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Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly, and welcome back to Best Advent Ever. As we continue to journey toward Christmas, I encourage you to think each day about what are some of your favorite Christmas experiences. By thinking about them now, by reflecting on them, meditating on them now, we prepare ourselves to experience them more fully. I remember as a teenager, we all used to go to midnight mass. And it's one of the things that I have great memories of from my childhood, and something I still love to do to this day. I love to go and see A Christmas Carol during the lead-up to Christmas. It's a meditation for me. It's a great reflection for me. I've been doing it for more than 20 years. I love having Christmas dinner with my family. What are your favorite moments in Christmas? And to think each day about one, to reflect on one, to meditate on one each day, prepare your heart to experience Christmas more fully than ever before this year.

We hear a lot about life hacks in our culture today. Seems everywhere you look in the media, someone's got a new life hack. And so in slowing down the speed of joy, I decided that we should have a little look at the concept of life hacks. Because the reality is, is that life isn't supposed to be hacked. If we think that life needs to be hacked, we're basically saying, "God didn't really design it right, so we need to hack life so that we can get it right where God got it wrong." And of course, when we say that out loud, it is ludicrous. It is lunacy. And that becomes very clear. But so many things about our culture sort of just slip by us because we don't have the clear thinking necessary to assess them and reject them. And we don't have the clear thinking necessary to assess them and reject them because we haven't slowed down the speed of joy. We're living life at the speed of joy. Just that speed and that joy provide a clarity that is necessary to see this culture for what it is, to assess what's being thrown at us, and to reject what's being thrown at us because it doesn't help us become the best version of ourselves. It doesn't help us become what God created us to be, and it does not help us to flourish as human beings.

A life hack is a technique adopted to simplify an activity. Life hacks are often clever strategies to accomplish tasks more efficiently. Here are some examples. Use different colored nail polish to identify keys. Freeze grapes to chill your drink without watering it down. Put a wooden spoon over a pot of boiling water to keep it from boiling over. Use a cheese grater to quickly soften hard butter. If you are having trouble staying awake in a meeting or a class, keep one foot slightly off the ground for as long as you can. There's nothing wrong with life hacks in a sense. They're clever, many of them. Some of them are brilliant. But why do we need life hacks? After all, life isn't supposed to be hacked. We shouldn't need to hack life. There just shouldn't be a need. We should be able to live a deeply fulfilling life without hacking life. Something is intrinsically wrong with the idea that life needs to be hacked. Sick and sad, it is evidence that something is profoundly broken. Now of course there's official life hacks and there are unofficial life hacks. There are things that we do every day to cut corners here and to save time there and to be more productive and to be more efficient. The question is, do they help us to flourish? Do they help other people to flourish? Do they allow us to love and to love more deeply, more intentionally? Or do they make it harder for us to love or even impossible for us to love in certain situations? The ultimate life hack is not having to hack life at all. And wise people build margin into their lives so that life hacking just isn't necessary. We are constantly testing the load limits of our lives. We allow no margin. Often take on breaking loads and are therefore flirting with catastrophe every day.

To slow down to the speed of joy, we need to build margin into our days. This margin is time to honor the unexpected, but important. Because let's face it, the unexpected is inevitable. You may not know what form the unexpected is going to take, but you can be sure each day, week and month will involve its fair share of unexpected situations and circumstances. The unexpected is inevitable. It's inevitable. Margin is time to honor the unexpected, to honor the unexpected. I think very often we were like cursed the unexpected. We're angry at the unexpected. We rage against the unexpected. But when we slow down the speed of joy, we have margin and margin is time to honour the unexpected. Let's start to build margin into our lives. Start to build margin into our days, one day at a time. Time, unscheduled for anything else, to honour the unexpected, which of course is inevitable. If you're a member of the Ambassadors Club, I want to thank you again for making Best Advent ever possible for so many people. If you're not a member of the Ambassadors Club, I want to invite you today to join the Ambassadors Club, to join this incredible mission, share with the staff at Dynamic Catholic and ambassadors all across the country who contribute a few dollars each month to support this incredible mission that is touching tens of millions of people every single year.

So click the button below, select your welcome gift. One of my favorites is the miraculous metal medallion. This thing, it's like as big as a hockey puck and it's heavy, it's solid, solid metal, and it's beautiful and great to have on the desk and just be reminded of Mary's ever-loving presence in our lives. God bless you, have a great day, and remember, be bold, be Catholic.

Thank you, Ambassadors. You are changing the world. See you tomorrow.

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Bye-bye. Have a great day.

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Come on.

Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Simon, come sit. I love you.

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Have a great day.

Have a great day.

Have a great day.

See you next time. Bye. Have a great day.