As she began her talk tonight, Sarah put a picture-perfect image of her family on the big screen for all the teens to see. Her hair was perfect and full, the kids were all dressed adorably and looking at the camera, beaming like perfect angels. She then told us that for this one picture that turned out great, there are about 30 that didn’t. And then she said, “I want to be real with you guys”, and proceeded to show her kids with messy faces, battling in plastic sword fights. She also showed images of her own selfies with double chins and without make-up on.

She then cautioned all of us, “Don’t compare another person’s highlight reel with your behind-the-scenes reel.” Sarah said she went through a difficult time in middle school when she questioned her self-worth, wondering if she was pretty enough, good enough and if she would ever be truly loved. She said she became a chameleon, changing her personality to suit whomever she was with at the moment. She needed the approval of others to feel loved.

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“If you’ve ever been to a Steubenville conference, you know we are never really finished.”

Father Dave Pivonka said this today at the end of Mass. Father was referring to the opportunity to come forward if any of the teens felt God might be calling them to religious life. However, isn’t this true in a different capacity? We are never really finished. While we may load up on the buses and head back to our assorted homes and parishes, the call to our vocation and to holiness is ever beckoning. No matter what our vocation is, we should all continue everyday to answer that call, whether to married, single, or religious life.

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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:

1. He had met some religious people that were weird, and he didn’t want to be weird.
2. 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.

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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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In his session this afternoon, Jimmy speaks on truth. In his talk he gives us permission to wrestle with the truth, but urges us not to settle for less than it. Jimmy Mitchell: Truth Revealed Jimmy is from Nashville and is founder of Love Good, a company which supports and invests in artists and songwriters with the goal of evangelizing culture with beauty that is rooted in truth. The logo for this company is a heart with an arrow through it. Beauty pierces the heart and, once wounded, the heart cannot help but want to trace that wound back to it’s source. The wound often in our culture is truth. The source? God.

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