2 Easy Tricks to Help Live a Better Catholic Life
Most people will give you broad steps you need to take to be a better Catholic. To be honest, I am not qualified to teach those steps, and there have been plenty of qualified people who have already stated these steps in other articles and videos online. I CAN, however, tell you about 2 things that were recently implemented into my daily routine that I have found to be very beneficial in growing my faith.
1. Reading 1 Bible Verse a Day
When I said these were simple, I meant it. Any given bible verse only takes a handful of minutes to read, and with the Bible App on your phone, can be done anywhere, anytime. Most Catholics that I have met have never read the entire Bible, myself included. This is crazy because we have access to the literal WORD OF GOD.
Many people try and fail to read it because they start too big. You start off by saying, “I’m gonna read the ENTIRE Bible, front to back”, and then proceed to read Genesis, Exodus, and maybe Leviticus, and usually lose interest before you’re done with the Pentateuch. While that may partially be due to those texts being hard reads, it is also since you did not set a goal for how many pages to read each day. You can breeze through Genesis in one day, but you might not even want to read Numbers in a few days.
That’s where the 1 chapter a day comes in. It’s so insignificant in terms of time that anyone can do it. But when you compound each day with the next and so forth, you get an exponential effect on your knowledge of scripture. I have personally found a great impact, as I have started to remember bible verses in conversation, which was something I thought I’d never be able to do.
I suggest starting with Matthew, then finishing the Gospels, then the New Testament, and then the Old. I found this way to be much easier to keep going initially. And if you’re looking for a little more, try reading 1 OT and 1 NT verse a day.
2. Turn Off Explicit Music
If we are what we eat, then we say what we hear. This couldn’t be more true when it comes, to curse words, and music is one of the most overlooked pathways to the way we speak. As a college student, I find it quite easy to figure out which of my classmates listens to explicit songs, just by how often they curse in our everyday conversations. And while swearing is not the heaviest of sins, it is a sin nonetheless.
Not only does explicit music have curse words, but it also tends to carry cruder meanings about other sins, which can subconsciously lead us to those sins. Murder, Robbery, Sex, Drugs, and even Satanic Worship can be found in explicit songs, which are all things we should not be striving for as God’s Children. Obviously, there are non-explicit songs with bad meanings, and some explicit songs with good meanings, but I have found this as the easiest way to cut down the pool of songs in a net-positive and clear way.
The steps for this are pretty straightforward. I went to settings on Spotify and turned off Explicit Music. Instantly, I had to cut out a large chunk of my music. I promptly deleted those songs from my playlist and was left with a few playlists that were still intact and some remnants of playlists that I had previously enjoyed regularly. I initially felt unsure of what I would listen to, but I quickly found refuge with my Classic Rock and Motown playlists (shoutout to Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder). I also started spending more car rides in silence in thought and prayer.
After a few days of this, I noticed a real change in my mood. I felt less agitated and more upbeat than usual. This has continued since, which makes me upset I hadn’t done this years before.
Welp, that’s all I have to say. I know these aren’t that crazy of ideas, nor are they the key to getting to heaven. But I have felt a profound difference between these two tricks, and feel that they would be very beneficial to anyone looking to take small steps toward becoming a better Catholic.
