Vices are our disordered way of fulfilling our God-given good desires. 

Summary

So many of us thought we were good people till we had kids, right?  This is because kids expose our weaknesses and we need to be aware of them in order to overcome them.  Listen in as we reveal Satan’s plan for you and lay out God’s great plan of using our rightly ordered desires to develop virtues and live according to His plan.  

The desires that God has put in our hearts for dignity, communion, justice, and peace are all good, but when we try to fulfill them on our own, they can lead to vice, or repeated bad habits.  We do this because we are all fallen, wounded people!  But the good news is that we just need to tap into learning how to satisfy those desires in the best way, which is what God intended for us.  This is a snapshot from our video series we are doing for our Cana90 Fellowship this year.  In that series, each vice gets its own video where we break it down and show how we as parents are particularly susceptible to falling into it.  Join the Fellowship here for the rest of the series! 

Key Takeaways

• Vices are our disordered desires.  Every vice has a longing or desire behind it and a corresponding virtue to help overcome it. 

• Parents struggle with vices in particular ways that may not have been evident before they had kids.  

• Envy is the longing for Dignity and it comes from the fear that we will not be seen, known, and acknowledged.  We get this from our Heavenly Father! 

• Sloth is the longing for Peace and it causes us to choose a “fake peace” that comes from ignoring problems instead of working through them. 

Couple Discussion Questions

• Where do I struggle to act?  What situations would I rather ignore than deal with? Write down some ideas.  Try them each day one at a time. 

• What is one thing I can do to make this room/situation/gathering better? How can I be proactive? 

• Think of when someone else was kind to you.  How did it make you feel? 

• List 25 things you can do to make the lives of others around you more pleasant

References

• Bishop Barron’s series on the Seven Deadly Sins

• https://www.wofdigital.org/seven-deadly-sins-seven-lively-virtues

• Broken Gods by Dr. Gregory Popcak

• https://amazon.com/dp/B00N6PETQ2?ref=KC_GS_GB_US

• Cana90 Fellowship 

• https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/