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