Saturday, June 27, 2009

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!

5 comments:

  1. Praise be Jesus Christ, now and forever! Amen! John, your blog is a great idea; many of my seminarian brothers have blogs where they record their discernment....I'm hopefully going to be starting one up shortly after everything in California:) I'll let you know about it when I do. But back to your post....the camp itself was a very spiritual, uplifting, and holy time for us all. I'm filled with humility and joy that I can continue to inspire you and help you along the way on your path of discernment; whether you know it or not, you do the same service for me and all my seminarian brothers. You continue to rejuvinate and reaffirm why we are pursuing our Father's call to the holy priesthood. Thank you John! I'll look forward to ready future posts on your blog; and remember, I'm always there for you! :) May our Blessed Mother, Queen of Vocations, and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta be with both of us as we continue to prayerfully discern God's chosen calling in our lives! God bless you John! :)

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  2. Well I'm just about as proud as a mother could possibly be!

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  3. It's good to hear that the participants at this retreat are as spiritually renewed (if not more so!) as the volunteers are! Since Jacob has been talking to me incessantly about this retreat for the past week now, and after reading this blog, it's very clear to me that this retreat was indeed everything that Jacob said it was and MORE! God bless you, John! I'll be praying for you in your discernment; just remember to throw in a few prayers for this unworthy Chicago seminarian while you're at it! :)

    - Andy Kirchoff

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  4. What a wonderful experience! God was definetly there with us. I too, John, as you know have been thinking about the preisthood. I had never set foot into a group of 14 other teen aged boys, and felt like I belonged until camp this year. It felt good to belong to something bigger than myself. It was a very humbling experience. Jake, you are one huge inspiration as well as Deacon Matt, but most of all as my best friend you have always been a huge inspiration to me. This was a great idea to put up this blog. May God bless you always on your journey, and may he bless all of us in our own discernment in Christ Jesus our Lord forever. Amen!

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  5. Nice to read your first post and the comments it received. I shall pray that the Lord unveils his will to you a little more each day. fjs

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