The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Simplify Your Life- Clean Up Your Past

Episode Date: April 27, 2017

One reason our lives are so complicated is because we haven't truly dealt with our past, and because of that, most of us are burdened by shame, regret, and unforgiveness. To help us identify those burdens and surrender them to the Lord, Jeff gives us a helpful exercise wherein we examine the "5 rooms of our heart." Jeff then shares tips for making a good confession and cleaning up your past, once and for all.

You're listening to the Jeff Kavana show. Episode 13. Simplify your life. Clean up your past. Hey, I'm Jeff Kavans. How do you simplify your life? How do you study the Bible? All the way from motorcycle trips to raising kids, we're going to talk about the faith and life in general. It's the Jeff Kaven show. Welcome back to the show, my friend. It's so good to have you with us. us. And I really look forward to joining you every week and talking about the things of faith, the things of life, things that you're interested in, things I'm interested in, and talking about how to really be a modern day disciple at work at home among the neighbors and extended family. I just love talking about this stuff. And I love your feedback. You guys are really doing a great job of giving me feedback and ideas on future shows. And I really

appreciate that. I really do an awful lot. And I want to encourage you right off the top of the show. If you've got more ideas, you just get a hold of me at the Jeff Kaven Show at ascensionpress.com. I'm going to talk today about simplifying your life. It's a theme I told you about it a while ago that I'm going to be bringing it up quite a bit, simplifying your life. In an earlier show, I was talking about what's the first step in simplifying your life, which is really understanding. the roots of the complicated life, which is sin, and going all the way back to the Garden of Eden. But today I want to talk about simplifying your life by focusing on what's happening inside of you, what's happening outside of you, the clutter in your life. We're going to talk

about cleaning up the past, cleaning up the past. Before we get to that, today, I got some really good feedback and some great email. Greg wrote me, and he was commenting on a prior show Perhaps you remember that show. You can go into the archives and listen to it. If you haven't heard it, it's about your posse, developing a posse. Now, I've come from that age where a posse was a man who rode with the sheriff, you know. And they rode with someone. And a posse is who you surround yourself by.

And I was advocating that every Christian should have a posse, meaning you walk with the saints. And I was talking about those saints that were in my. posse on that show. Go back and listen. I share a little bit about that. But Greg wrote in, and he gave me a list of his saints. And one of them really caught my attention. St. René Guppel. Now, St. René Guppel is the patron saint of his line of work, and I looked it up anesthetist. He is the patron saint of anesthesiologist and anesthetist. And I found that to be absolutely fascinating. As I looked back, Greg, you're teaching me something. See, on the show, you're giving me some great insight. He was martyred by the Mohawk Indians. And man, I'll tell you what, this guy died a rough death. He is a man who gave his life up. And anyone who's an anesthesiologist or a nurse anesthetist, this is your saint. I'd love to hear your posse. Give me a line. me an email the Jeff Kaven Show at ascensionpress.com and tell me who's in your posse. I'm learning

some things here today and I really appreciate it. My daughter is an is anesthetist. And so I'm going to, I'm going to share this with her and my wife wrote the biography of St. Kateri Tekewitha for servant. So you bring them, Greg, you just brought my wife and daughter together right there with a saint that I wasn't even aware of, to be honest with you. So appreciate it. Hey, we're talking about cleaning up the past and simplifying our lives. And boy, aren't our lives complicated with all of the stuff that we collect, everything that we accumulate in the garage and in the closets downstairs, in the attic, in the car, in the glove compartment box? You even probably have a drawer in the kitchen that is the catch-all drawer, that it's pens, pencils, it's, it's paper

clips, it's stamps, it's old, it's odds and ends of letters. It's, the kids' permission slips for school. Everything is in there. And that's probably the drawer you want to go through to check some of the things that you've lost because they might be there, including about $84 worth of loose change. But we all have these messes in our lives,

and we're talking about simplifying our lives, and I'm interested in this. I have such a feel of a felt need in my own life to simplify my life, but not just to have stuff, you know, my life clutter-free, but to prepare the way so that I can serve, Christ more fruitfully. And that's why I'm interested in simplifying my life. And that's

why Greg, that's why St. Francis is part of my posse because he lived a simple life and he reminds me every day. And so does St. Teresa of Calcutta, who's also one of the five in my posse. Now, I want to talk about specifically today cleaning up the past. And I want to look internally during this show about cleaning up the past. And what we're talking about here is We're talking about lives that are very complicated due to failure, rejection, shame, things, sin, mortal, venal, things that have happened in our lives that seem to haunt us, and we can't shake them. I want to advance the idea of cleaning out the house today, going through every room in your internal home, and cleaning it up, and going to confession. So on the last part of this show, I'm going to talk about how to make a really good confession. And if you haven't made a confession in a while, boy, is this show for you?

Because we're going to talk about the need for it and then how to execute that and how to actually go and make a confessions, especially if you haven't done this for a while. Now, here's one of the problems that we face. We are created in the image and likeness of God. And that's good. You know, it means that we have a will. We have an intellect. we have the capacity to love.

But when you think about God, God is everywhere. He's omniscient. He's omnipresent. He is everything. And God is yesterday, today, today, and tomorrow. He is in the yesterday. He's today. He's in the tomorrow.

He is in every aspect of time. And while we feel very limited by being here today and today, only, in living today only. The truth of the matter is, is a lot of us emotionally and intellectually don't just live in the today. You see, we are created in the image and likeness of God. And in a way, we have the capacity to be in yesterday. And we have the capacity, yes, for today, but we have the capacity to dwell in tomorrow. Let me give you an example. When we get caught up in sin in our life and we fall. And let's say that was two months ago. A lot of times we don't leave it alone. It haunts us. It badgers us. It follows us. It taunts us in every way. It reminds us that we're

losers. It beats us down. And that was a month ago. Or maybe something happened in college with you. Maybe something happened in college where you're ashamed of what you did. or it has marked your life ever since. And that was 30 years ago, but you haven't let go of it. It's still in your inner house right now. Oh, it might be tucked up in the closet and the shelf, but it's in there. We want it out of there. I know you want it out of there.

And that's what we're going to be talking about. So you have the capacity to live in the yesterday. Isn't that powerful? that means that you can be really not present to your spouse, to your children, to your friends, to your colleagues at work. You're not even present today. Why? Because you are totally caught up in yesterday.

And that's where you're living. That's where you're tortured. And you're only living about 20, 30 percent of today because of yesterday. You're there like 70 percent of your time or whatever percentage it might be. And then we've got today, of course, as well. But we have the capacity to live in the yesterday, today. But we also have the capacity to live in tomorrow. And how do we do that?

We worry. We're filled with fear. And we anticipate doom for tomorrow. And so tax season comes about, you know, let's say that it's three months before tax season. You're already there. You're thinking about it. You're worrying.

You're not sure if you're going to have a job in six months. That's where you're living. and spending a lot of a lot of your time. The whole goal here is that we would live today in a healthy way and that this is the day the Lord has made, and we're going to rejoice and be glad in it. There is a useful space in yesterday. Don't get me wrong.

There's a useful space. And that is we can learn from yesterday. We can be encouraged at how God has blessed us yesterday. and how his hand has moved in our lives yesterday. But get this. The enemy, Satan, who is real, can also use yesterday as a mallet to beat you, your sin, your shame, your regret. Now, we can also use the future as a benefit. It's an asset, and we can plan, and we can make good decisions.

We can project, we can anticipate. But the enemy can also influence us and use tomorrow to get us all bound up in worry and doubt and isolate us and make us feel alone. So you see, my friend, we've got the capacity to live in yesterday, today, and tomorrow, very similar to God. And oftentimes it's the yesterday and the tomorrows that bind us up and we can't even live today. And that's what I'm talking about when I say, let's clean up the past. in our life. Pause for a moment. Do you know of anybody in your life right now that's really struggling with that?

Maybe it's a sister, brother, someone at work, somebody who can't even get out of bed because they're afraid of tomorrow? Do you know of somebody who's struggling with yesterday or today or tomorrow, mainly yesterday and tomorrow? Do me a favor. Send them this podcast because it just might be the answer that they're looking for in their life right now. So we can dwell on yesterday, good or bad, we can dwell on tomorrow, fear and so forth.

But God has called us to walk in wholeness, and we're talking about cleaning up the past. I like the great quote of Pope Pius the 12th. He said, the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin. One of the problems that we struggle with when we talk about sin is that we've lost the sense of sin, and it's complicating our lives, and we don't see it as sin. And so one of the first things that we really need to do is to determine what is right and what is wrong, what is sin and what is not sin, and that if we are really struggling with yesterday, we need to identify the sin in our lives if we're going to truly clean up the past.

You see, a lot of people, and I know this from experience, not only in my own life, but I spent 15 years before returning to the Catholic Church as a Protestant minister, and I counseled hundreds of people. And one of the things that I saw more than anything else was a lot of sin which was related to unforgiveness. Now, that has to do with the past, doesn't it? You know, people who are struggling with unforgiveness towards their mother, their father, a relative, their uncle, a colleague, someone, a roommate in college, a friend in elementary school, a stranger in a parking lot coming out of nursing school or college, whatever it might have been.

And oftentimes sin lingers as shame. You know, shame is an interesting thing. Shame will, the idea of experiencing shame will keep you from sin, but if you have sin, shame can be. you down. And St. John Paul II said that shame is what we experience when when something that was meant to be kept private is made public. And so if you were caught doing something and it goes viral, shame is the result. And shame is a tyrant. Shame will beat you down. Now I know there's a lot of people that have experienced a lot of different avenues, shall we say, in college, and they've never cleaned that up from the past. It's like an old textbook that was put into a box and down

in the basement. It's still there, isn't it? It's still there. You haven't brought that to the Lord. You haven't opened that box of your experiences in college or something that happened in grade school, or something that happened in your family that you didn't even do, but it affected you and you felt a shame. Maybe it was something that mom or dad were involved in, or something a sibling did, and it colored you, and you haven't forgiven. You see, that can really clutter your life today as part of your past. Sin lingers as shame. Men, let me talk to you just for a second, because I'm one of you. Some of the things that we have been involved in in the past will handcuff us from being the husband and the father that God has called us to be.

And how many men I've talked to when they told me, well, my son is involved in pornography and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. And I'll say, well, you need to talk to them. You know what the response is sometimes? I have a hard time doing that, Jeff, because I experienced it myself and I feel like a hypocrite. You're caught in shame. You need to deal with that past. and become free and forgiven so that you can become an effective father. You can become an effective mother. So sin that lingers as shame is detrimental to your spiritual growth. And I want to help you on the tail end of the show on how to get rid of that

and how to make a really good confession. Number two, number one is sin that lingers as shame. Number two, regret that keeps you in a loser's mode, keeps you pinned down. regret oh boy so many of us you know we struggle with this regret from things in the past for things we did things we didn't do opportunities we didn't take advantage of opportunities that we squandered regret you know i talked to i talked to a lot of people who their their children are raised now and they'll with tears in their eyes they'll say i regret i regret not raising my children in the faith I beat myself up. I can't deal with it. I just feel like a loser. It's a regret.

Listen, God doesn't want you to live in regret. You might be experiencing it, but you don't have to live there. You can give this to Jesus, and you can move on, and you can start to do some things right. The way to deal with regret is not to make the same mistake that got you into the regret. It's a change. And to start moving forward. Oh, but Jeff, I'm 75 years old now. And I don't have a whole lot more time, but you do have time. You do. Even if you have just a few months left or a year, 10 years, whatever, you can live right. You can turn this around. You can do it. You really can. So regret that keeps you in a loser's mode is something people struggle with. And then the third, I hinted at this. I spoke about it just a little bit. Unforgiveness. Oh, man. Unforgiveness. Are you familiar with that ministry called Couple to Couple League? The founder of that, the priest that founded that, said after he was ordained, shortly after he's ordained, and I've got these figures kind of right. I just don't quote me on it, but I'm giving you around the percentage. You can look it up sometime, but he said that after hearing confessions and counseling and

so forth, you know, a few years after he was ordained, he said something like 50% of everything that I hear is related to unforgiveness. And then it was something like 15 years after he was ordained. He said, he raised the percentage. 75% of everything I hear is related to unforgiveness. And then after something like 35 or 40 years of being a priest, he said, 95% of everything I hear is related to unforgiveness. How, boy, how this really binds us up, unforgiveness. Let's just, let's think about that for a minute. Is there anybody in your past that is making your life complex today because of the memories? Is there anyone in your past that you have not forgiven?

Let's go through grade school. Were there things that happen in grade school that maybe you just thought, ah, that's not that important. But you think about it. It's actually changed you. You're different. Maybe you need to forgive. Let go. What about high school?

What about college? What about at work, at home, extended relatives? What about those thanksgivings? When the family got together, Thanksgiving dinner, and maybe your sister-in-law said something, and, man, it ticked you off. You guys used to get along. In fact, you used to get together with the kids,

all the cousins got together. You'd go to the zoo. You'd have lunch together and coffee. But something was said at that Thanksgiving dinner. And that relationship hasn't been the same. And you regret it. you want it to be the same. And for all you know, your sister-in-law wants it to be the same, but nobody's talking anymore.

That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. That'll complicate your life. We're talking about simplifying your life, aren't we? We're talking about cleaning up the past. Unforgiveness lands you in shackles. So we've got the ability to really dwell on the past. What about the future? Maybe you are shackled in the future with your career and,

and what you want your family to become because of shame. Maybe your regret from past things has put out the light of your future. Maybe unforgiveness towards somebody in your past has completely blotted out any possibility of the future in your family, extended family, at work, colleagues for the future. So, you see, all of these things, shame. regret, unforgiveness, these affect the past, they affect the future. Listen to what St. Paul said. I love this. Paul said in Philippians 3, verses 13 and 14, he said, brethren, he said, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. It's pretty good,

isn't it? He says he's dealing with the past here. He says, I'm going to forget what lies behind. and I'm going to strain toward the future, and he's doing this in the present. Verse 14, he goes on and says, I press on toward the goal. He says, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Isn't that great? So he talks about forgetting about the past. Jeremiah, the prophet, talks about the future when he says in Jeremiah 29-11, which is, by the way, on the list of a lot of my friends on their top five favorite scriptures,

Jeremiah 29-11, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord plans for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope. Isn't that beautiful? That is beautiful. Well, we're going to take a break, and when I come back, I want to talk to you about going to confession and kind of going through every room of your internal house, your soul, your mind, your memory, and bringing it all to Jesus and giving it all to Jesus and giving. it to him and cleaning up your past and beginning anew, and my friend, this is one of the great ways to bring simplicity to your life and uncomplicate your life. Quick reminder, go to the show notes. We have all these scriptures written down. Our great producer Marisa is putting it all together. It's going to be waiting for you. And you can do that by going to ascension

presents.com forward slash podcasts and click on my show. the actual show on this one, and all the notes will be waiting for you. And we do appreciate you sharing this with your friends. We'll be back in just a moment. Hi, I'm Father Mike Schmitz, and I want to invite you to join me at the National Catholic Bible Conference this coming May, May 5th through the 7th, in Houston, Texas. At the conference, you will hear from an amazing lineup of presenters who will help you grow in your faith and your understanding of the Bible,

including Jeff Kavins, Dr. Michael Barber, Sarah Chris Meyer, Thomas Smith and Dr. Ed Sree. To learn more and to register, go to Catholic Bibleconference.com. I hope to see you there. Welcome back to the show. We're talking about simplifying our lives. This is actually the second in a series that we're doing on simplifying your life. We'll be doing it from time to time and you can kind of, you know, watch out for them in the future.

We've got about five of them or so that we're going to be putting together. Simplifying your life. This is about cleaning up the past, and we've been talking about sin. And I want to turn our attention to confession, and I want to give you a tool that I think is going to be a very useful tool that we would call five rooms to go through in your life, in your inner life, to check to see if you need to go to confession and you need to clean up the past. I know that in our house, about every two or three years, my wife and I look at each other and say, we need to clean this. place up and we start going from room to room and casting out the things that we don't need anymore, things that are weighing us down, and keep what's necessary. And I think that's good for you to do and for me to do in our spiritual life from time to time. So I want to give you this

little mnemonic device. That's a memory device. And it's a kind of a visual, internal walk through your house from room to room to take stock and figure out how to clean up. the past in your internal life. By the way, this is what the ancient Greeks used to do. When they gave a speech, they would start at the front door of the house. And that's where their introduction was. They would attach something in their introduction to something in the front door of their house. And then they would go off into another room. And then they would go to another room and another room. And they would attach the points of their speech to each room of their house. And that's where the phrase comes in the first place, in the second place, in the third place.

That's just a little mnemonic device. So let's do it for sin in our life and cleaning up the past, shall we? In the first place. Let's look at those rooms. Let's look at the living room, shall we? Now, we're talking about the internal living room of your heart. What do you do in a living room? Well, the living room is where the family gathers. It's where we talk. It's where we share. It's where the relatives come over. We greet people. This is about relationships. Relationships that are important enough for you to have them over, might be a neighbor, relative, might be a colleague at work who comes over and you're sitting in the living room. Is there anything in your life that you need to clean up as far as relationships with your

children, your parents, your relatives, the neighbors, the way you treat people? This is a good opportunity to stand in the living room of your heart and to think right now. What do I need to clean up. Now write it down. Write it down because you're going to go to confession. Number two, from the living room, let's go to the family room. The family room is where typically people spend a lot of time watching television, media, internet searches, things like that. Oftentimes there's a computer in that room. More and more these days, people have laptops, but historically, that's been a place of consuming media, music, all of this. And just to ask yourself, when it comes to the media, the internet, movie watching, all of that, are you living

a healthy life? Is this complicating your life? Is there something that needs to be cleaned up? We move from the living room then to the second place, which is the family room, to the third place, the bedroom. This is a place that if you're married, this is a place of holiness. This is a place of giving yourself to your spouse. This is not a place of impurity. If you're single. This is a place where you sleep. And so when we will stand in the bedroom of our interior life, is there anything in your past that you need to bring to the Lord? And then in the fourth place, the kitchen. In the kitchen, what are we doing in a kitchen? We eat, we consume food. This is, this is where we eat and drink. Now let me ask you this. As you stand in that room in the interior part of

your life. Are you experiencing gluttony? Are you eating more than you should? Are you consuming things in life that are really complicating your life? Even if it's closed and everything else, we can put it in this room for the sake of our walkthrough. What about drink? Do you know that alcohol complicates more people's lives than almost anything else? When people begin to drink and get caught up in that, it is amazing how it complicates their life. You might have to clean that up and be honest with yourself about it before it gets you. And then fifth, you know where we're going. Let's go down that hall. Nobody else knows it's there. You've never talked to anyone about it. You never brought it up in confession before. Mom and dad don't

know. Your spouse doesn't know. Your boss doesn't know. But it's in that clause. It's hidden in the top shelf of that closet, and you walk by and you know about it, and you've never really dealt with it. Whatever that is, whatever it is, it could be that secret sin in your life that has so complicated your schedule, your time, your inner thoughts, you need to deal with it. And oftentimes this is the hardest one because nobody sees it. But if Jesus were to walk with you down that hall and he would suddenly smell the stench of that private sin. He'd say, what's in that closet? You say,

Jesus, look, you've been through all the other rooms. Isn't that enough? Can't we just, can't we just go to confession and deal with those four rooms? And Jesus would say, open it up. But Jesus, I can't face that. Open it up. And you open it up. And there is that private sin that no one knows about. And Jesus says, give it to me. And he wants to clean that up. Now, I'd encourage you to kind of go through this exercise and come up with your list, and then I would encourage you to go to confession. By the way, we got a lot of feedback about this on our past shows. Gina from San Antonio wrote, she wanted to know how to make a good confession. She just came out and said, I need to know how to do this. Betty wrote and said,

I still struggle with confession, says she gets nervous, stutters, doesn't feel good afterwards. And Norman wrote and said, well, let me just address Betty just for a second there before we get into a good confession. Betty, listen to what I'm about to share with you because I think it's going to be helpful. But one thing I would encourage you to do if you get nervous and stuttering is, and I don't know your life or where you're going to confession, but if you are going face to face, I would recommend going behind a screen anonymous where you really can be yourself and not feel like someone is staring at you. Norman wrote in also and said that he was involved in various religions over about a 38-year period.

And, I mean, he went through every kind of religion and experience you can imagine. He said that he eventually came back and he made his first confession in 38 years. Congratulations, Norman. That's fantastic. Grace wrote in and said that she can't think of any sins when it comes time to go to confession. I don't have that problem. I just don't have that problem, but that says something about me, Grace. But what I would say is this, that if you can't think of it when you go to confession,

you might want to prepare and keep a notebook, a Molsky notebook, or a hidden text file in your computer called My Neighbor's Sins or something like that. But find some way of keeping track of these things as they come up to you throughout the week, throughout the month. Now, if you have not been to confession for a while, number one, don't fear. Every priest that I know has welcomed people, and they look forward to confessional novices, okay? They look forward to those that say, Father, I haven't been here for a while. I don't even remember what to do exactly. He's not going to reject you. He's going to love you, and he's going to listen to you. Now, I go to confession anonymously. That is behind the screen. I just find that better in

my life and it's better for the priest in my life. But you just go to confession, okay? And we want to, what we want to do is we want to repent of all of this, bring it out in the open and give it to Jesus. Now, when you go to confession, first of all, it is you going before Jesus. This is a sacrament. That means you're encountering Jesus. And the priest is under what is called a ban. I'm saying this to you because I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, well, he'll know me or he'll hear my voice or he'll guess who I am and what if this is brought up in a sermon or a homily or something? Listen, it's under the ban. It means they cannot talk about this at all. This is very, very serious, all right? So you're going to want to repent. Now let me give you something

in the catechism. The catechism number 1431 talks about repentance and it says repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all of our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time, it entails the desire and resolution to change one's life, with hope in God's mercy and trust in the help of his grace. So going to confession, number one, contrition. Contrition is first place when it comes to going to confession. The Catechism says in paragraph 1451. Contrition is a sorrow of the soul and a detestation for the sin committed, together with the resolution not to sin again. Now, when you go into

confession, and you can read about this in paragraph 1455 of the Catechism, it says that the confession or disclosure of sins, even from a simple human point of view, free us and facilitates our reconciliation with others. Through such an admission, man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of, takes responsibility for them, and thereby opens himself again to God and to the communion of the church in order to make a new future possible. So before you go in, make an examination of conscience, we're kind of talking here about what the church calls a general examination of conscience.

Let's get everything, shall we? Let's clean up the past. Let's not mess around. Even if you think you might have confessed this, let's do a general. Let's really be thorough. Bring the scrub brush to your soul. Now here's the mechanics, okay? Number one, upon entering the confessional, you can kneel or sit, and you have the opportunity to make your confession face to face with the priest or behind a curtain or partition, make the sign of the cross and say, bless me, father, for I have sinned, and then state when your last confession was.

Number two, confess any mortal sin, that's any grave sin and any grave sin that cuts off the life of God. We'll probably talk more about that in a future show, but it confess any mortal sin, any venial sin that you wish to mention and how many times. Number three, you'll be asked to make an act of contrition. This can either be a prayer from the heart expressing your sorrow and intent, Or there may be one written out for you there, or you can take one with you if you Google it. Here's an example of an act of contrition. Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you. I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.

But most of all, because they offend you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love, I firmly resolve with the help of your grace to sin no more, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen. By the way, we'll put that in the show notes. And then after that, the priest will give you absolution. That's forgiveness. You'll hear the words you are forgiven, and the priest will give you a penance. He may say, say, three Hail Mary's.

He may say, pay back the money. Whatever that penance is, it's usually prayer or something to do to counter the sin in your life. And in some cases, your penance may be a combination, but it is to heal, to heal. And then you're free. that's it so my friend i'm really encouraging you today clean up the past it's a way to simplify your life and i know you want it i do too and remember share this with a friend share it with a friend who might need it go to ascension presents dot com forward slash podcast you'll get all the show notes for this show i really appreciate all your feedback and i appreciate you pray for me will you

i'll continue to pray for you god bless you and you have a good week Thank you.