IV. A Lively Faith Animated by Charity

From the Series: Beneath the Standard of Mary – The Heart and Voice of an Auxiliary Member

There is an old saying that used to circulate in the world of ambition and acquisition. He who dies with the most toys wins.

I have thought about that sentence many times over the years. And every time I come back to the same conclusion. It does not even make logical sense. You have the boat and the cars and the big house and you have the millions upon millions of dollars in the bank and then you are dead. So, you won? You won what exactly? You accumulated things you can no longer use, in a life you can no longer live, for an eternity you never prepared for. That is not winning, actually you are missing the point entirely.

A lively faith animated by charity is the complete reversal of that equation. It is a life so saturated with love of God and love of neighbor that the accumulation of things simply loses its appeal. Not because you are forcing yourself to be detached. But because you have found something so much more compelling that the other stuff just quietly stops mattering.

The two greatest commandments are not complicated. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and Love your neighbor as yourself. That is, it. That is the whole architecture of a life well lived. Everything else, the possessions, the power, the status, the carefully curated image of success, all of it is decoration on a house that is built on a worldly foundation of sand. And we all know how the sand story ends.

A lively faith is one that is woven into every single fiber of who you are. Not compartmentalized into Sunday morning and a few minutes of prayer before bed. Not reserved for crisis moments when you suddenly need God and dust off the relationship you have been neglecting. You have woven Jesus into your life, present in every conversation, every decision, every ordinary moment, and you do not turn it on and off. It is simply who you are.

And charity, real charity, the theological virtue, not just writing a check to a good cause, is what keeps that faith alive and moving. Because faith without charity can become cold. It can become intellectual. It can become a set of positions you hold rather than a fire inside you that drives everything you do. Charity is the animating force. It is what takes faith off the shelf and puts it to work in the world.

Here is something worth thinking about. This life is temporary. I know that sounds obvious, but most people do not actually live like they believe it. If you live to a hundred years old, which very few of us will, that century is nothing. Not a blink. Not even a fraction of a blink in the context of eternity. Billions upon billions of years stretching out beyond anything the human mind can actually grasp. And we get this small sliver of time, this one unrepeatable opportunity, to become who we are going to be forever.

That is not a reason for anxiety, instead it is a reason for focus.

When I truly understood that something in me relaxed. The things that used to create stress and worry began to lose their power. Because I know there is an expiration date. I know there will come a moment when I stand before the Lord and everything I accumulated, everything I achieved, everything the world told me was worth chasing, none of it will matter. Only what I did with the love He gave me. Only whether I gave it away freely or hoarded it for myself.

Animated by charity means giving it away, every single day in every single direction. Without ever keeping score.

It means that when someone cuts you off in traffic, which used to make people furious and apparently still does, your first instinct should not be anger but prayer. Because you do not know that person’s story. Maybe they just got a phone call no one ever wants to receive. Maybe they are racing to a hospital room to say goodbye to someone they love with only minutes to spare. Maybe their world just collapsed, and they are running on pure adrenaline and grief. You do not know. And charity, a lively faith animated by charity, assumes the best and responds with love even when the situation does not seem to call for it.

That is not weakness. That is the most radical thing a human being can do in this world.

Kenia and I were recently asked by a fellow rosary maker, someone genuinely curious about how we live, whether we ever just watch a movie or take a break. She wanted to know what else we do besides the Rosary Makers Ministry. We looked at each other and simply said “Yes, this is our life, making rosaries, sending them around the world, praying them, sharing the joy of them. Every day, no days off and rarely any vacation time from it, our focus is our Lord, our Lady and the Rosary.” And she looked at us with this expression of genuine wonder and said really? This is all that matters to you? “Yes. This is all that matters to us, to bring as many people as possible to Jesus through Mary.”

Not because we are extraordinary, we are not. But because we have done the math and the math is not complicated. Everything on this planet has an expiration date. The cars, the houses, the bank accounts, the titles, the recognition, all of it will be dust. But a rosary slipped into the hands of someone who prayed it in their darkest hour and found their way back to God, that ripple of love goes on forever. That moment of love given freely without expectation of return, that is the only kind of investment that actually follows you into eternity.

Animated by charity has many layers. It is the big visible acts, the works of mercy, the apostolate, the tireless showing up for others. But it is also the quiet interior layers. Eucharistic adoration sitting in silence before the Lord. Going to daily Mass as often as you can. The true honest examination of conscience, preparing for a heartfelt confession. The rosary prayed not as a ritual to be completed but as a conversation to be entered. The confession that keeps the soul clean and the heart humble. All of it together, the interior and the exterior, the hidden and the visible, is what a lively faith animated by charity actually looks like from the inside.

It is not heroic, or dramatic. It does not announce itself. It just loves, consistently, quietly, and without ceasing.

Because in the end the only question that will matter is not what you owned or where you traveled or how many people recognized your name.

The question will be how well you loved.

Start there and stay there.

That is a lively faith animated by charity.