The wonderful Daughters of St. Paul – along with their staff members and volunteers from Pauline Books and Media in St. Louis, Missouri – are running our bookstore this weekend; check out some of the awesome people and amazing stuff that you can find in the bookstore. And if you are viewing this from home, you can always order any of this great stuff (and lots more) online for those you love!
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and that may be true, but I can tell you for sure that it takes a village to put on a Steubenville youth conference.
Every weekend, 140-ish staff members and volunteers begin their service to God’s kids at SteubySTL by converging on O’Reilly Catholic Student Center at 10 am on Friday morning, as we did this morning. We gather to pray before we get to work.
Our church teaches that the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, which means that it is the most powerful thing we can experience (because we receive Jesus) and it is also the point from which all of our inspiration and energy flows. So, we began our conference with Mass.
Jason began his talk with brutal honestly, describing how in high school he had one foot in the world and one foot in the ‘youth group world’. Two of his reasons for this, which might resonate with some of us, were that:
He had met some religious people that were weird, and he didn’t want to be weird.
He didn’t want to lose his personality.
He later found out, by the way, that those weird religious folks were probably weird before they became holy. Fair enough. And he has also discovered since that it’s sin that actually dulls our personality, while God helps us to be fully ourselves. Retweet.
