Encounter one FIRST VIDEO BLOG!!! 2013-14

Advent

We arrived in Edmonton hardly two and a half months ago. Since then we have done more than 18 school visits, hosted two junior high and seven senior high youth groups, seen hundreds of students and thousands of people. In the next few days we have another junior high and high school youth group and our final school visit for the year. We have spoken of God's love and Mercy, about prayer and our quest for ultimate happiness in God, about the Sacraments God has given his Church. We have seen lives changed.

And not a single thing would have happened had God not been with us well before NET training started nearly four months ago. God was working to bring each of us on NET, to form us during training, to put us on the right team, to guide us as we drove west here to Edmonton, to help us meet and get to know all those we needed to. And not only us, but the parish and all her members, our host homes, the youths we have met and are going to meet. The list goes on, this would not be possible without God working, so we thank and praise Him as Christmas approaches and we remember His birth, His great Love for all of us.

Have a blessed Advent and a Merry Christmas from Infuse 2

A Warm Adoption

Hey, it’s Mary from the Montreal iNFUSE team One! Just a few days ago, a few of us sisters joined a new family who we'd be staying with for a little more than a week. We have now become older sisters to 5 youngsters, who've clung to us from day one. The shy stages of meeting our host family lasted only a brief few minutes, as we were playing Piggy-in-the-middle, being climbed on, getting some great new hairdos, reading bedtime stories, and joining these little girls in saying night prayer the evening we arrived. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that they had waited for our arrival to decorate the Christmas tree, which was a very special gift to us as we are not with our own families right now. It is a beautiful privilege to say that you have been welcomed into a second home in only a few moments shared with a new family.

Coming into the Christmas season we have not only been included in host home decorating and traditions, but also events of preparation that have gotten our hearts set on the coming of Christ. One event we were invited to participate in was an advent liturgy at Queens of Angels Academy for girls. Our team prepared a drama based on what the girls have learned about receiving and giving back, and our universal calling, no matter what your religion is, to love and serve one another as a response to God's love and call for us. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet many students and connect with them in an understandable way. We were welcomed back as a team which is a huge step in our hopes to reach out to the schools in Montreal, Quebec.

Our hope continues to grow as we approach this Christmas, and our team has much to prepare for, including many new surprises to come in our ministry.

God be with you all, and have a blessed Advent season.

iNFUSE 1, Montreal, QC

The Adventures of Encounter Team 2!

Hey people,

            It’s Mike from encounter two! Hope you are all doing well! The past few months for encounter two have been awesome! We have had the opportunity to minister to people of all ages in the Thunder Bay, Kamloops, Nelson, Calgary, St.Paul, Edmonton, and Winnipeg diocese. We’ve done everything from encounter days to family retreats, weekend retreats, and youth rallies!

            It’s been so cool spending time as a team and getting to know each other! As a travelling team we end up spending A LOT of time together. Since most of the time it’s in the van, we have noticed that that much time in close quarters has resulted in us rubbing off on each other! Too many of us Canadians are saying “All Ya’ll”, which Chase is pretty proud of. But all is well, he has started to call toques “toques” and not “beanies”, and we’re all pretty proud of him for that.

            All in all it’s been a blast spending so much time together, one of the coolest things we’ve done together was skidooing, when we were in Wetaskawin. It was awesome being outside in the snow, just hanging out as a team! A few of us also had the chance to play the beautiful game of hockey with our host family in Winnipeg, which was awesome because we’ve all been dying to play hockey again. Okay, maybe it was just me, but none-the-less we all had a great time!

            Like I said before, we’ve had the opportunity to put on some overnight retreats, in Trail B.C., Edmonton Alberta, and at Our Lady of Victory Camp in Alberta. It’s been such a treat to be able to spend more than a few hours with the youth, and see how God has been able to work through these events. At the end of one of our overnight events, we were told by the youth that a lot of them originally were only there to miss a couple days of school, but by the end they shared that they really grew closer to God at the event. God is so good!

            We are currently on our way back to Ottawa for Christmas break, we are looking forward to having a couple weeks to prepare for the next half of our year! We all hope you have an awesome Advent and a blessed Christmas!

God Bless,

Michael McCallum

 

Time Flies When You're Having Fun!

Last weekend was our first ever overnight retreat! It was a retreat for our new leaders as a thank you for all the time they've dedicated to leadership training the last couple of weeks leading up to it. We had nine youth come out for an amazing weekend of fellowship and fun at a cozy retreat center in Pontbriand! The weekend was filled with talks, prayer times, small groups, praise and worship, Mass, and even Adoration! It was such a spirit filled weekend and it really gave us the chance to get to know the youth even better and to share more about our lives with them too.

The men surprised us ladies by preparing a Christmas lunch!

This coming week is also our last week here in La Beauce before we head home for Christmas! We have a great week packed with events so we can spend as much time with the community as possible, including a Christmas dinner, sports night, music night, a youth group Christmas party, and a Youth Mass! As much as we’re all starting to get pretty excited to see our families, we also don’t really aren’t ready to leave this community. They have done an amazing job of welcoming us here and making us feel like we belong that the thought of leaving for a month makes my heart hurt a little bit. I am so thankful that we have the opportunity to come back for another four months after Christmas!

Have an incredibly blessed Christmas!

God bless,

Katelyn Sutton, LEN blogger

Merry times in the Maritimes!!!

Hello there!

Tim from Encounter One reporting from Charlottetown, PEI! We left Brockville, Ontario a couple weeks ago, then stayed in Halifax, Nova Scotia for almost two weeks, stayed in Tignish, PEI for a couple days, and now we’re in Charlottetown! Quite the journey to say the least.

At one retreat in Shad Bay, NS we had confession available during prayer ministry. A young man at the retreat was lined up for confession when Matt went to talk to him. He was really emotional and said “Honestly, I didn’t want to be here at first, my mom made me come, but I’m really glad I came.” He then went into confession and left with a huge ear to ear grin. Man!! is God good or what?

It’s hard to believe our year’s almost half over! We did our team’s last retreat of 2013 last night. It seems like we left Ottawa just yesterday ! But there's still almost 100 retreats left so stay tuned!

Take care and God bless,
Tim Elliott

Encounter 1

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Hey everyone,

I hope you are all having a blessed Advent, things here in Drayton Valley have been wonderful there is over a foot of snow on the ground and chill is in the air, and we are preparing to wind of this part of the year, but not without a few ministry updates, so lets begin!

Things have been going very well here, we have finished our first Leadership Training Series, and may I just say that our volunteers are the bee's knees (If you don't know what the bee's knees means, it means they are awesome). They are all very excited about helping us out with ministry and guiding our youth into a deeper relationship with Christ.

LAMININ!

Youth nights have been what I would consider very well received by the youth, we have a group of youth who are consistently youth group and we are starting to get a lot of new people interested, although our nights sometimes don't always go the way we planned them I believe this is just God's way of teaching us to be flexible with our schedules, and ideas. One such instance was when we had planned to have a confession night with our High School Group, but circumstances beyond our control did not allow for it to work out, so with a week to plan a new youth night we got down to business, after much brainstorming we came up with the idea to show them a video that we had been shown at Training called "How Great is our God'. It is a video in which we are given a glimpse at the sheer massiveness of our Universe and helps put into perspective the size of God, but then it flips it and tells us how intimate God's relationship is with us and how he holds together, to illustrate his point he talked about this Cell-adhesion Molecule called Laminin and basically what it is, is a protein molecule that acts like the rebar of the body holding us together.

So needless to say God was very much present in the planning of the night and it was very evident on the comments made by the youth about " How they had never thought of it like that before" and how it was "Really Cool how he used science to explain God"

Next week we will be heading out for December Retreat in which the staff will be giving us a retreat and prepare us to go home at Christmas. So as I write this I ask you to please pray for all of us this Christmas and we will be praying for you and your Families.

God Bless, and may your Advent and Christmas be filled with Many Blessings.
Jonathon Prieston,
iNFUSE 3,
Drayton Valley,AB

Stump the Deacon

Last Sunday we had a high school youth night dedicated to equipping the youths for the christian life with the tools God gave the Church. As part of that night we invited out a friend of ours -Deacon Harrison Ayre- to answer any questions the youths might have relating to the Church or its teachings. With a slight twist however: whoever asked a question that Deacon Harrison couldn't answer without going to the Catechism would win a chocolate bar of their choice. If Deacon Harrison went the whole night without getting stumped he could chose a chocolate bar of his choice.

So we opened the floor to questions and Deacon Harrison began. And the youths began asking really good questions: what is the sin against the Holy Spirit? Why does the Church not ordain women? Where did the practice of a celibate priesthood come from? What is the Immaculate Conception? Where did that teaching come from?

It was incredible to see these questions from the youth and even better to hear the answers from the Deacon (who did in fact go home with a chocolate bar). God was really working in both the Deacon and the youths to bring the truth of the Church to light!

Infuse 2, Saint Thomas More Parish, Edmonton, Alberta

Young Adults

In Edmonton we have been having some great youth groups and meeting some great people, including one of our travelling teams - Encounter 2 who dropped by for a brief visit and our supervisors who dropped in for a couple of days! One new development in our ministry is our young adult program. We had a meeting last Saturday night and several young people from the community came out, we talked about faith, had fun and had just a  great time hanging out.

It was also an interesting moment from a ministry standpoint, so far most of our work has been devoted to the junior and senior high school youth groups Compass and Cornerstone. The young adult group is a kind of continuation of those groups, one that provides a place for youth to keep practicing the faith among friends beyond high school and into the rest of their lives.

Peace,
iNFUSE 2
Josh Hickman

Leadership Training!

This weekend we started our first Leadership Training Series! This is really super exciting for us because as a parish team building a foundation for youth ministry, our goal is to be always looking to replace ourselves in ministry so that things can run smoothly after we leave. This Sunday was our first session of leadership training and we had 12 senior high school students and young adults come out which is really incredible, especially for this early in the year! I just know that God has big plans for la Beauce even after we leave.

We were also able to attend a Soirée de Témoignages (Testimony Night) to close off the Year of Faith! It was a beautiful night and a great chance to hear about how some of the parishioners have experienced God in their lives. Paul and Kristen also shared testimonies that night. It was a really beautiful way to end the Year of Faith.

Katelyn Sutton, 

blogger for Les Équipes NET

Still Before God

Hello Everyone!

I hope you’re all doing well! We’ve been getting back into the swing of things at the office after being on a retreat with the youth group the weekend of Nov. 15-17th! We were up north at a place called Camp Tiberiade. It was so beautiful!We weren’t in charge of running the retreat, but we were extremely excited to be a part of it, and to help the leaders in any way they needed us.

Since our youth group, the Almighties, meets every other week, we haven’t had too much time to spend with the youth. But this weekend, God blessed our team in so many ways. We got to spend so much time investing in and getting to know a lot of the youth. We were given the chance to see them each grow in their faith and understanding of God, their relationships with each other, and their own personal relationship with Jesus. It was so amazing to be a witness to the work that God was doing in their hearts!

We prayed, we sang, we laughed, we played games in the woods, we talked (and talked some more!), we stayed up late, and we got up early! Overall, it was an amazing God-filled weekend. A few of them even expressed how excited they are that our team is at their parish and that they can see that we’re taking the time to really get to know them!

Also, we had a tough time deciding on a blog title. "B[log]tastic" was also in the running!

God Bless!

Shaina Wreede

iNFUSE One, Montreal

Expect Great Things

God has definitely been working through us here in Beauce since our arrival. I can’t even believe how many amazing things have been happening and the way hearts are already being changed so early.

A few weeks ago at our senior high school youth group, we had one student attend who had been invited by a friend and decided to come check it out. He arrived late and had missed the opening game, song, introduction, and almost all of the talk. He seemed to have fun during the night, and afterwards we found out that during prayer time that night was one of the few times in his life that he had actually felt like God existed. We've also had many students tell us that prayer time was the favourite time of the night!

We’ve also been spending our lunch hour once a week at the high school in St. Prosper for the last three weeks. It was kind of awkward the first couple of weeks and none of the students really wanted to talk to us, though they were looking at us with curiosity. This week though, a couple of the girls sat with some of the girls we’d met over the previous couple of weeks. They were excited to see us and spend time with us and they listened to Kristen play guitar for the entire lunch hour. Teresa, Julie, and I also met a couple of girls who welcomed us with open arms and spent the entire lunch hour with us even after their friends left the table. The boys had a successful lunch hour as well!

Our team was given yet another awesome opportunity this week! We went to Quebec City for an hour-long radio interview with a Catholic radio station that will air November 30^th!

God bless until next time,

Katelyn, Les Équipes NET blogger

Adoremus

Last Saturday the team went out to a young adult adoration night at Saint Joseph's Basilica called Adoremus, it was based around two hours of adoration with five priests available for confession. There were prayers, readings and plenty of time for reflection. For us going to the night was awesome, after a busy month to be able to just sit before Christ for two hours, to pray and go to confession if we wanted. But also after the event we had the chance to meet many of these young adults, quite a few of them from the University of Alberta; to speak with them and invite them out to a couple events was great.

It sort of showed in a way how we are just a part of how God is working here in Edmonton, on one hand we are here at Saint Thomas More and in four of the schools inviting the youths to encounter Christ. And then on the other hand Christ is working all around the city calling people to Himself in other ways and other people.

Praise be to God!

iNFUSE 2
Edmonton

Cooler Days, Warmer Hearts

Hey Everyone!

Last Thursday we had our first social night for the Almighties youth group! We went bowling! Everyone who came had an awesome time, and it was so wonderful to get to spend time with the youth!

Also, host home ministry has become a very fruitful part of our ministry. Our host families have been so kind, and have gone above and beyond to make us feel welcome and like part of the family. Since we move host homes every two weeks, it always takes a little time on both sides to adjust, but through God's grace we have really been building amazing relationships with the families, especially with the youth who we stay with. We have played board games, watched and played sports, had family dinners, and prayed with the host families. It’s so wonderful to see how much they have been opening up to us and to God since we have been staying with them!

Doing the dishes!

Mary’s awesome experience from a host home: “While in a host home in mid-October, my team-mate and I had asked our host family if they wanted to pray night prayer with us. The first night, our host mom and her three high school and university aged kids joined us and shared intentions. The next evening our host mom asked if we would pray and said her kids would join us to pray a final prayer, but they preferred not to do intentions out loud. The next night none of the kids showed up to pray, but when our host mom prayed, she prayed for each of her children and thanked God that they were given a chance to pray out loud together. I saw this as such a beautiful example of how she loved her family so much, and simply wanted her children to grow in love with God and grow in their relationship with Him.”

God Bless!

Shaina Wreede

iNFUSE One, Montreal



And we're off!!!

Hey there! Tim here, Encounter One's blogger for the year!

Man, has it been a crazy week and a half. We've done nine retreats already all around Toronto. The week and a half may have been crazy but it was also amazing. Our youngest crowd was grade seven and our oldest crowd so far was grade tens. I know we've hardly even started the year, but just seeing how God's been working through the youth is amazing.

The retreats have been running really smoothly. The youth are having a great time and God's definitely been busy at work with them to say the least. Seeing so much change in such young people in only six hours is really inspiring. One thing we learned pretty fast is that while these youth may be learning a lot from us, we learn even more from them. Having done a lot of volunteer work in the past, we all know how great it feels to do good, but nothing compares to the feeling of directly experiencing God at work in the retreatants.

We got to stay in Peterborough for four nights last week, which was amazing. Peterborough really brought us closer together as brothers and sisters on our team as we had some funny mishaps, but we stayed united as a team throughout all of it. For example, one of our vehicles got lost in downtown Toronto on the 401 highway (named the busiest highway in North America) during rush hour traffic on a Friday. Or when we celebrated Rachel's birthday, we hid her cake in the oven...then our host dad went to cook supper and preheated the oven...resulting in a charred black cake...
But while we had some mishaps, we're completing our mission of contacting the youth of Canada and bringing them to Jesus as best as we can and that's what's important.

Encounter 1

Beginnings of Youth Ministry

Last week kicked off our junior and senior high youth groups, "Compass" and "Cornerstone". The nights were great, bringing out more than  40 youth in total. We had lots of fun with games, music and getting to know the youth!

Just seeing God working in the lives of these youth has been incredible, their love for God, intelligence and openness was astounding.
While Jessica was giving her testimony on how trying to please her friends and make them happy just drained her and left her empty searching for God, a young woman said "That's me!"

God is working! Praise be Jesus Christ!

iNFUSE2, Saint Thomas More Parish

Edmonton Alberta

Another Week of Firsts!

We had an All Saints party for all ages on October 31! It was a great opportunity to involve the younger youth that we don’t often get a chance to work with. It was also the first time any of us had ever organized an All Saints party! We had different stations with different carnival-style games with candy for prizes and caramel apples too! Later in the evening we did a skit and played a big game of Drop the Keys and finished off the night with a litany of the saints. We had lots of youth and some younger families come out and it was a super fun night!

 

Another awesome experience this week was leading our first ever Adoration night! Paul shared a little bit what Adoration is, then I shared my testimony, and Kristen and the band led music. Matt also led a really great reflection. It was amazing to see how many of our youth came out to spend some time with Jesus. It was also really great to see some of the older parishioners that we don’t get to have contact with on a regular basis come out. 

God bless!

Katelyn Sutton, Les Équipes NET blogger

Off and running

Hey everyone,

Welcome back to iNFUSE 3's blog glad you could join us!  Well we have been here in Drayton Valley almost 4 weeks now and things here are going just great.

Mike and Lisa talking about Ontario's Bagged Milk

So far we have had two Reach nights (our Junior High Youth Group) our first one was and ice cream scavenger hunt where the youth were given clues and the had to solve the clue in order to find the next one and the prize for the teams were different types of toppings for their ice cream. Our second reach night we took them for Slurpee's at 7-eleven, and then had small group at the church and then played line tag with them.
We also had our first Revive Night (our High school youth Group) for that we had them make pizza either really good or really disgusting  (that was up to them)but the catch was that when they were done we sat them at a table and they had to switch half of their pizza with the person to their right so there were some very funny reactions.

This past Saturday we kicked off our Young Adults Program with lunch at Boston Pizza.

Myself and Jillian explaining the Ice Cream Scavenger Hunt

We are also having our second Revive Night and will be talking to the student about the importance of Prayer in their life, so we are all very excited for that.

One of our team days we were able to see a real buffalo stampede which was super awesome to see and kind of scary at the same time
Anyways that is all for us today,


God Bless,
iNFUSE 3,Drayton Valley,AB
"The spirit of Humility is sweeter than honey, and those who Nourish themselves with this honey produce sweet fruit"
-St.Anthony of Padua

Hello from iN2!

        

Hello! A few introductions, we are NET Canada iNFUSE team 2, a parish team at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church (STM) in Edmonton Alberta. There are seven of us, (from the picture above) starting top left and going clockwise: Joseph from British Columbia, Josh B from Ontario, Josh H from New Brunswick, Brooke from Ontario, Samantha from Trinidad, Jessica from Prince Edward Island and Joanna from England.

After a five day road trip westward through four provinces we arrived Saint Thomas More Parish. Since then we have been introduced to the office and parish at the five weekend masses. STM is super excited for youth ministry, weather its starting the youth mass a month before we even arrived, forcing the parish organizers to cut off registration for host homes having already tons of extra homes for our eight month stay, or already starting to gather names for volunteers. Needless to say we as a team are super excited to work with everyone in Edmonton.

We just did our first series of youth nights and have visited the schools, more on that to come soon :)