Introducing: "Catholic Mom's Café"

It is my pleasure to introduce to you my friend, best-selling author Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle, and her latest project, Catholic Mom’s Cafe: 5-Minute Retreats for Every Day of the Year.

Donna is a renowned speaker, blogger, EWTN host, and author of numerous books, including Mother Teresa and Me: Ten Years of Friendship. Although we’ve never met in person, I’ve had the pleasure of calling Donna my friend as well as my colleague for many years.

Donna writes and speaks about faith and family in her numerous blogs—check here and here, for example—always with a special fervor for Catholic motherhood.

This post is part of a Blog Tour launching Donna’s new book. Drop by her Catholic Mom's Café blog and Facebook page to check out the rest of the stops on the Blog Tour—as well as Catholic ideas, book excerpts, reviews, inspiration, news, and recipes.

As a mother of five, Donna knows what it’s like to be a busy mother who has to be deliberate about carving time out of her day for the Lord—or it just won’t happen.

Catholic Mom’s Cafe: 5-Minute Retreats for Every Day of the Year is a 365-day devotional book for busy Catholic moms. The daily reflections highlight the virtues of faith, hope, and love, and are brief enough to be enjoyed in just five minutes.

“The focus in this book is about living lives of faith, hope and love within the vocation of mothering our children. God as a free gift gives us these wonderful theological virtues at our baptism. These virtues are key to living a Christian life, and I think sadly sometimes we forget about them. I thought it would be helpful to write a book in this way, which offers the busy mom a chance to discover the virtues already present in her life, but unfolding more and more each day. I think the book can be a reminder to "flex" a particular "muscle" of virtue each day to "grow" the virtues! Practicing these virtues makes us more like our Creator.” 

~Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle

Donna describes the meditations as “spiritual daily vitamins” to energize you and help you find “the faith, hope, and love you’ll need to be the mom God wants you to be – today and every day.”

By the way, Donna will be hosting on EWTN an upcoming five-part television series by the same name, "Catholic Mom's Café." Check your local listings for details.

One more thing—autographed copies of Catholic Mom's Café are available for purchase at Donna-Marie's website. You can also purchase the book through the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor.

Here's a sampling. Today's meditation in Catholic Mom’s Cafe: 5-Minute Retreats for Every Day of the Year:

April 23rd

Ponder
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." 
~Hebrews 11:1

Offer
I used to visit an elderly blind man at a nursing home. My first time visiting him, he reached his hands forward and ran them all over my face. That's how he "saw" me. It was the first time I had ever experienced something like that, so it was a tad startling.

In a way, his gesture demonstrates how difficult faith can be: Even when we are literally blind, we struggle to "see." And yet God calls us to have conviction about faith--these "things not seen"--even though we cannot put our hands out and "feel" it. Let's trust that He will help us grow in faith and pass it on to our children.

Pray
Lord Jesus, strengthen my faith in you so that I may share it with my family and others. Act of Faith, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be.

Savor
I want to reach out in faith as the blind man did.