Esther, from Omaha, Nebraska is a recent high school graduate who shared with all of us tonight how God has changed her prayer life.

When she was a freshman in high school she attended this exact same youth conference, but coming into the conference her prayer life was not very strong; she felt like she didn’t know how to pray, and that her prayers just weren’t that important. She was restless, lacked peace, and felt disconnected from the Lord.

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Rachel loves movies, especially those epic movies in which our heroes lay down their lives so that others might live: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and even Inside Out (from which she showed us an awesome clip).

In John 3:16 we read:

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

This powerful verse proclaims the most heroic story ever told; and though we never tire of seeing other versions of heroic self-sacrifice on the big screen, sometimes the most powerful version of all – that of God’s love revealed on the Cross – can lose its impact. Maybe because we’ve heard the story so many times, it seems like it’s not that big of a deal and we can learn nothing new about it. But God always wants to teach us more, and He is always willing to do something new within each one of us if we let Him.

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Near the beginning of today’s men’s session, Jason Evert mentioned a rather staggering statistic – as of today, not one man born in the United States of America has been canonized a saint in the Catholic Church – and he speculates that perhaps it’s because we have been listening to the wrong voices.

According to Vatican II, “When God is forgotten, the creature itself becomes unintelligible.” We need to remember that it is God who reveals us to ourselves, especially through our bodies.

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Ethan Hunter from Edmond, Oklahoma shared his testimony this morning during the men’s session.

His sophomore year of high school was really rough. The friends he hung around with brought him down, and eventually, pushed him further away from God. He struggled with the thought of taking his life, something sacred that God had given him. But during this moment, he felt God’s presence and it filled him with hope for the future. At the lowest of lows, God did not abandon him.

God changed the way Ethan looked at himself and brought him a true brotherhood to uplift him. He has realized that he is a strong man, and his strength comes from God!

Jonah is from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, where he attends St. Pius High School in Festus and is a parishioner at Church of Our Lady. This morning he shared with us the moment God taught him to listen to Him in prayer.

Jonah had a tendency to thrust his problems on Our Lord during prayer, expecting Him to solve them without patiently waiting for a response. Essentially, he used to pray in a way where he just wanted God to fix his problems.

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