What Target Are You Shooting For?

This, the Year of St. Joseph, is over halfway completed. Have you taken advantage of the graces God is offering you in this holy year? God is giving us the opportunity to obtain incredible graces and plenary indulgences (removal of sin and the punishment due to sin) by faithfully fulfilling a devotion to St. Joseph.

Why should we take on devotion to St. Joseph? Because we need a spiritual target to shoot for.

Without a target, shooting isn’t fun, isn’t competitive and doesn’t make sense. It has been said, “Shoot at nothing and you’ll hit it every time.” Often as we age, we allow life to direct us rather than us directing our lives. The point is that targets give our lives meaning and hope. A sure way to get our lives back on the divine track is to identify the correct targets to shoot for.

Your target is to be like St. Joseph–a saint. That’s it. If you are a husband, your target is to be a bridegroom in the image of Jesus Christ whose love, sacrifice, and relentless courage was so intense that He laid down His life for the sake of His Bride, the Church.

If you are a father, you are called to be like St. Joseph, a father on earth like the Father in Heaven; to “reflect and reveal God’s fatherhood” (FC 25). If you have a family, you are appointed to be the priest leader who offers the sacrifice of himself on behalf of his domestic church, his family, to ensure that we conquer the devil and that they arrive safely to heaven.

These are your targets. Now this might sound harsh, but if you aren’t shooting for them then you are sinning. The Greek word for sin, hamartia, literally means to miss the mark, as when an archer misses the target and loses the prize. We cannot afford to be distracted by “squirrels” and miss the mark of saving our wives’, children’s, families’, and neighbor’s souls. The consequences are too eternal.

For this reason, I developed Custos: Total Consecration Through St. Joseph; The 33-Day Preparation for Fullness of Divine Sonship and Spiritual Fatherhood. Custos is a one-of-a-kind spiritual bootcamp with St. Joseph, that is comprised of daily reflections based on St. Joseph’s life as revealed in Sacred Scripture. Yet it is much more than reading reflections. Custos is comprised of sevens stages, each with its own set of spiritual practices. A man selects one to two practices each stage and proceeds through the 33-days. The goal is to develop a spiritual blueprint, a daily-lived plan for personal holiness–for the rest of his life.

Custos gives men a very practical, challenging, doable target to shoot for daily.

Are you taking advantage of the graces God is offering you in this holy year by investing in a devotion to St. Joseph? Custos: Total Consecration through St. Joseph is one of those devotions. Take up Custos and receive the graces needed to become the heroic, sacrificial saint that God has called and destined you to be.