January 2026 Lecturer's Report
18" To Get Into Heaven
By Bob Walz, Lecturer for the Council.
Hero image: Pompeo Batoni, Sacred Heart of Jesus, via Wikimedia Commons.
Worthy Grand Knight and Brother Knights
You can miss getting into heaven by 18”. Hold on. Getting into heaven is not a football game where we measure progress with yard markers. And you are correct. But the distance between your head and your heart is approximately 18”. And that distance can be the longest distance you ever have to travel.
18"
The distance from head to heart.
FEAR
False evidence appearing real.
Action
Compassion begins when we get involved.
Head and Heart
Everything starts out in your head. You have thoughts and ideas. You make decisions on what you will do with those thoughts and ideas. You have a thought or an idea. You consider the consequences of acting on that thought or idea. And acting on that thought or idea, when compared to the consequences, becomes either easy or difficult depending on how the consequences are perceived.
A difficult consequence and the thought or idea remains in your head. A simple consequence and the thought or idea travels those 18” to your heart. And the heart is where action can originate, action that leads to compassion and love.
What Stops Us
What stops thoughts or ideas from moving those 18”? Fear. Fear that something bad will occur if action is taken. And what is fear. The usual definition for fear is the perception of what is in our head.
Ffalse
Eevidence
Aappearing
Rreal.
We see something or someone and we generate an immediate conclusion about what we just saw. An instantaneous reaction that tells us to avoid that which we just saw. A person that does not look like us and our immediate reaction is to cross the street to avoid any contact. An accident that looks too dangerous for us to become involved and we move on.
Those reactions are all based on fear. We need to eliminate fear and get involved. We may never encounter one of the examples written above. But we do experience activities that keep us from allowing our thoughts and ideas from travelling those 18”.
A Different Kind of Fear
We see individuals reacting to tragic events and we call them heroes. Those individuals have taken the word fear and have redefined it.
Ffresh
Eevidence
Aallowing
Rreaction
Volunteer
The easiest way to cross those 18” is to volunteer. To volunteer to do something that we consider too fearful to ever join. I know we have ample opportunities to volunteer as Knights of Columbus. And our actions show that we do volunteer more than the vast majority of most people. Now our job as Knights becomes more difficult. We need to get other individuals that we know to volunteer. To step up and overcome their fears. And when we do that, everyone benefits because more people cross those 18” and successfully get into heaven.
