So!

We just finished our first official week of mission. It’s crazy to think we’ve only been here just over a week. It feels like so much has happened since we got here last Friday. We did 60-second surveys in our parish, St. Jude, today. The surveys ask the parishioners a few questions about faith, such as “Do you believe Jesus is God?” and have the opportunity for them to leave their contact information so we can call them and invite them to our upcoming events – the first of which being Catholic Christian Outreach’s Discovery faith study, which we will be starting up this Thursday. We got over 60 contacts from our parish in total! We hope a lot of them will come out on Thursday!

We’re pretty excited for Discovery starting this Thursday...mostly because it’s an amazing study! It presents the four basic gospel points in a clear and simple way: firstly that we were created for a relationship with God and that this relationship is broken by our sin, creating an infinite divide between us and Him; in order to remedy this, God sent His son, Jesus, to die for us, bridging this infinite gap as an infinite being, yet a human; lastly, we are all invited to respond to this remedy, by giving the Lord our yes in our own life, freeing us from the burdens of sin and granting for us eternal life. Even though it’s so simple, it’s completely mind blowing. I think especially as Catholics, we tend to think of God as distant – not as a person who knows and loves us. It definitely changed my life when I took it. I never really knew that God loved me personally until then. And even though I still didn’t feel like He did for a long time after taking Discovery, I chose to believe it then, and eventually, that feeling did come, but more importantly, I believe it more strongly now than ever before.

So, we have really high hopes for this faith study. The three of us have seen the incredible things it can do in people’s lives, and God will do really great things with it here at St. Jude J

-Mary-Claire Hoffman