Retreat Times

Hey everyone :)

              So I have the honour of writing this week's blog. It's luck of the draw actually, but we'll call it honour. Sooo much has happened this week. Guess I should begin with the retreat..
We had our 4 day School of Evangelization Retreat with Michael Dopp this weekend. It was way more awesome than I even remembered from last time I did it. Michael Dopp is a truly gifted speaker and his witty cracks and hilarious analogies leave you looking at your watch wondering where the hours went - seriously.              
Some highlights for me.. He spoke about how important it is that WE have a relationship with God before we try to go our evangelizing other people. We can't give what we don't have and we need to understand what it is that we're calling other people to take a part of in at least some way before inviting them. He also talked about how us Catholics need to stop catechizing people who aren't evangelized, like how we tend to focus on teaching people about the sacraments or the gifts of the Holy Spirit in things like Confirmation and RCIA programs, which are good things, but aren't of much use to someone who isn't really interested in the faith because they don't know God - so we need to focus on that first. And how all of our ministries exist in order to evangelize - so even though its easy to get caught up in what colour to paint the Church or what time to have the rosary, EVERY SINGLE MINISTRY's focus should be to PROCLAIM CHRIST. That is why they exist. The CWL, the Knights of Columbus, the Baptismal Prep and Youth Committees, the choir...everyone. That was pretty cool to remember, because I know its easy to get sidetracked with that stuff. Because as Michael put it, yes those other things need to get done too. But we can't lose our focus of why we're doing all of this. Michael also taught our group how to write their own testimony, how to share the basic gospel message clearly, essentially that we were created by God purely out of love, and so that we would have a relationship with Him, that relationship is broken (once by  Adam and Eve, and continually harmed by us) by our sin, so God sent His only son, Jesus, to die to repair this brokenness by taking on the punishment for our sin, and we are all called to respond to this act of love, to say yes to this offer at a mended relationship with God and live it out in our lives.
       And our lovely friends from Ottawa (Carole, Zak, Dan, Joe, Jeremy, and my brother Pat) were here to help out with the retreat, which was really cool. They're great people. I laughed a lot this weekend guys so thank you for that :). And thanks for all your help, your beautiful witnesses, and general awesomeness.
   I also had my last day of volunteering at Sacred Heart today, which was actually pretty sad. I guess I grew kind of attached to some of the kids there, and the teachers too. I'm going to miss them. Hoping to see some of the older ones around when our Youth Group starts next week though :)
Anyway, that's our life lately. Our friend Zak who was here for the retreat wrote something to share too so I'll let him do some talking. Au revoir and please pray for us.!
                            -Mary