Part of the spirituality of Click To Pray includes a nightly examination before going to bed. It’s connected to a practice that St. Ignatius Loyola taught his followers to do and helps a person look over the past day and see the presence of God in their life.

However, it isn’t always easy to know what exactly to do. Fr. John McCloskey provides his prac-tical thoughts on the practice in an article entitled, “The Seven Daily Habits of Holy Apostolic People.”

Fr. McCloskey writes, “You sit down, call on the Holy Spirit for light and for several minutes go over your day in God’s presence asking if you behaved as a child of God at home, at work, with your friends. You also look at that one particular area which you have identified with the help of spiritual direction in which you know you need to improve to become a saint…Then you make an act of gratitude for all the good that you have done and an act of contrition for those areas in which you have willfully failed. Then it’s off to your well-deserved rest, which you strive to make holy through your interior dialogue with the Holy Trinity and your mother Mary as you drift off to sleep.”

This daily “examen” is essential to a fruitful spiritual life and it helps prepare you for the next day. It helps us examine how well we have practiced the Way of the Heart and where we need to improve. The Divine Physician will then heal our heart and mend it, making it stronger. Sometimes his medicine isn’t easy to swallow, but he gives us the remedy that speeds us along the path to Eternal Life.