We begin our day with 45 minutes to an hour of personal prayer and then meet in the chapel for an hour of adoration, which includes the rosary. We attend daily Mass and we pray vespers together before supper.

Somehow that doesn’t seem enough. We also make a poustinia (24 hours of prayer in solitude) once a week; and with our workload, there is often a temptation to skip it.

The difficulties that people experience seem to be more serious with each passing year, and this impacts our lives as well.

A deep personal relationship with the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and with Our Lady is vital for us.

We have learned that when we sit down with Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit or Mary and have a heart to heart—"What do you want in this situation?" "How do you want us/me to pray about this?" or "Mother Mary, how did you handle this kind of thing?"—and then take time to listen—eventually we’ll receive an answer. Maybe not immediately, but it will come.

We continue to encourage and guide a group of young moms and because of this, we’ve come to know, love and be a part of their families.

Seeds of encouragement and support are dropped into the hearts of the dads as well, and we’ve been begging God for years to get something going for them, too.

Now a group of them meet monthly with a priest. This is an offshoot of an annual men’s conference that began over three years ago in Michigan.

We bought a number of on sale tickets to the first conference and gave them to some of our friends for Christmas.

We don’t often see results of what we do, but the group from here that attends each year is getting bigger, and some dads take their older sons along.

We continue to walk with the Sudanese refugees. There are hundreds now, and we can no longer take care of their material needs. So we move with them in a way that is truly Madonna House—in friendship and love—encouraging, consoling, etc.

We give what support we can, too, to the Sudanese priest. For a couple of years, there has been a Mass each month just for the African community and they can "come home to the Lord" as African people. We are praying that this will eventually become weekly.

A catechism class we began for some Sudanese children is presently being taught by a retired teacher, a truly faith-filled woman.

We love these traumatized children and figure they’ll remember this love more than anything. They have joined us with a few adults in praying the rosary every Friday evening.

Through all of this, the three staff in this house—Renate Zanker, Gloria Lawton, and I—are called to really "be there" for one another in love and truth. If we don’t do this, with all that is asked of us, we won’t survive.

We’ve come in contact with a fellow Catholic community, The Intercessors of the Lamb, whose charism is communal intercessory prayer. The members are monks, nuns, and priests, and they have an outer circle of families and lay single people.

Their contemplative spirit is fed by Catherine Doherty’s book Poustinia. They don’t just read it; they pray through it and journal with it, so that it can help form their interior life. This has inspired us to do the same.

We have been encouraging our friends to spend serious time with God and with Our Lady so that they can be sustained against the onslaught of modern society and the culture of death and to fall in love with God more and more.

It was a joy for us when members of the Intercessors gave a talk to a group of our friends and began with the words, "Today what is most needed is a deep personal relationship with God—and to grow in this, you need to spend quality time with the Lord."

Many looks were cast our way with knowing smiles, raised eyebrows, or thumbs up, and we knew they "got it." That afternoon, two more very busy moms made arrangements to come and pray in our chapel.

I would say that most of our life, while hectic, is joyful.

Some of our sorrow comes from seeing the innocent Sudanese youth absorbing our ungodly North American culture. Of course, we also watch this happening with our own Canadian youth. On the other hand, we also see some of them, both Sudanese and Canadian-born, making good choices.

Another light in the Windsor area is the formation of a group called the "Women of the Vine." For years, we have been praying that something like what we have been doing with the home schooling moms could be made available to all women.

Three women prayed about beginning Women of the Vine for three years, and a year and a half ago they began to meet monthly at a parish for 6:30 p.m. Mass followed by a talk according to the teachings of the Church. They have asked me to be a spiritual guide to their core group.

There is a line in a letter to the staff by our foundress Catherine: "The spirit of Madonna House is one of ardent zeal for the glory of God, the salvation of souls, and the restoration of all things to Christ through Mary."

Our life seems so chaotic and inadequate when we are bombarded by the immensity of the needs and challenges brought about by the culture of death. But this ardent zeal keeps the fire burning through the everyday things: folding the laundry, dusting, chopping vegetables, gardening, answering the door and phone, etc.

And God gives little graces to encourage us. One night when I was feeling really burdened, a thought suddenly came to me, and I exclaimed, "We’re saving the world!"

Let me end with a little story. At Mass one Sunday, behind us was a young boy with a computer toy which was beeping. Hearing Renate sigh, I thought the sound was bothering her.

After Mass, I said something and she replied, "No, it brought to mind all the children addicted to noise and computers, and my sigh was a prayer for them."