Once I was invited to a group meeting with Pope Francis. Entering the room, I paused, eyeing the seats next to the Pope’s fancy chair. Someone saw my paralysis and invited me to sit in the seat farthest from what I wanted. Hiding my disappointment, I sat. We waited. To our surprise, an aid pointed out that those seats were still empty and invited me and another to have them. We calmly but gleefully strode across the room and sat. Pope Francis entered, and we enjoyed two hours of amazingly uplifting conversation.

I’ve been hiking Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona most of my life. It is a vigorous forty-five minutes to the top. Near the peak, the end suddenly appears much further away, and steeper. At that moment, a descending hiker often offers encouragement: “Keep going! The peak is right there. It’s not as far as it looks. You can do it!” It usually works. After another five minute push, you summit and enjoy a glorious panorama of the Sonoran Desert in the Valley of the Sun.

During my baseball career, my best coach often said, “You shouldn’t be worried if I yell at you. Be worried if I don’t. If I stop pushing you, it means I don’t think you have any more potential.” He demanded a lot, and I knew it meant he saw that I could be something special on the baseball field.

Last summer I was at the National Eucharistic Congress when Fr. Mike Schmitz delivered an impassioned call to repentance in his keynote address during an evening revival session. The crowd received his message with great enthusiasm. Their applause and the cheers shook the Lucas Oil Stadium.

The next night, Sr. Josephine Garrett took the stage and, in her address, got into the nitty-gritty of what it means to be a disciple, what it means to live repentance — or, as she so beautifully put it, to embrace the hunger. And in doing so, she called back to the previous night’s thunderous approval of Fr. Mike’s message.

It’s 9:08 on a Saturday morning, and I am too darn busy for confession. I’ve probably written before about how hard I find it to get to confession — I say ‘probably’ because I really can’t remember. I whine about it so frequently that it’s hard to tell if I’ve made it the subject of a written piece or if it is simply an oft-recited refrain from the Litany of Colleen’s Perpetual Complaints.