Friday Focus 🔎 desert | dawn | harmony

Welcome to Friday Focus!

Welcome to Friday Focus, my weekly letter from PAX Renewal Center. I’m glad you’re here, whether you’ve been reading for years or you just found your way to this little corner of the inbox.

This week I’m a few pages into a new book about the deserts of southern Utah, sitting with a passage from Galatians about what it really means to boast in the cross, and letting a line from John Muir remind me how even the roughest terrain can hold a kind of harmony. You’ll also find this month’s conversation prompts for couples, a fresh word on where fall can lead a marriage if you let it, and a look at what’s happening over our heads this week as summer gives way to autumn.

As always, I hope something here gives you a little more peace to carry into the weekend.

Dan Jurek contributed to this week’s newsletter

A Book I’m Beginning to Read

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey. My daughter Elizabeth suggested it. Several of her friends who live and work in the wilderness of southern Utah speak highly of it. The book recounts Abbey’s season as a park ranger at what was then called Arches National Monument, and I’m looking forward to losing myself in it and imagining that wide-open corner of the desert Southwest.

A Free Resource for Couples

September Conversation Prompts

At the start of each month, I share a new set of conversation prompts for couples: a simple springboard for weekly connection. Pick one of the two topics, sit down together, have a real conversation, and close it out with a short prayer or reflection. My hope is that this becomes a steady little resource, something that helps you go deeper in how you communicate and ultimately, in how you love one another.

A Passage From Sacred Scripture

“May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ! Through it, the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. It means nothing whether one is circumcised or not. All that matters is that one is created anew.”

~ Galatians 6:14-15

A question for reflection: Where this week are you tempted to boast in your own effort, image, or achievements, rather than resting in what’s already been done for you? What would it look like to set that down and simply receive the truth that you’re being made new?

In This Year of St. Francis

 “At dawn, when the sun rises, everyone should praise God who has created brother Sun for our service, for through him our eyes light up the day. In the evening, when night descends, everyone should praise God through brother Fire, for through him our eyes light up the night. We are all, as it were, blind, and it is through these two brothers that the Lord gives light to our eyes. We should praise the Lord then in a special way for these creatures and for the others too, who serve us day by day.”

~ Mirror of Perfection, 119

A Quote Worth Reflecting On

“Nothing is more wonderful than to find smooth harmony in this lofty cragged region where at first sight all seems so rough. From any of the high standpoints, a thousand peaks, pinnacles, spires are seen thrust into the sky and so sheer and bare as to be inaccessible to wild sheep, accessible only to the eagle. Any one by itself harsh, rugged, crumbling, yet in connection with others seems like a line of writing along the sky; it melts into melody, one leading into another, keeping rhythm in time.”

~ John Muir, Bloody Canyon

An Invitation For Couples

A 2-Day Marriage Intensive with Dan 

The Covenant Repair Intensive™

Every marriage has a current running beneath it: the day-to-day rhythm of school pickups, work deadlines, and dishes in the sink. Most weeks, that current is all a couple has time to manage. Then September arrives, the schedule settles, and for the first time since spring there’s a little slack in the line.

That’s often when couples notice what the busyness had been covering. An old disagreement neither of you quite closed the loop on. A hurt that got set aside so the summer could stay easy. The slow drift that happens when two people run a household well but tend the marriage itself a little less. Fall doesn’t create any of that. It simply clears enough space for you to see it.

The Covenant Repair Intensive™ at PAX Renewal Center was built for exactly that space. Two full days together, without interruption, to do the kind of deep work a fifty-minute session was never designed to hold. We’re not there to determine who was right. We’re there to help you understand what happened between you and find your way back to each other, with real tools and language you can use once you’re home. Couples almost always leave carrying something they hadn’t felt in a while: real hope, and the sense that the road ahead is one you can walk together.

If you’ve been wondering whether this fall is the season to invest in your marriage, I’d love to talk it through with you. I offer a free 20-minute consultation, just the two of us, no pressure, so you can ask your questions honestly and see if it’s a good fit.

Schedule your free 20-minute consultation

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Night sky for September 18-25, 2026:

This week the sky itself seems to mark the turning of the season, the moon filling out toward fullness just as the calendar tips us into autumn.

Key Highlights:

September 18: First Quarter Moon rises in the evening sky, half-lit and growing toward next week’s Harvest Moon.
September 19: Venus reaches its brightest point of the year, a brilliant light low in the western sky just after sunset.
September 22: The Fall Equinox arrives at 7:05 p.m. (CDT), the first evening of autumn and a rare balance of day and night.
September 25: Mars slips in among the twin stars of Gemini, Castor and Pollux, visible in the early morning sky alongside Jupiter.

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of Earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things. All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. For without we cannot survive.”

~ Hildegard of Bingen

Clinician Spotlight

Dan Jurek

For more than four decades, Dan Jurek has sat with couples and individuals in seasons that felt to them as rugged and unyielding as any mountain range: jagged, worn down, hard to find a path through. What he has learned, again and again, is something like what John Muir once wrote of the roughest peaks he climbed: that what looks harsh and broken from a distance can, in time and in relationship, “melt into melody, one leading into another, keeping rhythm in time.” Marriages are often like that. Two people, each carrying their own rugged terrain, can still find their way into harmony, not because the hard edges disappear, but because they learn, with patience, to read each other’s landscape.

“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home any who have lost their way.”
~ St. Francis of Assisi

These words are more than inspiration; they are the mission that shapes everything Dan does. Rooted in Catholic faith and grounded in decades of clinical practice, he brings warmth, wisdom, and professional depth to every encounter, meeting each person exactly where they are.

Daniel Jurek, M.Min., M.A., LPC-S, LMFT, AAMFT Clinical Fellow, and Certified Spiritual Director through the Archdiocese of New Orleans Spirituality Center, is trained in the Gottman Method, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Imago Relationship Therapy, and Attachment Theory. He serves couples, individuals, and fellow therapists through marriage intensives, retreats, clinical supervision, and continuing education.

Let’s focus on the good together.

Contact us today to make an appointment with Dan! 

Blessings,

Dan and the Clinical Team at PAX Renewal Center