Revive, week 5!

Hey there!

Trying to recount the past week has made me  quickly realize how jam packed this summer has been so far, which seems to cause the days to run into each other.  “What do you do with your days?” you might ask.  Well let me tell you! 

Revive is such a peculiar mission.  Maybe that’s only my perspective, but I’ve never done anything like this before!  Last summer the path was laid out for us and it was clear what kind of mission work we had to do for Impact, but this summer is quite different.  It’s like blazing a trail in uncharted territory, using skills that you only recently acquired.  Sort of makes me picture an inexperienced hiker trekking through the jungle.   But actually, an inexperienced hiker would, I’m sure, have a much more difficult time then us because we have a secret weapon: the Holy Spirit!  Revive has been peculiar, and different because each day we wake up and pray for guidance.  When you’re experienced it’s sometimes easy to know in which direction to go, but when you’re in this kind of situation, you’re walking blindly by faith, and it’s sort of awesome.  That’s probably the biggest thing I've learned so far this summer, is that if you rely completely on God for guidance and direction, He will not let you down.

So this past week’s highlights…drumroll!!!!  Lesson 4 of Discovery!  It went so well.  I ended up having a “smaller” study, with only 12 women this week, so there was lots of sharing, and I was really feeling a sense of community.  In the lesson we looked at an analogy from St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue.  St Catherine describes that God intended for a perfect relationship between Himself and humanity, this would look like a bridge.

But then, we sinned.  This sin washed away the bridge, and created a huge divide between humanity and God, between you and God.  This divide is so huge, and raging that no matter what you do, YOU CAN NEVER GET TO GOD IN HEAVEN.  Sin causes SEPARATION and DEATH.  I know when I think of being separated from God for ever I feel pretty miserable, but we know this isn’t the end of the story!

God is loving, so loving that when He saw what we had done, He knew He had to fix it.  So He became man to take on our sin.  As a man, Jesus took on your sin, and suffered.  He paid the price.  By dying on the cross, Jesus bridged the gap between us and God, so that we might have eternal life and come to the same joy as the angels (paraphrased from St. Catherine of Siena).  AWESOME, right?!  Without Jesus, we’re damned, but with Him, we are offered eternal joy and fulfilment with God.

(don't mind my pitiful drawings)

A few days after this awesome lesson, we got to celebrate Marc-André’s 20 birthday!  If you don’t know Marc, I’ll fill you in on some insider info.  He is really wonderful, and we’re very blessed to have him on the Revive: Espanola team this summer!  It’s hard to believe he’s only 20, Mary and I joke that he’s actually a 40 year old man stuck in a 20 year old’s body…haha.  So for his birthday we had a pizza party at a friend’s place (thanks Larissa!) before going to a concert!  Brian Houston, a Christian artist, was playing at the Lighthouse in Espanola.  He was really great!  We then went to Marshall’s (the local bar and grill) for some pool and fellowship!  It was all in all a really great day!  Thank God for Marc-André’s existence!

Today we went to mass and Fr. Ed had a really amazing homily!  He spoke about how God can raise us from the dead not only physically, but spiritually as well, AKA Revive!!!  We also had many people register for our retreat, which is June 20-23^rd!  We’re all getting very excited for the retreat and can’t wait to see how many people the Lord will call to come! More info about the ministry at www.missionoftheredeemer.com

I think that’s pretty much it for this week, thanks for reading!

God Bless!

Angele