"Here Comes Good-bye"

Last night was a bitter-sweet night because it happened to be the last "holy hour" for the year. It was definitely one to remember though. The leader did a spin-off of "The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous featuring Robin Lynch," called "The Lifestyles of the Saints and Blesseds featuring Robin Lynch." Basically my friend played Robin, and had him recently converted to the Catholic Church where he then made a time machine to go back into time to learn about how the saints lived. So as she was role playing as Robin Lynch, she had a Brother play Blessed Raymond of Capua, who was St. Catherine of Sienna's spiritual director. (The picture to the right is one of St. Catherine dictating letters to Blessed Raymond.) It was so much fun watching these two interact with each other, and it was a fun way to learn about both Blessed Raymond and St. Catherine. I did not know much about her before this, but she was a fire cracker. One of the most important things she did was bring the Pope back to Rome where he belonged. She also had the "invisible stigmata" which is something I have never heard of before. I larned some other things about here, but I don't have the time right now to type it all out here because of work.

It's always hard to say good-bye to friends who you know you won't see for a good while, but that's life. It's full of good-byes... I'm just not a fan of them. Luckily though, I will be able to see most of these people atleast one last time before they all leave to go home or move on to the next chapter in their lives on Monday night, so it wasn't really good-bye just yet, hence the title "Here Comes Good-bye."

I know that when Wed. rolls around next week I won't know what to do with my new found free time. I'm sure I will figure something out though.

God Really is In Control!!!

In the past few years one of my favorite things to help out with at my parish is the youth group. As I have said in a previous post that a lot of the people that have been really important to this ministry are leaving this year for bigger and better things, and for awhile the few of us left did not know what we were going to do.... After tonight, I have even more confidence that the youth group will do well without those people, but we will still miss them greatly. They are irreplaceable. Tonight happened to be the ministry fair for the R.C.I.A. class. Basically the fair is made up of a person from each ministry in the church who come to talk about their ministry and then afterwords the people from the class had a chance to go around and ask even more questions about the ministry they might be interested in. It's also a chance for the different ministries to gain new recruits to help out.

Right before the ministry fair began my friend and I were talking about how we would miss one person in particular because of how much he has done this past year with the youth group. Both her and I were in the middle of talking about how we liked that a male lead our youth group retreat this past year. It was nice to have that, and we both agreed that we should try to find another one of our guy friends to help lead next year's retreat with us. Well, God works in wonderful ways, because when it came time for the people to come around and find out more about the ministries, one college guy came up to us and started talking about the youth group. He mentioned how he was active in the youth group in his old church, and had great experience in running retreats and Bible studies. Both my friend and I looked at each other and it was like we both knew this guy was going to be very important to the youth group and had him give us his contact information. Along with this young man we had four other people, all college students, interested in helping out with the youth group as well. I am excited to get to know all these knew people over the next year, and am very grateful that God answered my prayers about how we were going to deal with the youth group without the people that were leaving. Kinda cool don't you think?

Memorable Quotes from Bishop Fulton Sheen

My mom passed on a book to me a few months ago called "The Quotable Fulton Sheen." I finally opened it up today and have already found some really good quotes in it. Here are a few that I picked out already.

"Beauty without virtue is like a fair flower that has an offensive odor. But true beauty bathes in that light without which nothing is beautiful. beauty is a gift of God, like the rain. He allows the rain to fall upon the just and the wicked, and He gives beauty not only to the good, but even to the wicked. Wicked beauty strikes the eye, but the inner beauty of grace wins the soul."

"It has always struck me as strange that we should pardon a wife, on the grounds of 'temporary insanity,' for limiting her married life by shooting her husband, and at the same time glorify the same wife as a 'progressive free-born woman' because she limits her family by stifling an unborn life. All of which goes to prove that we do not need new laws but expansion of the definitions of old ones, and particularly of the law of murder."

"I wonder if it is not true that as the world loses veneration for Christ's mother, it loses also it's adoration of Christ."

"Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more."

"The very fact that the world is a thousand times more scandalized at a bad Catholic in public life than a bad anything else, is only a proof that the world expected much more of him."

"A man's real good is that which he works most earnestly to preserve, and which saddens him most when he loses it."

I can't wait to look even more through the book to find more quotes. Very interesting ones, indeed.

Where Did My Week-End Go???

As I said in my last post we have been blessed with gorgeous weather this week-end! :) Today after mass we had the Confirmation reception for all the Confirmation II students that will be receiving the Sacrament next week at the Lucas Oil Stadium up in Indy. This year, all the confirmation students in the Archdiocese will be receiving Confirmation together in the stadium for our175th Anniversary Mass. There will be nearly 3,000 students that will receive the Holy Spirit in this Sacrament, along with nupital blessing given to all married couples that will be there. There will also be religious orders celebrating jubilee anniversaries as well, so the stadium will be pretty packed and will be having more exciting things than a football game going on in it. I think it will either be really great or very chaotic with all those people figuring out what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it. I am very excited for it.:)

Anyway after the reception I hung out with some friends waiting for noon mass to be over so we could sell coffee for a mission trip some of the youth group members will be going on. Now, I was not planning to stay all that time between masses, but it was pretty relaxing and I am glad that I did not leave one of my friends there to ammuse herself alone. While hanging around while mass was going on I was sad to see just how many people showed up so late to mass. Some were still coming in after mass had been going on for half an hour. I just can't seem to comprehend how people cannot seem to get the church for even one hour to be with God, and I think it's because I do enjoy going to daily mass that one hour does not seem like that much time at all. Really it isn't. I do not like to judge people, I try really hard not too, but when I watched those people walk in thirty minutes left like it was the most normal thing I had a really hard time not judging them.

After I left church and came home, my sister and her boyfriend and I decided it was to gorgeous to stay inside, and so we decided to go hiking. We went to McCormack's Creek where we hiked to the waterfalls. It was a lot of fun, and we stayed at the falls for quite awhile. We all got wet and cooled off from the heat. I ended up getting a little sunburned on my arms from all the sun this week-end. That's what I get for not wearing sunscreen.... that's one thing I do not like about my skin.... I burn so easily. I have a feeling I will probably end up with skin cancer one of these days because I don't think about putting on sunscreen in the Spring. Oh well, if that's how I die then so be it.... I didn't even mean to get into the topic of skin cancer, but that is how my mind wanders from topic from time to time.

Now it's back to the work routine, and with the pretty weather, I am sure my week will go by much faster than in the past few weeks, let's hope.

Partying is So Overrated Anyway.....

This past week-end we have been blessed with gorgeous weather! It was sunny and warm and simply gorgeous. I could not have asked for better weather for this week-end in particular. It was"Little 500" week-end here in good old Bloomington, In. There is even a movie made all about this event called "Breaking Away," which happens to be a favorite of mine. Really though, this week-end always seems to be the most dangerous week-end in my town because of all the drinking and partying that goes on with the college students. Instead of participating in the drinking rituals of the many students my age I decided on a more safer and sober approach to the week-end....

We had our C.C.D. classes yesterday. Every year I tend to switch back and forth between helping my mom with her 6th grade class and my dad's R.C.I.C. class. Yesterday, however, I decided to hang out in my friend's 3rd grade class since I will be helping teach it over the Summer. The class was spent on learning The Apostle's Creed and learning all about Pentecost. You see, instead of meeting every week for the kids, we meet four times a year on a Saturday for about three hours, and then for one week in the Summer from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon. That week is a huge commitment to make, and sadly I could not take off any time last year to help out. This year I will be teaching the third graders in the mornings and then my friend will take over for the afternoons so I can go back to work. I have never worked with third graders before, but I think it will be a great time. The kids all seem like good kids and knowing that will make teaching them more fun.

After classes were over I went with my friend to go find Confirmation presents to buy for the six kids in our small group. We went to a place called "The Mother of the Redeemer Farm" bookstore (I could talk about why it's called that, but that is for another blog all together.). It is always fun to go into that little shop because there are just so many things to look at and find. There is always something different every time you walk in there. After spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out what in the world we would get them, we finally decided on a visor clip which says that if the owner of the car is in a dangerous accident to call a priest. They are really cool looking clips. Some of them had crucifixes on them, others had Mary on them, and one had the Sacred Heart of Jesus on it. We also got them a little prayer book filled with different useful prayers (I know, shocking right?) like the prayers for Before and After Communion along with others. The last two things we decided on were little ring rosaries and a little "How to Pray the Rosary" booklet. All in all I think we did well. It's always fun buying gifts for other people and wondering about how they will react to them.

Later in the late afternoon and early evening I went to baby-sit for one of the daycare families. The parents had a wedding reception they wanted to go to without having to worry about dealing with the kids, and they were not really comfortable leaving them home alone for that long just yet. It's always fun watching the kids one on one and seeing how different they are in their own home environments. We had a blast trying to catch butterflies and playing hide-and-seek for a good hour and half. There is no better way to end a hide-and-seek game than going out and getting ice cream from the local ice cream shop.

It was a very eventful day yesterday to say the least, and I definitely did not need to drink a thing to enjoy it.

2009 Trike-A Thon

Every year at the daycare I work at we have our annual trike-a-thon to help raise money for St. Jude Childrens Hospital. Last year we rose over $500. dollars for the hospital. This year we past that amoun and then some with a final total of $745.00. YAY!!!! Basically the families take home forms and ask their friends and family members to make donations for the hospital, and then they bring the money to us on the day of the event. We were very blessed to have such gorgeous weather this morning for the kids to ride their bikes and trikes. They rode for about an hour and a half, and were very tired afterwards to say the least. It's always a blast to do this event because we really know we are helping families at the hospital who do not have enough money to cover their child's health expenses. As a special treat this year, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, came to start off the trike-a-thon for the kids. They were all excited about seeing Clifford, but there were a few who were not so sure about him. One child, Grady, went up to Clifford and asked him if he was real. It was kind of funny.
The one thing about this event that we have annually is that it helps the children learn how even though they are "little" they are still capable of making a difference in another person's life, and that is a lesson that is hopefully going to be carried over through the years as they grow. :)

Kid's Say the Darndest Things 2

Here are some more funny things I have heard while working at the daycare. These guys are really so funny sometimes!!!!



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Me: Hey Miko. Can you say "hello" in Polish for me?

Miko: (At the top of his lungs) Hello in Polish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!

Ok not quite what I was looking for, but at the same time it makes sense, and it was really funny.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Axel's mom: I have to take Lilly to the doctor today, Axel.
Axel: Why does baby Lilly have to go to the doctor?
Axel's Mom: Because Lilly has to get her shots.
Axel: Lilly has to get shots?!?!? How many shots?
Axel's Mom: Just a few shots, Honey.
Axel: Lilly getting shots makes me very sad, Mommy. (defiantly) I don't want Lilly to go to the doctor! I want her to go to school with me!!!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One day at work when we went outside we were mildly surprised to find that for some reason some chipmunks decided to use our playground as their birthing grounds. Well as we were talking together trying to figure out what to do with these little critters I noticed a crowd of children around one of the many chipmunk holes. When I went over to see what they were talking about I heard the following conversation....

Josie: So what are we going to do with these little critters anyway?
Chelsie: Let's kill 'em!
Kevin: NO!!!!!!!!!!! They are God's creatures! We can't kill them!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One day, one of the kindergarten teachers donated a kitchen set to the daycare filled with all sorts of dishes and play food. One of the new toy food things, a scoop of strawberry ice cream, became the center of discussion. As you read this, keep in mind the color of the ice cream was pink....

Greta: Oh yummy everybody. This is just so tasty and delicious!
Axel: Oh no, Greta!!!! Don't eat the flamingo poop!!!!!!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miss Emily: Axel, did Alexander take the stick away from you?
Axel: No.
Miss Emily: Then what did Alexander do to make you kick him???
Axel: He pointed the stick at me and said he was changing me into a hot dog, and, and , and I don't want to be a hot dog!!!!