Worth Their Time: Accompanying Busy Men Toward Real Change

Every busy man who agrees to spiritual direction brings one unspoken question with him: is this worth my time? He gives his hours to work that pays and a family that needs him, and he will not keep an appointment that feels like a soft hour of talking about his feelings. This short course takes a single interview with Fr. John Hopkins, LC, a spiritual director with decades of experience accompanying men, and turns his approach into a usable skill for the helping professional.

Fr. Hopkins does not open with sin or a prayer schedule. He opens with health, asking a man how he is doing against the ideal he was made for as a husband, a father, and a friend of Christ, then helps him picture an ideal that is real and demanding enough to be worth pursuing. From there the work gets concrete: challenge the man discovers through hard questions rather than receives as a lecture, homework small enough to actually be done, a steady refusal to let the hour become a place to complain, and accountability offered the way the best boss a man ever had once offered it. Underneath the method is a conviction the course takes seriously: the real challenging is the Holy Spirit's work, and the director's confidence has to rest there.

Learners watch the brief interview, then work through a formation lesson grounded in Divine Mercy University's Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person and in the classic tradition of spiritual direction, closing with a reflection activity. Interviewed by Dr. Stephen Grundman of DMU.