Feeding Hearts and Stomachs

Some celebrated President's Day by sleeping in and enjoying the day off, but us missionaries, we're different people.  We capitalized on this rare day off and invited all of the student missionaries at MIT over to our apartment for a student missionary event.  This was the first of a four part series, in which we will be talking about the topics of prayer, evangelization, discipleship, and life-long Catholic mission.  Not only will we be addressing these topics, but we will also be pairing each of these with a saint who exemplified the discussed pillar.

Tom, Natalia, Margaret, Megan, and Maita discuss their prayer lives.
On Monday, after feeding the students sandwiches and chips, Levi spoke about Mother Teresa's devotion to prayer and her ongoing love and work for the Lord despite years and years of darkness and desolation in her prayer life.  She was a force to be reckoned with!  Levi made reference to Pope John Paul II's homily about her upon her beatification.  I highly recommend taking a peak at it; it's great read!  (Click it: John Paul II's Homily).  One of my favorite stories about Mother Teresa is one that Joey shared with a handful of students: When a handful of the Missionaries of Charity approached Mother saying that they didn't have enough time to help the poor and dying and therefore they should pray less, Mother Teresa said the opposite was true.  They should pray more!  She doubled their prayer time and almost instantly the Missionaries were able to help all those they needed to and more.  Truly, nothing can be accomplished without God called upon through prayer.

The event also included Mic and Luis, two of Levi's disciples opening and closing us in prayer, as well as a beautiful testimony given by Nik, one of Levi's disciples who is a student at the Berklee College of Music across the river from MIT.  Nik reminded us all that each of us prays differently and that each of us should come to understand prayer through the gifts and passions we have.  The event closed with small group discussions talking about the challenges that arise in prayer and the solutions that different students have to these difficulties.

All in all the luncheon was a success!  I cannot honestly convey how heartwarming it is to see your apartment filled with students who are striving to know Christ and serve Him!  It was even more beautiful to witness them opening up and sharing with one another their prayer journeys.  Praise God for this wonderful opportunity for all of us to come together!  I pray that we may continue to seek nourishment and fellowship with one another, but that we may always remember that we are called to be sent.

God bless and later days!
Ann

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Call Me, Maybe

Image
When I was a wee little thing, I was as shy as could be!  (I still can be incredibly shy at times).  One way in which my shyness would manifest itself was in a great dislike of talking on the phone (mainly because there was no way I could hide behind my mother's leg on the phone and have her talk for me). It was simply me and the other person on the other end of the line...no barrier, no blockade, just the two of us. (No Will Smith reference intended). As I grew out of my shyness, I still clung onto this dislike of speaking on the telephone.  In high school over the summer months, friends would celebrate when they held me on the line for more than a half hour!  One day, a friend was actually able to keep me on the phone for a whole hour!  That hour long conversation remained my record for longest phone conversation until this year actually. Despite this aversion to phone conversations, I have found myself practically with one ear glued to my dumb phone (opp...
Read more

SEEK and Ye Shall Find

While those five little words--"seek and ye shall find"--should probably draw to mind the Bible verse Matthew 7:7 (Ask, and it will be given you, seek, and you will find, etc.), the first thing that comes to mind is Ella Fitzgerald's "Someone to Watch Over Me."  If someone simply says, "Seek and ye shall find" automatically I hear the soft piano and the soothing pulsation of Ella's voice flowing between the words.  I hear her emphasize "seek" and "ye" and I begin to drift into the following lyrics, "So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind."  And the song continues to play in my head... Needless to say, every time someone at FOCUS's recent SEEK Conference in Orlando, FL, mentioned Matthew 7:7, and began to read, "seek and ye shall find," my mind had gone down the river of musical lyrics, not stopping until the song had ended.  (At which time I was completely lost as to what the actual...
Read more

Modern Womanhood and My Moment in It

"Thirty, flirty, and thriving..."  The wish that Jenna uttered on her "disastrous" 13th birthday in 13 Going on 30  ...and the wish that came true when some magic dust flutters onto her head... (Shout out to my OLHC girls who watched that movie a million times with me). There was something magical (even without the magic dust) about the idea of being 30 when I was younger.  It was the age when I was supposed to have life figured out - an illustrious career, a man I love, friends who have been with me on the journey for years.  But now, as I am only a few short months away from my 30th birthday, I feel like all of my original hopes and dreams are no where close to being realized, and I am left wondering, "Where's my fairy tale ending?" While in the eyes of the world, I may have achieved success - I am after all a Senior Project Manager/Producer for a Video Marketing Agency at the age of 29, after quickly climbing the ladder in 3 short years. Yet, wh...
Read more