…   Here and there Pierre gave a few practical tips to help people to grow in faithfulness:

• First of all, of course, turn to the Lord asking Him for His help. If you do not constantly beg the Lord [saying] that you are a poor type, that you believe in his mercy, and then that He must come to help you – well, it will not work…
• The support of brothers and sisters…

• Put prayer first in your life.

You will say: “But I’m very busy.” Pierre recognized this: The thing that always gives us most trouble is the pace of life. We are snowed under, so we cut down on prayer.

This is a real problem and a true source of spiritual combat. We are really engaged in a ruthless struggle and the devil, by secondary causes, always tries to nibble away at us … he nibbles away at our time. [Time] is what we can offer to the Lord. So it’s important for us to be able to see precisely how we can change things so as to make progress.

The Lord does not ask us to do difficult things which conflict with our timetable and the duties of our state in life. If you really had a fairly reasonable timetable, a fairly rigorous one, and you could really pray profoundly, well your life would change, it would be less mediocre, it would be less careless, and gradually you would make progress.

• The busier one is, the more important it is.

As Saint Francis de Sales said (to one of his friends who had become a bishop): “Adore for one hour.” And the other man said: “But I’m very busy.” “Well, in fact, adore for two hours then.”

That’s right, Pierre commented, but it’s obvious. The busier you are, the more you must say: “before everything else.” You pray to the Lord, you look at your timetable and you say: “But there are no possible times.” So you say: “Begin again!” And you’ll say, “But there’s this, so I can cut that out, and I can get rid of that …” He added mischievously: “And then in the end I have my two hours and I start with my two hours”; but in fact it is one hour, you mustn’t push things at the beginning! But, it’s like this, if you are a very, very busy man!!!