Ready for Life Ministries

Always Be Ready

Helping all to always be spiritually ready for life—for this life and the next.

Always be Ready for Eternal Life

Christianity has a deep and thought-provoking teaching known in Latin as memento mori. It is literally translated as "remember death," which we're to remind ourselves daily of our mortality. You may see paintings of saints holding skulls to signify that they were constantly reminded of their death. In that way, they can intentionally maximize the good they do to build the kingdom of heaven. If you've read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey or if you're familiar enough with Buddhism, you may be familiar with the concept of "Beginning with the End in Mind."

The goal of contemplating your death is multi-faceted, and the primary reasons are below:

You address the fear of death, overcome it, and are liberated from its oppression, as death is a part of life such that even Jesus couldn't escape it;
Looking at death and what lies beyond gives you a clearer sense of how to plan out the short-term and long-term milestones in your life, with which you can plan subtasks in shorter timeframes to achieve them, obtaining for yourself a detailed roadmap for you to navigate your life so that you end up where you want to go with the legacy you want to leave behind;
With the detailed roadmap to begin each day and week, you're able to live almost entirely in the present, with very little to worry or fear of the future;
With the detailed roadmap, you see more clearly any obstacles that currently hinder upon or is an obstacle to any of the milestones ahead, allowing you to address them, and furthermore, allowing you to foresee other obstacles that may impede upon various upcoming milestones and plan their mitigation;
By addressing all the past, present, and future obstacles, a greater degree of interior freedom is obtained that will allow you to better serve those around you, furthering your capacity to build the kingdom of heaven, and thus allowing for additional major milestones of service to the Lord on your roadmap and/or adding greater impact to the milestones you have already mapped; and
With all of the above, the natural side effects to your life are greater love, joy, peace, harmony, courage, and interior freedom.

Spiritual Exercise Set I: Obtaining a Roadmap for Life

We have developed the Ready for Life Ministries Spiritual Exercise Set I to help you obtain the roadmap mentioned above. The set consists of the five spiritual exercises below. The first two are personal reflections and the last three are guided meditations based on the Christian Bible. Ready for Life Ministries is conducting one-day retreats that involve the use of these exercises, and will be providing additional resources for the retreat, such as spiritual direction.

If you decide to proceed with these exercises, you’re highly encouraged to journal all your experiences in each exercise and any of their repeated efforts to allow you to better reflect on your spiritual journey. In fact, you’re encouraged to revisit these exercises annually. The guided meditations are cumulative in nature, so their success is dependent on the thorough completion of their preceding exercises. Lastly, you’re highly encouraged to receive spiritual direction for the series of spiritual exercises to ensure that you're guided by the Holy Spirit. It goes without saying that being in a state of grace is very helpful against spiritual attacks when you're trying to get closer to Jesus Christ.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns about these exercises, please email Info@ReadyforLifeMinistries.org