August 09, 2026

Begin This Day Perfectly

Every day we ought to renew our resolutions, and stir up ourselves to fervour, as if it were the first day of our conversion, and say: Help me, O Lord God, in my good resolution, and in Thy holy service, and grant that I may now, this day, begin perfectly; for what I have hitherto done is nothing.

Thomas à Kempis was a monk at Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle, writing for novices in a religious community during a time when the wider Church was fractured and many found devotion easy to begin but hard to sustain. He watched brothers grow lax after early enthusiasm, their first fervor cooling into routine. This line was his corrective: resolve is not a thing settled once, but something remade at the start of every single day. It speaks to beginning again because it refuses the idea that yesterday's effort, good or bad, determines what today can be.