Our women’s session today began with a personal testimony from Julia from Belleville in the Diocese of Belleville.

During high school, Julia made social media accounts in hopes that she would be able to reach more friends. But that’s not how things worked out. People began to tear her down and made her feel worthless.

At her first Steubenville Conference, she still found herself comparing herself to everyone in the room. During Adoration, as the monstrance came by her, she saw her reflection in the glass. From this image, she was reminded that God made her beautifully in His image and likeness.

She encouraged the women to turn to the Lord the next time they are struggling with their worth.

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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Today’s Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Peter Wells and we are so blessed to have him with us this year. He serves as the Apostolic Nuncio to Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland.

We all desire to feel loved, important, cared about. It is in our nature. We want to know we have people who see us for who we are. We desire to know our worth, but at what cost? In his homily this morning, Fr. Dave Pivonka challenged us to examine our true worth.

What is our worth?

Fr. Pivonka started his homily by defining worth as what one person is willing to pay for something, and what one person is willing to sell something for. As he addressed the youth he stated, “As a high school student your world is all about defining worth: you are a starter on the football team, you got an A on a test, you are in theater. You say that is what gives us value and worth, but brothers and sisters those are not the things that define us…you are worth more.”

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Andrew and Angela have been volunteering at SteubySTL for ten years. This summer, at both conferences, Andrew will be helping with prayer ministry and Angela will be in the nurse’s station; she secretly hopes she won’t need to see you there, but if you need any help, they’ll treat you right!

When Angela is not helping with this conference, she loves working (she claims to have the coolest job ever), running, yoga, and spending time with her husband and son. She’s a CRNA in real life, ran a half marathon less than a year after giving birth, actually enjoys the extreme level of nerd her husband is on, and secretly wishes she lived in Lothlorien.

Andrew enjoys his work for a tech startup, spending time with his wife and son, and finding some time at the end of the day for some gaming. He’s a huge nerd, mostly focused on technology and Star Wars, and he watches more content on Twitch and YouTube in a normal day than any human probably should.

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Jimmy Mitchell kicked off Steubenville 2018 with the first talk, The Father’s Love Revealed. He encouraged everyone to embrace what it means to be a child of God through vulnerability and our weaknesses.

Mitchell discussed the feeling of being small and broken. He experienced these feelings visiting the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. After a day of adventuring, he was covered in mud and scratches and felt small approaching this holy grotto. But, once he began to enter the healing water at Lourdes, those feelings of being small, dirty, and broken were “overshadowed by the vulnerability.” In the grotto in prayer he said he was, “feeling little, feeling vulnerable in many ways feeling all of my brokenness but specifically feeling it in light of God’s merciful infinite love.” We are imperfect, small, and vulnerable, but God continues to love us unconditionally and recklessly.

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