Mary Sophia from LEAD is a parishioner at Mary, Mother of the Church in the Archdiocese of St. Louis where she is a member of the parish youth group. She recently graduated from Mehlville High School, and in the fall she will be a freshman at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Tonight we had the privilege of hearing her share about the first time that she let God into her life. In 8th grade, during a time of deep personal struggle – her mom had been diagnosed with cancer – she started to resent God, and thought that He had forgotten about her.

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Fr. Mike started his talk with a question that is asked by most people, “How do I get to Heaven?” He then said that most people believe that good people go to Heaven when they die, but that is untrue.

Fr. Mike gave us this scenario: If you die and are standing before God and He asks, “Why should I let you into Heaven?” What would you say? “Because I am good.” or “Because I go to Sunday Mass?” None of these would be good answers. He then explained that the correct answer would be: Because Jesus Christ died for me, and because of that I have chosen to live for Him.

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David began by bringing a few teens up on stage. He asked them to quickly define these words: to date, dating, seeing each other, and hooking up – according to today’s culture. The answers were quite despairing. Answers included talking about sex, no strings attached, and conditions.

David then asked the teens about the goal of dating. The arena all answered in unison, “marriage”. So, according to our culture, we are supposed to prepare for this sacred union of marriage by a no strings attached and a hook up culture. Really?

The world is constantly disintegrating the ideas of the way of dating and marriage that God has for us. David explained that, “The world doesn’t understand the sacredness of marriage”. So how do we get back God’s idea?

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Kaitlyn from LEAD is a member of St. Joseph Parish in Conway, Arkansas – which is in the Diocese of Little Rock. She will be a senior this fall at Greenbrier High School.

In her testimony this afternoon, she got very vulnerable with all of us about a difficult family situation she experienced, and how she felt a great deal of personal guilt because of how the situation played out.

What brought Kaitlyn a tremendous amount of freedom was opening up with her small group at a Steubenville youth conference.

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After an opening game of Family Feud between the speaking team and a team of teenagers – which the teens dominated, tbh – we spent the rest of this afternoon’s general session focusing on family relationships.

Katie Prejean McGrady began by sharing an awesome story about the birth of her daughter Rose; it’s impossible to summarize in a way that would do it justice, so you might want to give it a listen by clicking on the link above or watching it on our Live Stream.

The moral of Katie’s story is that family life is messy and chaotic and nothing like you’ll ever see in a Hallmark movie. And yet, the great news is that there can be beauty in the messiness.

“God does not call us into isolation, He calls us into relationship.”

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