Tom in Little Rock, Arkansas, asks, Were you always this focused on God in your life or was there a turning point? Yeah. I had to include it because it has a turning point, which is the name of my Bible, my Bible study it is. I didn't know that. I know. I just want to point that. Thank you. It's a great question.
I think the important thing in the question is to realize that what you're describing, Tom, is not in the past tense of my life, you know, but it is something that, like all of us, I have to struggle with every day, every week, every month, every year of my life. So, no, I wasn't always focused on so much on God and mission and some of the times when I wasn't so focused, happy, really recent.
And some of the times like that will be probably not too far in the future. I don't think that we it's not binary. It's not one Xeros. Oh, yes, we've done that. And now we are that. Now we have to keep winning it every day. And I think that's that's what makes it exciting. That's what makes it challenging. But there have been some really powerful turning points in my life.
You know, in my book, I heard Godlove, which came out this year. I talk about who taught me how to pray, and I talk about the reality that most people have never been taught how to pray. You know, we spend a lot of time talking about prayer. We spend a lot of time telling people they should pray. But it's astounding how few people have ever been really taught how to pray. And when I was, about 15 percent of my family taught me how to pray.
And it was I will never forget the moment. I'll never forget the day I describe it in detail. And I heard God laugh. And I think when you read that, I think it sort of puts a lot of jigsaw pieces together. And you're able then to look at what I've done over the last twenty seven years and what I'm actually trying to accomplish, you know, for you, for your friends, for your kids, for your grandkids, because that was an absolute turning point in my life.
Last question, and it builds on that Emma was on Emma in San Antonio, was on a pilgrimage with with us that I was leaving last year in Italy, and she made her first reconciliation. She was there with her three older brothers and her parents. She made her first reconciliation while we were on the trip in Italy. And Emma asks who were who were what inspired you to start dynamic Catholic?
Great question. It's fun stuff in it, yeah, so I tell this story in my book, Resisting Happiness and basically Dynamic Catholic is the result of an intervention in my life in about two thousand seven. So twenty seven, I'd been writing and speaking for about 15 years, written probably about 15 books, sold millions and millions of copies, spoken of millions and millions of people.
And a group of my friends got me together and they told me, you are wasting your life. And it was I mean, it crushed me, it like sometimes you have these moments and you're just so completely disoriented. It was one of those moments for me and. And they challenged me, they said, you've got to get off the road, you've got to start creating content and experiences for people that can reach millions and millions of people.
Yes, you're out there talking to a thousand people every night, three hundred nights of the year. But that ultimately will be very bad for you, very bad for your health, very bad for your relationships. And and you have so much more to give and. So, again, that's that was a massive turning point in my life, it was it was a moment of incredible disorientation that took me months really to recover from. And and through that process, I realized that they were right, in a sense.
And then I went back and I spent some more time with them and I said, I will orient me, how do I know what this looks like? And they say, you have to work out how do you have 100 times more impact in the next 15 years then you've had in the last 15 years, not twice as much impact, not five times or 10 times as much impact, but 100 times more impact. And we will do anything we can to help you work that out and to help you bring that about. We'll do whatever we can to help.
But it's it's a 100 times factor. And and so Dynamic Catholic was born out of that. And that was 11 years ago, right?
Matthew Kelly
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