9: 10 Practicals To Slay The Catholic Girl Life

Hey there, friend. Welcome back to ever be. I am so excited that you're here today. If this is maybe your first time tuning in, then hi, welcome. I am. I'm Mari and I hope that this episode provides you with just some great advice and some really practical steps and tools for you to, live a Christ centered life and really start slaying your Catholic girl life.

Hey, I'm your host, Mari Wagner, and you're listening to the ever be podcast where faith meets lifestyle. I'm so excited you're here, whether you're a new listener or a longtime follower, I know there's something here for you. Pull up a chair and listen in for insightful real life conversations and actionable steps on how to claim the full life God created you for. If you're a woman desiring to live a Christ centered life in today's modern world, then this is for you. Welcome to Ever Be.

If you have been following along for a while this might sound a little bit familiar. Um, so in January of this year, 2024, I gave a breakout session talk at the SEEK conference and it was called how to slay the Catholic girl life. Um, and I won't be giving the full spiel today. It won't be the full talk, but a segment of the talk where these 10 practical steps that I shared on how to really live out your faith in the everyday life. I think this is one of the top. Ask questions that I get. And one of the things I love talking about the most because it's the most fundamental part of your lifestyle. Like if you truly are living a Christ centered life, and if your faith is truly the root in the center of your life Then your life needs to reflect that and your actions need to reflect that. And so hopefully, um, if you feel like you're in a place where like you're stuck and you want to, you know, get back on track on living your faith, or maybe this is totally new to you. And you're like, I think that I want to do this, but I have no idea what it looks like to actually own my faith and live my faith. I hope that this will be a helpful episode or a good boost of encouragement for you.

So before we dive into the practicals, I want to give you some context as to how I got here in my life. And if you want to hear the full testimony story, go back into one of the first episodes, I think it's episode two. Um, but really there was a time in my life where I wasn't living super Christ centered -ly. Um, but my heart, my personality has always been, passionate and joyful and just having this zeal for life, this excitement for life and always desiring to live a full life.. And when I started to feel the Lord really tug on my heart, like, Hey, I didn't make you to live this way. I made you for more. I made you to live truly in a Christ centered way and to glorify me through your life. And not even that, but I made you to live an amazing full life. When I started feeling all that in my heart, my biggest fear was that if I like fully dedicated my life to God and fully like leaned into living my faith as like the center of my life that I would lose that zeal for life that I would lose that passion and that joy and that excitement that I wouldn't be This like fun mari anymore and i'm here to tell you that none of that was true That actually i've never been more joyful. Uh, my life has never been more fun fun, more adventurous, more exciting, and more full. the Lord doesn't, lack in his promises. He follows through and he means it when he says that he wants a full life for you. He says it in John 10, 10, I came so that they might have life and life abundant. And he means that for you, um, in your life, he wants you to have the most amazing abundant life ever. And our world tries to get us to believe the lie that if we live a worldly life, that's where we're going to find fulfillment and freedom. And like, maximize our life and have the most success. And that's a lie, you guys, like that's, that's truly a flat out lie. And it's a tactic that the evil one does to tempt us to, uh, paint a picture that is false because he is full of false promises, but that's not the truth that the Lord has for you. And that's not the truth, um, that the Lord speaks up when he speaks of an abundant life for you. So. These practical steps, this advice that I'm going to share with you today is something that I wish that I would have learned way earlier than I did. And that I just love sharing because. It changed my life and I hope it changes yours. But you have to know that to actually like be in the heart space and in the head space to start living out these 10 practicals, cause I have 10 practical steps for you today. So you can't say that you've never heard Any practical steps on how to live your faith. Okay. You're going to get them all here today. but to actually, like I said, be in the head space and the heart space to dive into this, you need to come from a posture of like putting Jesus first in your life. And the reality is that it's a lot simpler and you can start a lot smaller than you think, putting Jesus first in your life looks like giving him a daily. Yes. And I think when we hear the statement, put Jesus first, we mistake the essence of what it means, um, in our everyday life. Because a lot of times we think of it as like, wow, look at this person. Like they're going to go be a missionary. Like they're They're really putting Jesus first in their life, you know, or these people, you know, this person went to the seminary and decided to become a priest, like he's really putting Jesus first in his life. And those are good and beautiful callings. And if you feel those on your heart, totally, totally pursue those. but a lot of us are going to have much more day to day opportunities to say yes to the Lord and to put him first. And it's a lot simpler than those big callings. And actually when we say yes to all these little callings, it helps build up our faith and our stamina in a way to be able to say yes to him when he calls us to bigger things. So giving Jesus your yes, a daily yes, putting him in first can look like putting him first over your school or your work. This means that Sunday mass is an obligation, right? You don't miss mass because, you have a ton of work, that you didn't get done over the weekend, or you have a test that you didn't study for that happens on Monday, or there's, you know, sports obligations. If you have kids in sports or, you're traveling, you do. Everything you possibly can to get to Sunday mass every single week because the Lord has set aside that day and that one hour of the week for us to worship and love him. And the least we can do is give him that time. So that is an example of putting Jesus first over your calendar, your work, your school. Maybe it looks also like giving him some more time during your week. Maybe there's like a small group you can join in your local parish or your school. Maybe there's a Bible study, um, or a group of married people that you can make a marriage group with and, meet either once a month or once a week to read a marriage book together or pray scripture together or build each other up in the faith. So besides just going to the bare minimum of once a week mass on Sundays. Also cutting out time during your week to form yourself in the faith and to spend time with the Lord. Cause like we've learned in the past in my episode, everything you need to know about prayer, we know that your relationship with Jesus stems from your prayer life. So it was actually taking time to pray and to give time to the Lord during the week. Giving Jesus a daily yes, putting him first also looks like putting him first over your relationships. So this means seeking friendships, uh, relationships, people around you that are going to build you up in the faith and not tear you down. Um, it's so true. I don't know if you've heard this thing before, but it's so true. You become like the five people you spend the most time with. Um, and so think about that. Who are the people that I spend the most time with? Who are the people that I allow to have influence in my life? Are they people that have the same values and faith and morals as me? Are they people that are striving to live Christ centered lives? Are they people who are, desiring to know and love Jesus and serve him in their life? Or not?, this doesn't mean that every single person in your life has to be a believer. You can absolutely have friendships with people that aren't Christians, but those five core people in your life, I encourage you to find the people that are on the same walk of faith as you and to encourage you and push you. And especially in your dating relationships, your romantic relationships, um, if you are in a season of dating where you are praying for your vocation and trying to find the one, keep this in mind, keep the Lord first, in your life over these relationships, seek out a man or a woman who is devoted to their faith, who is practicing in their faith, who will help build you up in your faith and help you raise a family of little saints one day. And then lastly, I think this might be the hardest one. It takes a daily yes to put Jesus first over yourself in your life. And the reason why I think this is hard is because I think we're so used to trusting in ourselves. We're so used to being self reliant and feeling like we need to provide for ourselves. Like we need to make it happen for ourselves. Like we are the only ones that we can trust. And that's just not, you know, Not how the Lord wants us to live because doing that means that we're trusting ourselves over trusting the all powerful, all loving, omnipotent God of the universe, creator of the universe. And when you say it that way, it sounds a little bit crazy, right? Like how could I trust myself, a sinful, broken human being over the most perfect, most loving, most good Father, creator of the entire world and universe ever. Like that makes no sense. However, it's hard. It is hard to put your full trust in the Lord, especially because the way he works in our life is sometimes, in such intangible ways and we don't see the physical fruits immediately, but I encourage you. To put your trust in the Lord, and to trust in his promise of a full life and sort of start to let go, start to unravel these tightly gripped hands that you have on your plan for your life. Trust me, this is coming from someone who Who likes to plan every inch of her life. I have learned over and over again, that tightly grasping onto our plan actually just slows down the process of getting to the best version of yourself and the best version of your life that the Lord has in store for you. So surrender your life. Put Jesus first over yourself, his plan over your desires and start unraveling that grip that you have on your plan for your life. So how do we actually lean into this abundant life? How do we actually put this surrender, this Christ centered living lifestyle into practice? Let's get into the 10 practicals that are going to help us do that. Number one, build a daily prayer life. This is going to sound like I'm beating a dead horse. And the thing is, is I will never stop talking about it because time and time again, this just happened to me like a few weeks ago again, where the past few months have been super busy and my prayer life has been totally out of whack and not been prioritized in my life. And then finally I spent a week of daily prayer of the sacraments of adoration and, it just felt like I had so much more clarity and so much more peace and so much more energy enjoying my life that I was like, huh. Yeah, I knew this. Giving my time to the Lord and surrendering my life to him actually works. So build a daily prayer life. Perfectionism doesn't get you very far in the spiritual life. Just checking the boxes, just doing things for the sake of doing them. I think this is something we fall into a lot as Catholics. Like check the box. If I went to Sunday mass, check the box. Check the box. If I went to confession, you know, like these things don't actually, um, build up our relationship with God and our spiritual life as much as they could. Don't get me wrong. You'll still receive sacramental grace from all these things, but if you are desiring a true living relationship, intimate relationship with Jesus, just checking the boxes, isn't going to get you there. a daily prayer life, a committed prayer life is what's going to get you there. So my recommendation is truly at least 15 minutes a day. And that's the bare minimum. I mean, I recommend 30 minutes a day. That's my honest number one recommendation. If you can work up to 60 minutes a day and maybe do a holy hour in your adoration chapel in your parish, or just in the church at your parish, or just in a little prayer corner in your house. I highly, highly recommend that you do so. I, I promise you it will change your life. Number two, seek the sacraments. You guys, this is like math. I say it every time, just like one plus one equals two. And that is the answer. Every time when we seek out the sacraments in our life, when we frequently seek out the sacraments, we just are filled with supernatural grace. It makes your soul stronger. It makes your faith stronger and it makes the spiritual life just that much easier and that much sweeter. I love, love, love St. Faustina and I've been reading her diary for years. It's a really, really big book. So it takes a while to get through, but one of the things she says in there, so, so St. Faustina was a mystic and Jesus would appear to her and give her these messages. And one of the messages that she wrote down that Jesus spoke to her was that he has so much grace and mercy to give and wants to pour it out upon us. But a lot of times he can't because we don't ask for it or we're not open to it. We're not open to receiving it. And we're not even putting ourselves in a position to receive it, or we're not even realizing our need for it and asking God for it. So seek the sacraments. You guys put yourself in a position where you can receive his grace, where you can receive his mercy, where you recognize your littleness and your need for the Lord. Try to attend mass during the week. If you can maybe pick one more day or two more days during the week when you can go to mass or pick one day a week Where you can sign up to do a holy hour in adoration at your parish. A lot of the times parishes are looking for people to sign up for a weekly hour for adoration so that they can keep Jesus exposed. So do that, or go back to confession. If you haven't gone back in a while, the sacraments are just an avenue of grace that we need in our lives. Number three, set boundaries to root out sin. Okay. So it is not realistic for us to think that we are never going to sin again, right? It's in our human nature, but we can set boundaries in our life to help us root out sinfulness and to help us seek holiness. And this is going to look different for every person because we all fall in different ways. We all have different temptations. and it's going to look different depending on your stage of life, right? Whether you're in college or you're in the working world, you're newly married, you're a mom. things are going to look very different. So just know your heart, know where your temptation lies and Be proactive and set up boundaries in your life to help you root out sin. So for example, if you're a college student and you know that you are surrounded by party culture all the time, maybe set a boundary of how many drinks you're going to have so that you can make sure that you're drinking in moderation and you're not actually falling into drunkenness. Maybe you are in a relationship and chastity is really hard and you know this, set up boundaries in your relationship where you don't hang out in each other's rooms, or you don't hang out when you don't have other roommates or friends over at the house, or you have a curfew, you don't hang out past maybe 10 p. m. or something like that. Or if you do, you have to be out in a public space. setting up these boundaries in your life are going to help you to strive for holiness. Actually live the life that the Lord has in store for you. That's going to bring you so much more joy and peace and purpose in your life. Or maybe you're married or you're a mom and, your way to de stress is screens, but you find yourself really stuck in scrolling or turning to, Netflix or YouTube or whatever it is to keep you busy, to have noise in the background to distract yourself, to escape from the stress that you have during during the day. Maybe it's time to set boundaries around that. Maybe you have a passcode on your phone that only your husband knows. and you only have one hour of phone time a day or social media time a day, or maybe you have a cutoff time where after 8 PM there's no more screen so that you can give your body and your mind a break before you actually wind down and go to bed and and you give yourself space for prayer. for reading, um, or just unwinding and caring for yourself. Number four, form your mind and soul. It's important you guys to actually know why we believe what we believe, why we practice what we do in our faith. And I think this is also a common shortcoming in the Catholic faith, where a lot of us go to Sunday school through grade school, and then we kind of drop off the face of the earth when it comes to catechesis in our life and forming ourselves in our faith. And then we get to be adults. And a lot of us are like. Why do we do this as Catholics? Why do we believe this? Why do we do what we do? And you guys, it's so important, not just to be able to defend our faith, the beauty of our faith, the richness of our faith, but also to increase our own faith and have confidence in why we live out our faith the way that we do. And to learn where it's come from and to learn that Jesus Christ is the true founder of our church. Our church Is the fullness of truth. and the more that you can learn about the richness of our teachings and the tradition that comes from, the thousands of years that our, our faith has been passed on, or from the tradition of scripture, it's going to build up your faith so much more. And that knowledge in your faith is going to strengthen your soul. Number five, find community. I can't stress how important this is. Even Jesus did not do his walk alone. Okay. He had 12 guys that he invited into close friendship, close community that he prayed with and walked with and did mission with. and we are called. to have the same type of community. We need people in our life who are on the same path, who are going to build us up, who are going to encourage us, who are going to pick us up when we're down, who we can pour into and evangelize to as well. so find community, whether this is a Bible study at your parish, or maybe it's one or two more friends that you know, share the Christian or Catholic faith with you that you can meet up for coffee with once a week or every other week or once a month, or, you know, people that. Believe what you believe that have the desire to live the way that the Lord is calling you to live, to live a Christ centered life, find those people and stick with them. And it is okay to distance yourself from the people who aren't doing that for you or who are actually drawing you away from your faith and drawing you away from the Lord. And this goes for social media to you guys, unfollow accounts that you feel like are drawing you away from your faith. we consume so much and just like we become the five people that we spend the most time with, we also are so impacted by the things that we consume. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. but. In social media, there is an avenue to find faith filled community as well. so there are amazing, amazing Catholic content creators on Instagram that are showing an example of a faith filled life of how to grow in your relationship with Christ, how to respond to our culture in a Catholic worldview, how to practically live as a Catholic and Christian witness in your life to others. So find those people. Find those people online and follow them and get rid of the people that you feel like are not drawing you closer to the Lord. Now I will say this with a caveat. if the Lord is calling you to invest in people who are not in the faith, that is good and beautiful too. I want you to hear me when I say like, I'm not telling you to live in a bubble of Catholic or Christian people. Like the Lord was where the sick were. The Lord was where the prostitutes were, where the sinners were, where the Pharisees, where the tax collectors were. He spent time with the people who didn't know him and didn't know their faith. And it is important to share our faith with those people. However, if we don't already have a foundational community around us, that's going to strengthen us and pour into us so that then we can. pour out to those around us. That's, that's what I'm talking about. You need those people as well in your life. Okay. Number six is clean up the media you consume. I already started talking about this in the last one with social media, but this also goes for the type of music we listen to, the type of movies we watch, the type of shows that we watch. Um, I know when I first heard someone tell me this, I had so much resistance to it. And I was like, I am not affected by the things that I watch. I can watch rated R movies or rated R scenes and not be affected by them. Like, I'm an adult. It doesn't matter. But the reality is, you guys, our mind, heart and soul absorbs everything that we consume and just like we don't want to fill our bodies and our like stomachs with like trash food, you know, like if we just ate out at McDonald's and Wendy's every day, like, wow, our body would. definitely decline in health. Same with our soul and our mind and our heart. Like if we just fill it with trash all the time, we can't kid ourselves and think that it's not going to be affected by it. So fill your media, your social media feed, the things that you watch with things that aren't trash and that aren't depicting a life that is not Christ centered. this is also going to be a kind of a different point of discernment for different people, I think, because again, we're all tempted by different things, um, and have more temptations one way or another. So just keep that in mind. but really I challenge you to take a look and take an inventory of the things that you consume and make decisions about like, What is actually helping me get to heaven? What is actually forming me to be a Saint and what's not? And what should I let go of? Number seven, fill your life with faith filled items. Now I might be biased about this because I own a Catholic lifestyle brand where we literally provide faith filled products for you to have in your life, but the reality is, The reason we have this brand and the reason I believe this so strongly is because I know the impact that it has and the impact that it's had in my life. I especially am so drawn to beauty and I have seen it in my life and in so many others, how beauty draws us to God. Beauty reflects a deeper reality of the Lord and, and reaches for something in our soul that makes us want the Lord. So the more that we surround ourselves with faith filled beauty in our life, the more we desire the Lord and the things of the faith. So invite Jesus into the space that you live in, into the items that you have in your home, whether it's just a beautiful rosary or a holy water bottle on your entryway table or on your nightstand, or maybe it's a piece of Catholic art or faith filled jewelry, apparel or lifestyle goods, whatever it is, I really encourage you to fill your life with faith filled items and to have those daily reminders of your faith and whose you are and what you are truly rooted in. You know where to find those goods. Westcoastcatholic. co is the number one place that I will recommend to go find those. Number eight, get to know Mary and lean into her motherhood. I love Mary so much you guys and the Lord has just Always put it on my heart, um, to share about his mother and to share about her love for you and the impact and the power that she has in your life. The bottom line is Mary is your heavenly mother, and she wants to wrap you up like her little baby and protect you and carry you to the foot of the cross and just offer you and your whole life to the Lord so that he may bless it in abundance. And Jesus said this himself in the hour of his death on the cross. He turned to the disciple of John and said, John, behold your mother. And he turned to his mother and said, mother, behold your son. And in this moment, he entrusted Mary to humanity and entrusted humanity to his mother. And so there is a very special place in Mary's heart for you, her child, her son, or daughter, and her mission in her life It's to intercede for you, is to pray for you, to help you know her son more, to help you lead your life towards her son. That's her mission. It's not about her. It is always, always, always about Jesus. And what a gift that this mother is that we have, because sometimes it can be intimidating to go straight to Jesus, depending on what your relationship was like, maybe with your father and where your relationship is at with God, um, it can be intimidating to go to the father and to bear your heart and soul and your sins. And, and sometimes we just need a sweet mom. I don't know if you ever had this experience, but when I was little, sometimes I knew that if I really wanted something that was going to be a little bit tough to get, I would go to my mom and I would ask her to talk to my dad for me and sweet talk him and you know, put in a good word. And more often than not. Dad can't resist mom, right? Like he can't resist mom when she comes to him and says, sweetie, our little girl was asking for this. I think that we should, you know, give her this or blah, blah, blah, whatever it is that you're asking for. The heart of a mother just melts the heart of a father. So Mary is here for us to intercede for us to be that liaison in a sense when we feel like we need our prayers to be sweetened to the Lord. So this leads me to number nine. Pray the rosary again. I've said this so many times, but I've experienced the graces in the rosary a hundred fold in my life. The piece that it brings is. Not really comparable to a lot of other things. And I don't know why it's also like math. It's also like one plus one equals two. It just works. The graces of the rosary are so effective and are so beautiful. And I think that there's so much stress and anxiety in our culture and in our lives, and we need to combat it and we can combat it with the rosary at the very least. Um, it takes 15 minutes. You guys, I used to think that the rosary was like, would take forever and it doesn't, it takes 15 minutes of your day, um, to reflect on Jesus's life in scripture through these meditative prayers, these Hail Marys, um, and to entrust whatever your worries are to Jesus through Mary. I promise you it'll reduce your stress. It'll reduce your anxiety and it'll just bring more clarity to your life. So pray the rosary. Lastly, surrender your life to Jesus. This is number 10, this is the all encompassing, practical step. Um, and it actually takes a moment of prayer where you go to the Lord, where you open your hands in surrender and you say, Lord, I surrender my life to you. I don't want to play God anymore. I don't want to be in control of my life. I want you to lead. I want you to be Lord of my life and Lord over everything of my life. And if you have trouble with this, if you have something in your heart that you're like, I want to, But I just can't get myself to truly surrender. Then pray for that grace, pray for the grace to desire that surrender. That is a prayer that I've prayed a lot of times in my life. When I know the Lord is calling me to let go of something and I don't want to, I'll be like, Lord, give me the desire to even desire to let go of this. Give me the desire to desire your will over mine. And that will soften your heart and the Lord will hear that prayer. Okay, friends, those are my top 10 practical tips on how to live a Christ centered life and totally slay the Catholic girl life. I hope they were helpful to you. I hope that you got the boost of encouragement that you needed to keep going in your walk of faith and to maybe restart that conviction and that energy and that commitment to Jesus and the way that he's calling you to live. Last thing I want to leave you with is persevere. You guys persevere in the journey of faith. It is not an easy one. It is not for the faint of heart. and just start small. So these 10 steps, it's a lot, right? Work up to the 10 steps. Just start with the first five. Okay. Start with those and start implementing those into your life. And once those become habits, then increase to the next steps as you feel like the Lord is calling you to do. But most importantly, persevere. Um, sometimes when we get into these spurts of like a faith high or retreat high, things are really easy and then it crashes and then we get discouraged. It's okay. There's going to be discouragement. There's going to be trials. There's going to be difficulty that evil one likes to make it difficult for us. And the Lord tests our faith as well. It's not always going to be easy in our faith is strengthened when we persevere through the hard times., so keep going. You are doing amazing. Just you getting to the end of this episode shows your heart and your desire to know and love the Lord and live for him and serve the Lord. So know that I'm praying for you, in your journey of faith. And I hope that this was so helpful. It was a blessing to you in your life. and if it was, please pass this episode on, bless another friend in your life, share this episode and drop a five star rating or a review on here, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever it is that you're listening today, and know that I'm so grateful for each and every one of you in this amazing community. We'll see you next week.