When someone tells us they want to take up their life of faith again, we almost never suggest an ambitious plan. Ambitious plans last eleven days. We suggest three practices that fit into any week.
The first is a moment of silence at the start of the day. One minute, before the phone. That is all. Silence produces nothing visible, and precisely for that reason it is the first thing to be sacrificed and the most missed when it is gone.
The second is a concrete intention for someone in your community. With a name and a situation: not “for the sick”, but “for Marta, who has surgery on Thursday”.
The third is an act of service you can sustain through the week. The important word is sustain: better a weekly phone call for a year than one heroic afternoon in March.
All three have one thing in common: they are measurable. On Saturday you can answer without ambiguity whether you did them. The spiritual life dissolves when it becomes unverifiable.
If one week one of them fails, you do not start from zero. You pick it up again. The aim is not a perfect chain, but a habit that survives the bad days.
Many people tell us the third practice is the one that pulls the other two along. Serving brings up names to pray for, and praying for names brings up the need to be quiet for a moment.
If you have been doing all three for a while and want more, the next step is not to add a fourth: it is to go deeper into the one you do worst.
There is nothing original about these three practices. All we have done is shrink them to the point where they can no longer be postponed for lack of time.
Choose the starting day — today will do — and tell someone. What is said out loud holds up better.