...where winter is 15°C

Hello and welcome to AUSTRALIA

where water is more expensive and kangaroos total your car if you're not careful driving on country toads at night...

Emma Fradd reporting again, this time away from Team 4 and off NET; I want to share a blog about the last 10 months of my life, the present and my future!

On a team with 5 other people - you’re around them for constantly for 10 months, you pray with them, share every experience with them and they become a strong source of fellowship. Surprisingly this year, I loved not having a lot of “alone” time. I loved learning how to love my team and help them in their faith journey. And it works both ways. God really does speak to you through them and they build you up to the best you can be. This year on NET has helped me to choose joy in my everyday actions, and serving my team has allowed me to grow in serving others.

Because you grow deeper in love with God, it leads you to evangelization. You get filled and fed with God’s love and it equips you to evangelize to those around you and not just the teenagers that you see on retreat or in your parish. As my year went on, I found that I wanted to evangelize more than ever, I wanted to share God's love and message with everyone around me, in host homes, with my team, with the parish priest and especially with the youth who are searching more than ever for it.

I served on NET during August 2009 - May 2010. Thanks to NET, I still have this zeal for evangelization. I’m going into my old high school now and doing classroom presentations, sharing with the students my relationship with God and to challenge them to have one as well. I’m leading music at Mass every weekend and I am so much more confident about talking about God with others.

As music leader on my team this year, I was able to work with musicians and build up bands to play at Mass and other youth events, I really believe that music is one of the best tools available for evangelization. So that’s why in 6 weeks, I’ll be flying back to Canada to join NET’s Massive Worship team. I will be traveling across Canada, running retreats for musicians to encourage and equip them to lead worship. Other retreats include assisting parish missions and adoration services with music and school retreats. All of this proclaiming the word of God with my guitar!

NET has helped me a lot to see how important evangelizing is, and I know that it’s not going to stop after Massive Worship, I really have a passion for talking about Jesus and I think God is going to use me and this gift he’s given me to do just that in years to come!

Join me in saying a Hail Mary for Catholics everywhere that they will respond to God’s call to evangelize. As Pope Paul VI says:

“The Church exists to evangelize”

Let's hurry up and exist!

Emma Fradd

NET Alumni
Port Pirie, South Australia

So what is this NET thing anyway?

I remember confusedly asking myself this exact question about 6 years ago when I was invited to apply to NET Canada, but this past week our NET staff took the initiative to answer this popular question for the young adults in the Ottawa area by hosting our first ever "Come and See" evening at St. Maurice parish in Nepean (special shout-out to Miss Hannah Sheridan pictured here for heading up the planning and execution of it all!) It's one thing to tell a faithful young person, "Hey, you'd be great for NET, you should fill out an application!" and a whole other thing to invite them to simply get to know the ministry with no pressure to apply. What we've found after an event like this one is that once you meet this amazing ministry and get to know it's mission, you can't help but fall in love with it and desire to somehow get involved!
That's what we witnessed among the crowd attending our event. It was a great mix of people: there were some NET alumni, some NET staff, someone who was already accepted to NET, another who was in the process of finishing his application, others who were still finishing high school, and still others who were in the midst of university. We presented to everyone the heart of NET Ministries and the simple mission of it, which really comes down to young people sharing with other young people how God has worked in their lives. NET Ministries is challenging young Catholics to love Christ and embrace the life of the Church, and we do this through proclamation of the Gospel, invitation to live it out, and forming and equipping young people with the skills they need to do this.
What really caught my attention when I was considering NET was encountering the change I saw in my own brother, Peter. When I was 16 years old, Peter had just returned home after serving a year with NET Australia, and the transformation in him was undeniable; he was uniquely passionate about his faith, and he understood it! That was something I wanted so badly. That's why when it came time for me to decide where to go after high school, NET was one of my first options. But I really didn't know what NET was about just by looking at my brother.
And so it was for many of the young people who attended our event. It's easy to have heard of NET when you live in Ottawa and many of your friends are NET alumni, but it's just as easy to not really know why NET is so great and why we need young people to participate in it's powerful mission of evangelization.
For me, it wasn't until I got halfway through my first year of university that I realized I wasn't happy with where I was and where I was going. I was studying music and practicing my cello for endless hours every day, truly devoting my entire life to music. But at the end of each day, I'd come back to my dorm room feeling empty. I wanted God to be at the center of my life, but in reality my cello was! So I realized a change needed to happen, and whenever there is potential for drastic change my life, I tend to take the deepest plunge I can. I decided to apply for NET Canada, even though I had no idea what exactly I'd be doing. I just knew that I was called by God to do something great. That meant radically giving up my cello and music degree for a whole year and for the first time ever, I was okay with that. I soon realized that God was more important to me than my cello, and if he asked to do something as radical as taking a year off my music degree my only response could be, "Yes, Lord! I'd do anything for you!"
For so many young people, that kind of decision looks too scary and too intimidating, but I encourage all to adhere to the words of Pope John Paul II when he spoke encouragingly to thousands of young people at World Youth Day in Denver: "Do not be afraid to go in the streets and into public places... this is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel."