intentional with how you spend your time and money. 

• If God has blessed you, be a blessing to others. God will give you a mission - respond!    

• How can we use our time intentionally to prioritize each other? How can we live in a way that puts our marriage first? 

• What is the mission that God is asking us to go on two by two?  What is the particular way we can serve Him as a married couple?

The only way to not live constantly in the Urgent is to manage those things that are Important.

“How are  you?” “BUSY!” Isn't that the response so many of us give when asked this question?  How did we all get so busy and how do we get off the crazy train?  Parents have as much time as anyone else (even though it doesn’t feel like it!) but they need to be more conscious than anyone else regarding how they spend the precious time they have.  In this podcast, we give five steps that parents can use right now to use their time wisely.  Using the Eisenhower matrix of Important/Urgent we will show you how to manage those things that are Important (children and all their needs!) so we aren’t always living in the Urgent.  Parents must be careful on how they spend time because days turn into weeks, and then years, and then kids are gone!  Childhood is short and we need to be very intentional on how we spend our precious time with our precious children.  

• We all need to evaluate how we are spending our time.  If you always feel like you are putting out important fires, then you need to learn how to manage those things so your life isn’t always “urgent”.

• To make sure you take care of those relationships that are essential in your life, you have to schedule an appointment.  Put on your schedule prayer time, date night, special time.  

• One essential way to live a balanced life is to create routines that will build good habits for you and your children. 

• Make your time purposeful.  It's not always about the quantity of time, it's also the quality of that time. 

• Keep in mind your mission!  The mission of your family is to confer identity, belonging and purpose upon your children.   If you don’t do it, they will seek that out from others and that is a scary prospect.  

1. Let’s evaluate our time. Are always putting out fires? Do we feel our life is frantic?  How can we identify pain points and create routines to address them?

2. What is the best way to use our time together?  What are the needs in our marriage and how can we satisfy those needs when we are together? 

3. How can we use our time better with our children? What would they like to do?  

"God gives us our children to heal and transform us." - Kyle Wester

In many ways, being a parent is less about our kids and more about our own formation!  When we lean into the vocation of parenthood, God can use every experience with our children to show us His love and to form us into the person He has created us to be.  In this podcast, we talk to Kyle and Sara Wester, counselors and hosts of the podcast The Art of Raising Humans. During our conversation, they explained four different parenting styles that we move in and out of depending on our life circumstances, how our marriage is actually the most important parenting tool we have, and how our understanding of who we are in the eyes of God affects how we relate to our kids.  This podcast is full of great insights for parents and we know you will gain from the Wester’s wisdom.  

• Children need to be taught relationship skills and correct behavior.  The most powerful way they learn is by watching how you relate to your spouse. 

• God gives us our children to heal and transform us.  To love our children effectively, we need to first receive God’s love for us personally. 

• Every conflict with our spouse or children is about expectations.  

• When our child exhibits behavior that is inappropriate for a situation, we need to ask ourselves, “What is this behavior telling me about this child?”

• Discipline comes from discipleship and the foundation of discipleship is relationship.  We all must work on having a deep and rich relationship with our children to form them.  

• There are 4 different parenting styles that we move through depending on our life circumstances.  We don’t always choose what is best, but we can keep in mind the goal of Loving Guidance and move towards that. 

• Recommended books from the Westers:

  • Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids by Dr. Laura Markham

  • Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by by Rebecca Bailey

  • Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen

  • No Drama Discipline by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

1. Are we happy with how we are modeling conflict resolution for our children? How can we do this better? 

2. What in our children do we see in ourselves?  Write these things down.  Do we love these things in ourselves? Why or why not?  

The Art of Raising Humans Podcast Link 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/artofraisinghumans

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/artofraisinghumans?igsh=MXkyOGRwbzJ2ZDF1MQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@artofraisinghumans?_t=8itlE1tnZSF&_r=1

“Lovemaking puts flesh on the vows that we exchange in marriage” - Byron and Francine Pirola

A few years ago in Australia, we met an amazing couple who we immediately wanted to share with our listeners.  Byron and Francine Piroloa from Smart Loving, are on a mission to make marriages stronger all over the world and they are willing to talk about that subject that few couples will tackle - physical intimacy.  We aired this podcast five years ago and it got such a great response that we decided to put it up again for all of you.  Listen in as we talk to the Pirolas about how and why you should make time for sex, how the arousal pattern for men is different from women and why sex gets better and better the longer you are married!  This is a podcast filled with wisdom, but also laughter and honesty.  We hope you will enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed talking to them! 

• Anything precious and unique needs rules to be protected.  That is why the Church gives us boundaries in this area to teach us how to be appropriately vulnerable in our marital relationships

• A person’s sexual prime is in their 20s, but our erotic prime is reached in our 50s. This is a culmination of our relationship and our intimacy that is built over time. 

• Sexual relations can slip into the “recreational” category in our minds when we are trying to survive.  The antidote is seeing sex as a sacred communication that needs to be prioritized. 

• Desire, arousal, climax, resolution is a typical male pattern.  For most women the pattern is different - arousal, or foreplay, creates desire in the woman.  

• We need to work and train our brains to connect with our spouse emotionally, to be present, so the intimacy that we share emotionally and physically. 

• How are we creating a romantic environment in our relationship?  Where are we making space for marital relations?

• How are we opening our hearts to our spouse in lovemaking?  Can we work on being present to our spouse and retrain our brains to focus on them? 

• Free Conversation Starter on Sexual Intimacy

• Smart Loving Marriage Kit

• Catholiccouplesgetaway.com

• Family Board Meeting April Course

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.  Genesis 2:24

Unity between man and woman was God’s original plan, but the Fall not only broke our relationship with God, it also broke our relationship with each other.  But the good news is that Jesus has given us grace in the sacrament of Matrimony so we can have a oneness in marriage that would be impossible otherwise!  With unity, couples can handle anything life dishes out. Without it, even the easy things will seem hard. Couples need to constantly be striving for unity, because if spouses aren’t intentional, those marriages will drift apart!  In this podcast, we will give you three tools - honoring, forgiveness, and vulnerability - that you can use to start moving towards your spouse.  We need to intentionally use these tools to work towards the greater unity within the gift of marriage that God has for us.  

• All couples must strive for unity - if you float along, you will drift apart

• Unity was what we were made for, but the fall introduced distrust into the male/female relationships

• There are three things you can do to move towards unity:  honoring, forgiveness, and vulnerability

• On the scale of Affirmation/Criticism, choose to honor your spouse, even publicly to build them up

• On the scale of Resentment/Forgiveness, choose to forgive them instead of being resentful of their shortcomings

• On the scale of Detachment/Intimacy we need to choose vulnerability and openness to our spouse. 

• On a scale of 1-10, how are we doing in our unity? In which of the three areas can we do better? 

• Which one of these three areas is the most challenging for me?  Why do I think that is?  

• Free Mini-Marriage Retreat:  https://messyfamilyproject.org/guide/mini-marriage-check-in/

• Register for the Family Board Meeting! 

  • https://messyfamilyproject.org/course/family-board-meeting/

• Easter Webinar

  • Register here….

• www.Catholiccouplesgetaway.com

Vices are our disordered way of fulfilling our God-given good desires. 

So many of us thought we were good people till we had kids, right?  This is because kids expose our weaknesses and we need to be aware of them in order to overcome them.  Listen in as we reveal Satan’s plan for you and lay out God’s great plan of using our rightly ordered desires to develop virtues and live according to His plan.  

The desires that God has put in our hearts for dignity, communion, justice, and peace are all good, but when we try to fulfill them on our own, they can lead to vice, or repeated bad habits.  We do this because we are all fallen, wounded people!  But the good news is that we just need to tap into learning how to satisfy those desires in the best way, which is what God intended for us.  This is a snapshot from our video series we are doing for our Cana90 Fellowship this year.  In that series, each vice gets its own video where we break it down and show how we as parents are particularly susceptible to falling into it.  Join the Fellowship here for the rest of the series! 

• Vices are our disordered desires.  Every vice has a longing or desire behind it and a corresponding virtue to help overcome it. 

• Parents struggle with vices in particular ways that may not have been evident before they had kids.  

• Envy is the longing for Dignity and it comes from the fear that we will not be seen, known, and acknowledged.  We get this from our Heavenly Father! 

• Sloth is the longing for Peace and it causes us to choose a “fake peace” that comes from ignoring problems instead of working through them. 

• Where do I struggle to act?  What situations would I rather ignore than deal with? Write down some ideas.  Try them each day one at a time. 

• What is one thing I can do to make this room/situation/gathering better? How can I be proactive? 

• Think of when someone else was kind to you.  How did it make you feel? 

• List 25 things you can do to make the lives of others around you more pleasant

• Bishop Barron’s series on the Seven Deadly Sins

  • https://www.wofdigital.org/seven-deadly-sins-seven-lively-virtues

• Broken Gods by Dr. Gregory Popcak

  • https://amazon.com/dp/B00N6PETQ2?ref=KC_GS_GB_US

• Cana90 Fellowship 

  • https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

A problem with disrespect from a child always goes back to a dysfunction in the parent-child relationship.

When our sweet children enter the teen years and adolescence is upon them, something happens that tends to cause parents stress and dismay - back talk and disrespect.  Some of this is immaturity on the part of the child and some is simply lack of training in relationships.  It is our job as parents to teach our children how to express their feelings, disagree, and even debate while maintaining an attitude of respect towards us and therefore, other people in their lives.  The family is the training ground for life!  In this podcast we will give you some perspective on the struggles teens have, tell you what NOT to do and explain the Three C’s of responding to a mouthy teen.  Listen in!  

• A disrespectful child is, simply put, someone no one wants to be around. But the good news is that parents can change this!  We can help our child become someone we not just love, but like.  

• Yelling, punishing, taking things personally, and debating with your teen does not work.  Avoid these reactions. 

• Tweens and teens need us to guide them on acceptable ways of speaking to others.  This will help them be successful in many areas of life. 

• CONTROL YOURSELF - If you are triggered by your teen and fly off the handle, ask yourself why and get your emotional life in order. 

• CONSEQUENCES - It is our responsibility to help them see what happens when they don’t control their tongue.  The world’s consequences will be much harder than ours! 

• COACH - We need to point our teens towards adulthood so they can see we are not treating them as a child, we are teaching them how to be an adult. 

• Are we happy with the way that our children speak to us?  Can we identify areas of difficulty with them? 

• What would be a quick, acceptable consequence for our child’s disrespect?  Which one of us would be best to talk to them about this? 

• How can we coach our child to do better? 

Links:

• Link to Cana90 https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

• Link to Beloved Event https://arrayofhope.regfox.com/beloved