It’s that time of year again! I used my week of being under the weather to touch up the Saint’s Name Generator, so it’s all set for another round of saint choosing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Saint’s Name Generator is a simple program I created to choose a saint’s name at random. I like to use it to find saints to for each year, as well as for other causes and events for which I could use some extra prayers. There are about 300 names in the database, so it’s a great way to discover fascinating holy people whom you might not already be familiar with. (Also, I included the text of the Litany of the Saints in the source code, so every time the program executes, it runs through that prayer.)

This year I got St. Martin of Tours. I’m excited about having him as my patron for a lot of reasons, but this excerpt from the reflection at the bottom of his bio really jumped out at me:

The saints are not creatures of another world: They face the same perplexing decisions that we do. Any decision of conscience always involves some risk. If we choose to go north, we may never know what would have happened had we gone east, west or south. A hypercautious withdrawal from all perplexing situations is not the virtue of prudence; it is, in fact, a bad decision, for “not to decide is to decide.”

Along with his fascinating life story, it gives me a lot to think about as we begin this new year. St. Martin of Tours, pray for us!

You can get your own saint here. Leave a comment and let me know which saint was chosen for you!

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