For about three years, my phone was the last thing I saw every night.

I'd get in bed around eleven, tell myself I'd check one thing, and look up at two in the morning.

News.

Politics.

Arguments in comment sections between strangers I'd never meet.

I'm a project manager, so my brain is wired to look for problems.

At night, it found all of them.

I'd finally put the phone down with my heart racing and lie there in the dark, running through every way the world, my job, and my life could fall apart.

I was raised Catholic.

But by then, my faith had shrunk down to Christmas Mass and a vague sense that God was probably out there.

It certainly wasn't helping me sleep.

My Grandmother's Advice

My grandmother, Nonna, is ninety-one years old and sharper than I am.

One Sunday dinner, she asked why I looked so tired.

I told her I wasn't sleeping.

I told her I stayed up reading the news.

She put down her fork and gave me a look I remembered from when I was eight.

Then she said that whatever you fill your mind with before sleep is what your soul chews on all night.

She told me to stop reading the news at night.

And to start listening to the saints instead.

I laughed and told her that sounded a little old-fashioned.

She said that so was sleeping, and I seemed to have forgotten how to do that too.

The First Story

That night, mostly to humor her, I left my phone in the kitchen.

I put on an old radio by the bed and found an audio recording of the life of a saint.

The first one I heard was about Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

He was a Polish Franciscan priest who was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz.

In 1941, after a prisoner escaped, the guards chose ten men to starve to death in a bunker as punishment.

One of the men cried out for his wife and children.

Father Kolbe stepped out of line and offered to take his place.

The guards agreed.

In that dark bunker, he led the dying men in prayer and hymns until the end.

The man whose life he saved survived the war and lived for decades afterward.

I lay there in the dark after it finished.

My heart wasn't racing.

It was full.

And for the first time in months, I fell asleep before midnight.

Why It Worked

I kept going.

Every night, a new story instead of the news.

At first I thought it worked just because I'd put the phone away.

That was part of it.

But it was more than that.

The news showed me everything wrong with the world and left me feeling helpless.

The saints showed me people who faced things far worse than anything I was worried about.

Prison.

Plague.

War.

And they faced them with peace.

Not because their lives were easy, but because they trusted Someone bigger than their problems.

Their stories shrank my worries back down to their actual size.

The Stories That Stayed With Me

Some nights I'd hear a story so powerful I'd lie awake thinking about it, but in a good way.

I heard about Saint Josephine Bakhita.

She was kidnapped as a little girl in Sudan and sold into slavery, beaten so badly she forgot her own name.

Years later, she found freedom, became a Catholic nun in Italy, and spent her life in quiet service.

She said that if she ever met the men who kidnapped her, she would kneel and kiss their hands, because without them she might never have come to know God.

I had spent the evening before angry at a coworker over an email.

I felt very small after that one.

I heard about Father Damien, a Belgian priest who went to live among people with leprosy on the island of Molokai in Hawaii, who had been sent there to be forgotten.

He dressed their wounds, built their homes, and buried their dead.

Eventually he caught the disease himself.

He didn't leave.

I heard about Juan Diego, a humble man in Mexico in 1531, and the Lady who appeared to him on a hillside and left her image on his cloak.

Story after story, night after night.

Ordinary people.

Extraordinary trust.

From Stories to Faith

Something I didn't expect happened along the way.

The stories started making me curious about the faith that made those people who they were.

Kolbe celebrated Mass.

Damien heard confessions.

Bakhita spent hours in front of the Eucharist.

I realized I had the same faith available to me, and I had been ignoring it.

So I started going back to Sunday Mass.

Then I went to confession for the first time since college.

Nonna cried when I told her.

Then she said she told me so.

What Peace Feels Like

I want to be careful here.

I'm not saying stories cured everything.

I still have stressful weeks.

I still have nights where my mind won't quit.

But the peace I have now is different from anything I had before.

It's not the absence of problems.

It's knowing I'm not carrying them alone.

It's knowing I belong to the same family as Maximilian Kolbe and Josephine Bakhita.

The Church calls that the communion of saints.

I call it the best company I've ever kept.

Try It Tonight

My phone charges in the kitchen now.

The radio by my bed plays a saint's story most nights.

Some nights I barely make it five minutes before I'm asleep.

Nonna says that's the saints tucking me in.

If you're lying awake tonight with a racing heart and a glowing screen, try what she told me.

Put the phone in another room.

Pick one saint.

Let their story be the last thing you hear.

Your soul will have something good to chew on all night.

Marcus is a composite character, and this story is illustrative, inspired by the real experiences of many people who have found peace through the stories of the saints.

Your turn: Which saint's story has brought you the most peace? Share it in the comments below.