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.
Mitchell said that we should embrace the childlike vulnerability and littleness that “is, in fact, the secret ingredient to happiness this side of Heaven,”but at times we can run away.” He drew an analogy to the prodigal son who took his father’s inheritance to spend. In running away we are settling. As Mitchell said, we are settling for screens instead of relationships, and darkness instead of God’s light, but God continues to love us through this. “If we had even the smallest glimpse of the Father’s tender, intimate love for each of us this weekend, our hearts would explode with joy,” Mitchell said. We can never fully understand God’s love for us. All we can do is do our best to love Him and his creation in return.
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