Growing Deeper in Faith, Love and Hope in the Lord through discerning His Call!

This past week I participated in St. Francis De Sales Seminary Summer Camp titled " What's Up Jesus?" This is a camp for teens in high school who are discerning a call to the priesthood. There is also a camp for junior high kids call " Time to get real!" This was my second year attending it. The camp is just so inspiring, uplifting and refreshing because I got to meet and befriend other kids my age who were also hearing God's call and how they should answer it and grow a desire to do God's will. Also at the camp were 4 volunteering Seminarians who wanted to help us deepen are call. Three of them are in college seminary, one just graduated, and another was just recently ordained a transitional and is preparing for this final year before reaching his ultimate goal of being ordained a priest. The seminarians were Nathan Miniatt, Bob Spoerl, Jacob Heidel, John Gibson, and Deacon Matt Widder. I have been in close contact with Jacob and Deacon Matt for the past year and enjoy their friendship and guidance they provide for me throughout my life. This camp is provided by Fr. Jim Lobacz the vocational director at the Seminary and his assistant Susi Kurek. The two of them have become my very close friends also. The interesting part about this year's camp was that we improved greatly in numbers of participants! Last years camp had six participants whereas this years sprouted up to 15! Thanks be to God! I am so happy that more and more people are hearing God's call and are listening and are deciding to attend the camp! For those that don't know about the camp and what we do for 3 days there, I will condense three days worth of action in order to fit the page! Seminary Summer Camp offers the opportunity to grow deeper in faith and realizing what God wants us to do with our lives. The three days consist of listening to one anothers call stories(seminarians and priests included), adoration, benediction, daily mass, liturgy of the hours, confession, sessions where we learned about the priesthood through movies and discussions, and also there was time for recreation! To summarize all of this, we were able to learn hard, pray hard, think hard, and last but not least, play hard! The whole camp was one of the greatest experiences I ever had! I am so grateful to God for calling me and many others to explore the priesthood and for giving us the opportunity to meet others that feel the same as we do! What a great God we have that definitely knows what we need and who we need! Indeed Father knows Best!