Transcend Today

Preface

Have you ever wondered why you exist?

Have you ever stopped — really stopped — and asked who you truly are, or who you are meant to be?

Before you turn another page of this journal, I want you to wrestle with that question honestly, because the answer changes everything about how you live the next twenty-four hours, and every twenty-four hours after that.

Who are you?

Not your name. Not your job. Not the country on your passport or the number in your bank account.

Who are you?

I know what you might be tempted to answer. I’m a software engineer. I’m a teacher. I’m a mother of three. I’m from Texas. I’m Catholic. I’m a Marine. I’m someone who is still trying. I’m someone who is tired.

Those answers are real. They are not wrong. But none of them reach far enough. They tell me what you do, where you come from, and how you are getting by. They tell me what has happened to you. They do not tell me who you are.

So let me tell you the only honest answer there is — the one your Father in heaven has been speaking into your soul since you first began to wonder why you exist, the one you have been waiting your whole life to hear:

You are a beloved child of the Almighty Father. You were thought of, intended, and loved into existence by the one and only Creator God. You come from His thoughts. You belong to Him.

Your earthly parents gave you life, and you should honor them, for that is a commandment, and through them God Himself reached down to make you. But it is your Heavenly Father who knit you together in the womb. Before you were formed in your mother’s body, He knew you. Before the world named you, He named you. Before anyone ever hurt you, He loved you. And He has not stopped loving you for a single second of your life — not in your worst hour, not in your loudest sin, not in the longest silence between you and Him.

Your body was made to be His temple. His Spirit longs to dwell in you, and through Baptism that indwelling becomes your inheritance. It is to Him your soul will one day return.

So if anyone ever asks you again who you are, do not be afraid. Tell them:

“I am a child of God. I am a divine creature, made by the King of the universe, the Almighty Father.”

If you want proof that He has not stopped loving you, look at the babies in this world. Watch how they smile. Watch how they laugh. They have just come from the Father’s thoughts. They do not yet know how to speak, but they already know how to be joyful, because joy is their inheritance. They have not yet learned shame, or doubt, or the weight that the world tries to put on a soul. And what you see in their joy is the original signature of God on every human being.

If you can look at a newborn and know in your bones that they are heaven-sent, then you must accept that you, too, were heaven-sent. The same Father who breathed life into them breathed life into you. The signature you recognize in them is the same signature He placed on you.

That signature — the image of God Himself, the joy and holiness and divine likeness pressed into your soul the moment you came forth from the Father’s thoughts — is still on you. The years may have buried it. The noise may have muted it. The wounds may have made you forget it exists. But it has never been erased. It cannot be erased. Be still, and know that He is God, and in that stillness the signature can be found again.

You were not made for the noise of this age. You were made for Him.

Now that you know who you are and who you’re made for, understand that knowing who you are is one thing. Living as who you are, though, every single day, is another. Transcend means to rise above. Not to escape the world. Not to pretend the suffering isn’t real. It means to rise above the noise, the lies, and the distractions, and to live in constant dialogue with the Father every waking moment of your terrestrial life.

When you live like this, peace, love, and joy begin to fill your entire being. You start to see with His eyes. You start to hear with His ears. You start to see the beauty and perfection in all creation — in pavement, in grass, in the sky, in the light — but most of all in your own reflection in the mirror, and in every brother and sister the Father places in your path.

People will tell you this kind of life is unattainable. They’re wrong. It is more than attainable. In fact, it’s exactly what you were made for. The Spirit of the Lord is at work in you already, drawing you, calling you, stirring the very desire that brought you to this page, whether you feel Him at this moment or not. And He wants to do more than draw you. He wants to dwell in you. The Father has promised the gift of His Spirit to all who come to Him through His Son. That Spirit is poured out at Baptism, sealed in Confirmation, restored in Reconciliation, and renewed in every Eucharist. What God has promised, He fulfills.

And it is in the state of grace — the soul restored to friendship with God through Baptism, kept in that friendship through Reconciliation, deepened by every Eucharist — that the gift of His Spirit reaches its fullness in you. His Spirit then flows within you like a river of living water. Sanctifying grace — God’s own life dwelling in the soul — cleanses you, transforms you, makes you more like Jesus, until you live in that very state of grace where the Father elevates your soul to share, by grace, in the divine nature of the Holy Trinity (2 Peter 1:4, CCC 460).

Only there does the Father become not a distant Creator only, but a Father who dwells within, who speaks within, who walks with you every day of your life. That is what every soul was made for: not just to know about the Father, but to be drawn into His own life.

And a relationship with the Father, like every relationship worth having, requires dialogue. You know this from your own life. No relationship — not with a spouse, not with a child, not with a friend — survives without two things: communication and service rooted in love.

That’s what the Father is asking from you today. He desires for you to seek Him. To talk to Him. To listen to Him. To serve Him with your whole heart.

And He has given us a way to remain in Him that is more than dialogue. It is union itself.

Listen to what Christ said the night He gave us this gift, and listen carefully, because these are the hardest words He ever spoke — words so startling that many of His first disciples walked away when they heard them. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”

He meant it.

This is the mystery at the heart of the Catholic faith — that Christ Himself, the very Son of God, is truly present in the Eucharist at every Mass. After the words of consecration, what appears to be bread and wine is, in its very substance, the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. The Church calls this transubstantiation. Not a symbol. Not a memory. Not Christ alongside the bread and wine, but Christ Himself where the bread and wine were. The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is the source and summit of the Christian life (Lumen Gentium 11), and the destination of every page of this journal. The 14 habits inside are small liturgies pointing toward the one true Liturgy — the Mass, where Heaven and earth meet at the altar. The morning page prepares you. The evening page gives thanks. The day in between is the conversation that flows from His presence within you.

That is the destination. But the road begins wherever you are. He is waiting for you, and the first step is not the altar. The first step is just turning toward Him. Some of you already know Jesus. Some of you are still searching. Some of you have walked away and are circling back. You are not late. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him. Wherever you are starting from, He is closer to you than you are to yourself. If you have never prayed before, pray now — in your own words, even one sentence. “Father, I want to know You. I am open. I am listening. Show me.” He hears it. He answers it.

If you have wandered into another faith or away from any faith at all, do not be afraid. Truth is not the enemy of truth. Bring your honest questions. He has been working in you longer than you know.

And when your heart is ready, go to Him in the way He gave Himself to us. Find a Catholic parish. Tell the priest where you are, and let him guide you to your next step. For some, that step is Baptism. For some, it is being received into the fullness of the Church. For some, it is coming home through Reconciliation after years away. Whatever your step is, it is part of the road to the altar where the Bread of Heaven is waiting for you. The Eucharist is not the first step for everyone. But it is the destination of every soul that says yes to the journey. Everything I have written in this journal is meant to walk you toward that altar.

You were meant to share, by grace, in the divinity of the Holy Trinity. You were meant to shine in this world and bring light to its darkest places. Your light was not made to be hidden. You were meant to bring:

That is what you were made to bring into the world. You were born for this. This is your moment. You are not reading this by coincidence. You are not on this beautiful blue planet by accident. Your existence, your essence, your body — even its eventual mortality — were known from the very beginning. Creation exists first for the glory of its Maker (CCC 293) — and within that glory, the Father has placed you, made in His image, the summit of His visible work. He created you and granted you the privilege of being human: to breathe, to see, to sense, to taste, to laugh, to cry, to love — to experience everything that being alive in His world makes possible. And that — every breath of it — is His love made visible.

That is nothing short of miraculous if you ask me!

And yet, even knowing who you are, who you are called to become, and what it means to live in the state of grace with His Spirit dwelling in you — please, also know this: God loves you, and He is fully aware that we are inclined toward sin because of our fallen nature and the concupiscence that remains in every human heart. He knows we can fall. He gave us free will, not because He wanted servants, but because He wanted children who would choose Him out of their own desire to do what is good. That is why He placed a conscience in every soul — the quiet voice within that knows good from evil, the Father’s whisper helping us find our way back to Him.

But we do not always listen. Sometimes we stray. Eventually we fall. And when you fall, He is not waiting to punish you. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, He is running down the road to embrace you, and He desires to save you! There is no darkness that He cannot reach into.

Just as children sometimes stray and find themselves lost in the dark, men too are afraid in the dark — but it is when man becomes engulfed by darkness or believes that he is too far gone, that he himself becomes darkness and begins to believe that is where he belongs. Yet just like a lost child alone in the dark longs to be rescued, every soul in the dark longs for salvation.

If you are in the dark today, you are not too far gone. Come home. The Father is not the God of confusion. He is not silent toward His children. The world is loud, and the enemy of your soul wants you to believe that you are alone, that no one is listening, that prayer doesn’t work, that you are too far gone, that you don’t have what it takes.

None of that is true. He has not given you a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of self-discipline.

You have everything you need, because the Spirit of God moves within you, and because you have a Father in heaven who is waiting for you to come home to Him every morning, all day long, and at the close of every day.

This journal is the instrument He has placed in your hand for that homecoming. It is for every soul: the young who are searching, the seasoned who are returning, the wounded who are healing. We are all looking for the same thing — to know the Father, and to know ourselves in Him.

Each page will guide you to:

• Wake with gratitude
• Care for the body that is the temple where God resides
• Set intentions for the day in conversation with Him
• Close the day in honesty, examination, and surrender
• Write to Him — because the most ancient, most healing form of dialogue with the Father is the written word from a willing heart

You will not perfect this in a week. You may not perfect it in a year. That is not the point. The point is that you have decided to begin. And the Father, who has been waiting for you, will meet you on every page.

The Father is offering you the chance to transcend each and every single day, so don’t wait to transcend tomorrow when you can transcend today!

I am praying for you. I do not know what you are walking through, but the Father does, and He has sent me to walk beside you on these pages.

Together, we will transcend today, and every day after.

I love you. I am honored to walk beside you.

“As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” — 1 Peter 1:14–16

Transcend Today. ✝️
— Jefferson Romero