Happy New Years Everyone!

As we begin the new year tomorrow, I thought I would wish everyone of you a very Happy New Year and share a short and simple prayer that I wrote for this special occasion. I invite you to please pray this along with me. May God continue to bless you throughout this new year.

Prayer for the New Year

Father of all ages,

We ask you to continue to bless us as we begin this new year.
Help us to remain close to you as we make tough decisions in the future.
Help us also to correct our mistakes that we have made, and improve our imperfections.
Let us remember that you are always near us until the end of time.

We ask through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ who is Lord forever,

Amen:)

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone! Just wanted to post a quick note and a awesome song for the Christmas season! Hope you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4FPlNIdQ5A

May you and yours have a blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year!:)

John

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!!!!!!!!"

You know it is Christmas time when you see people rushing around last minute for presents in jam packed stores and stressing out about everything they have to get done around the house before visitors arrive. To the world, this is what Christmas is all about.

This is not what Christmas should be about however. Sometimes people fail to realize what the true meaning of Advent and Christmas is. All they know is what the world tells them. They've forgotten the real reason though.

Advent is the time of waiting. We wait for Christ's coming but people often ask,"How can we spend all of our time waiting when there is so much to do?" Christ has an answer for that. This past Sunday the first reading from the Prophet Micah was a message to Bethlehem from the Lord our God. In this reading, God told us that Jesus would "stand firm and shepherd his flock by the strength of the Lord, in the majestic name of the Lord, his God; and they shall remain, for now his greatness shall reach tot he ends of the earth; he shall be peace."

What comforting words! Jesus shall be peace! During the hustle and bustle of this season, God is asking us to take a break from the stresses of shopping and presents and turn to preparing our hearts for His Son's coming, so that He can flood us with His peace. This is what the Lord promised his people when they were in a dark time during Herod's reign and he is still promising these same words today! Peace is coming. This is just what we need.

A Blessed Christmas Everybody!:)

In Your Hands

Just found a beautiful song that I thought I should post! The song is entitled " Your Hands" by JJ Heller. When I first heard it, I was amazed! This song really hit me. The past few days I have been feeling a little down in the dumps. Everything was going wrong in school. I was stressing out about upcoming exams. I was losing interest in my extra-curricular activities and was letting every little thing get me down. I was praying everyday to God, asking Him for answers. I wanted to know why I was feeling like this? What should I do about it? Is God still here with me? How come I haven't felt His presence during this time?

Today my dad was listening to song on the computer as I was getting ready for bed. As I was preparing, I was listening to the lyrics. They were talking about " when the world is shaking, Heaven stands. When my heart is breaking, I never leave Your hands."

I felt like this was what I needed to hear! I felt like this was an answer to my prayer from God. God was telling me that He was still here with me even if I couldn't feel Him. I think He was telling me through this song that when I am feeling low, I am in His hands. He will never leave my side.

What beautiful lyrics! We must never forget these words of comfort. Even when nothing is going our way and we feel out of sync, God is still here and closer to us than ever. This song really made my day. Maybe you will enjoy it too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlL8LayF0uw

God Bless You,

John:)

Happy Feast Day of St. John of the Cross!!!!

Since it is the feast day of my favorite saint, I thought I should post this short but beautiful prayer to him that I found on Catholic Online. Feel free to pray with me. :)

Prayer to St. John of the Cross

Saint John of the Cross, in the darkness of your worst moments, when you were alone and persecuted, you found God. Help me to have faith that God is there especially in the times when God seems absent and far away.

Amen

P.S.- I have semester exams coming up on Thursday and I am extremely nervous so if you could please keep me in your prayers, that would be great!

Thank you :)

Book Review!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone! Just finished reading a great new book! The book is entitled "How to Let God Help You Through Hard Times" which is a compilation of many other books on the same subject. This book was very helpful for me because it taught me what to do when I do come upon hard times full of emotional and physical pain. It taught me how to continue to pray through hard times and remember that we are never alone during them. This is a great book for anyone who is struggling or hurting and feel alone. This book teaches that God knows what we are going through and that we must continue to trust in and pray to Him. Here are some beautiful prayers and quotes from this book that really intrigued me.

Love by: Charles Stanley, A touch of His Grace

Love makes us greater than we ever were before,
takes what we have to give and gives back even more.

Love makes us stronger than we ever thought we'd be,
takes the load we have to bear and sets our spirits free.

Prayer of Thanksgiving

Thank you, God, for the people you have chosen to be my family and my friends. They are my guides, my teachers, my angels, and my cheerleaders. Though I may often be in conflict with them, and we fight and argue and say things we will regret, I am blessed to have these people walking beside me along life's path, helping me to grow and become who you created me to be.

Amen


The Mystery of Beauty by: Emily Dickinson

I shall know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky.
He will tell me what Peter promised,
And I, for wonder at his woe,
I shall forget the drop of anguish
That scalds me now, that scalds me now.

God's Best For My Life by: Lloyd John Ogilivie


He's there with you now. Trust Him. And then expectantly anticipate that at the right time and in the way that's most creative to you and all concerned, He will intervene and infuse you with exactly what you need. What an exciting way to live!

Measure Your Life by: Wesley L. Duewel

Happiness is fleeting; it tends to depend on the circumstances. Joy can be permanent. It is part of your character. A habit of grumbling and complaining, a tendency to be negative, tells something about the level of your spiritual life. Measure the Spirit's work in your life by your deep abiding joy regardless of life's circumstances.

This book helped me out a lot! Maybe it will help you too! Hope you enjoyed the quotes. Check the book out for yourself. :)

Blessings,

John

Wake Me Up

One of my favorite songs is by a band named Further Seems Forever. The name of the song is called Light Up Ahead. This song is very special to me because I first heard it when I was going through one of the toughest times in my life. This was in 8th grade. I was failing school, messing around in class, not listening to teachers, not doing homework and worst of all I was moving away from God. I hardly prayed. I didn't feel the need. I felt like God didn't care about me and was punishing me by not helping me with my grades. My parents every night during dinner would tell me that I needed to buckle down and work harder, but I never really listened. To tell you the truth back then I never really cared. I felt I could get along in life without good grades in school. So I chose to give up. I chose not to work hard and give it everything that I had.

My parents told me that I better pray to God to help me realize that I need to work hard in school. My parents also took it a step further by telling me that if I didn't get my grades up they would pull me out of this school that I begged my parents to send me to over a year ago. This got me going. I started to work harder and try my hardest in school but nothing was happening. I began to feel that nothing was working. So during this time of stress, I knelt down for the first time in over a year and I prayed. I prayed asking God to help me do the best that I could to work hard and not give up in school. I told Him that I was giving up everything that I had that had moved me away from Him. I told Him that I would no longer mess around in school and give up on my homework if He helped me to get good grades for the rest of the year.

During one of my prayers a song on the radio began playing. It was the song called Light Up Ahead by Further Seems Forever. As I prayed I heard the lyrics of the song, " Take this heart of darkness, I give it up. And all the emptiness, you fill me up. The times I feel like nothing, you bring enough. So I can live for something, you lift me up! And all these bad dreams, I wake up to the light. And when I can't see, I wake up to your eyes. Wake me up!"

These were the lyrics I needed to hear. This song gave me renewed strength to carry on and work to get good grades. The lyrics taught me that I needed to wake up and turn away from not working hard in school so that I would be able to get good grades. It also taught me to trust in God that He would take care of me during this hard time. It also taught me that I couldn't do anything without God and I was wrong to criticize him for my own faults. I knew that He had been trying to help me but I did not open myself up to Him. However, this was definitely going to change.

Slowly I let God back into my heart. Ever since I let Him back in and trusted Him to help me with my grades everything began to fall into place. I began to pick up my grades and work hard in school. Now I pray everyday and ask God to be with me throughout my day helping me to grow closer to Him and continue to pick up my grades.
I must always remember that God is always near me. I just have to want to be near to Him. I must always remember that with God all things are possible. Thank you God for coming into my heart and helping me through my difficult time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s43ZIDSXgw0

Taking a Stroll in the Snow!

Yesterday began as a normal school day. I woke up and went to school, prepared to stay late because of my music ministry rehearsal which I have every Thursday. However on this particular day we did not have practice. I did not know this however until I waited in the music room for a half hour until my music teacher told me that it was canceled. Frustrated that they could not address this over the announcements before I came, I wondered what I should do with the remainder of my time until my mom came to pick me up. When I walked outside I found that it was snowing! This was such a beautiful sight! It was so beautiful that I decided to spend my time taking a stroll in the Seminary Woods which are right in the backyard of my high school.

Inside the woods was warm. My feet crunched the thousands of leaves under my feet. I tried to look for deer, but I saw a lot of squirrels instead. It was fun to watch them bounce around in the piles of leaves on the side of the path I was walking. As I continued to walk, I saw an old man walking his dog. I wondered where he had come from. I had not seen him before. He looked like he could barely walk, perhaps this was why he had a cane. I watched as he trudged up the leave covered hills. I wondered where he was going. Then as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

Soon it began getting dark. Mist started to roll in from all around me. I decided to keep walking however, because of my desire to sit and pray at the Grotto which was somewhere in the thick of the forest. As I made my way through the woods, I came upon the cemetery that I had passed through many times. It contained all of the graves of seminarians, priests and nuns from years past. I wanted to stop there for a while, but as I came closer and closer I began to grow afraid. I was all alone and I felt scared. The cemetery seemed eerie and creepy. I wondered why this was because in my years that I trudged this path I had never felt this way. The cemetery began to fill with mist as I watched from abroad. As I watched, I began to grow more afraid. Slowly I began to back pedal down the path that I came from. I made my way back out of the woods and walked toward the seminary library where my mom was coming to pick me up.

Yesterday was a crazy day. I pondered why I had felt uneasy while I was in the woods. Maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me. I wish I had had enough courage to brave the cemetery in the woods. I'm sure it would have been beautiful, but for some reason I felt discomfort. Perhaps the next time I stay late for school I can have a chance to go back to the woods and take a quiet stroll. Have any of you ever felt the same way I did?