Hello everyone, so after a nice christmas break our team has all been able to return nice and safely and get back out on the road. Since getting back on the road we have been able to have a lot of fun as a group as we travel around Ontario. The other day we went tobagganing as a group. We had a blast trying to combine all our crazy carpets and going down in one long line as everyone else on the hill watched.

A very touching part of the prayer time at one of our very recent retreats was that the school had organized for all the parents to write their kids a letter. During prayer time they all recieved letters from their parents. It was amazing to see just how much of an effect all the letters had on the retreatants. If I were to guess I would say at least half of the kids there were in tears after reading the letters from their parents.

Currently we are in Burlington Ontario but coming up we will be heading to Hamilton and London Ontario where we will be putting on our first family retreats.

That is all for now but stay posted for our next updates.

God Bless You

Patrick Pringle

Welcome Back

As the second half of iNFUSE team two starts we are so excited to get back to work here in beautiful, snowy Steinbach. It has been a whirlwind of a first week back, but we have enjoyed every moment of it.

On our return to the office we found some lovely chocolates as a “welcome back” gift. It has been wonderful reconnecting with parishioners here, finding out how their Christmas season went and seeing how much they missed us (which was just as much as we missed them!).

The week was filled with the final planning of our event-filled first weekend. We had our first ever youth Mass with visiting priest, Fr. Rene Chartier. The youth of the parish performed the duties of sacristan, readers, altar servers and Eucharistic ministers. We have had some great feedback and are looking forward to many more to come. After Mass, we held our first REACT (grade 6/7/8 youth group) of the New Year. We first cooked up some hot dogs and had a meal together. This was followed by some life-sized games. We played giant “Guess Who?” with the youth acting as the game characters, giant “Dutch Blitz” – a fast-paced card game, and giant “Foosball”. We all had a blast and from what our high school leaders told us, they really want to play some of those games with the high school youth group sometime.

We also had our first Family Fun Day of the new year at which we sat down to watch “Meet the Robinsons” with bags of popcorn and glasses of punch in hand. The movie was incredibly funny and really focused on how important the unconditional love of family is.

Coming up for us in the next few weeks are the first of our leadership training workshops for our volunteer youth leaders, and our high school retreat entitled “Open the Door”.

We hope you all are having a good start to the New Year and we cannot wait to share more of our time and ministry here in Steinbach.

God bless

Elizabeth Fitzmaurice and the Steinbach iNFUSE team

Back in Action

Massive Worship is back in Ottawa! After a great Christmas break we all came back together for a week of January training.

During training there was a Host Home Appreciation dinner on one of the nights and we were able to play music for Mass. It was so great to serve God in that way again, especially after two weeks apart.

We are also excited about our CMW 101 Workshops, which are happening every Monday in this month of January (It’s not too late to come! You can sign up at the door any of the nights. More info at the bottom of this post)

CMW 101 is Contemporary Christian music and Worship training sessions. Basically any musicians who are interested can come down and receive personal training with their instruments on how to use contemporary music for worship. The first night was very good we had mostly keyboardists and acoustic guitarists. It’s a great opportunity for fellowship with other Christian musicians and also a great way to learn a few new things about leading worship. I encourage anyone reading this in the Ottawa area to come out to our next sessions!

Also our team is breaking some new ground. This is actually the first time a Massive Worship team has continued into January, as last year's team was a pilot project and only ran for four months. Woo! We are thrilled to have the opportunity to take Massive Worship places it has never been in the past, especially Western Canada next month!

Another thing that our team has found very exciting is that we have the chance to spend some time in a real recording studio, not to put out an album or anything but to just get the overall experience. We get 6 days to spend time recording and mixing and learning about the recording process. We went for two days last week and had so much fun! I guess it’s basically a musician's dream. I loved putting on the headphones and looking through the glass window at the people on the other side talking to you with a mic. It was just like you would imagine it would be. We were able to record 4 songs in the two days, this week we are going to record a bit more and then learn how to mix the recordings. It’s definitely a highlight for our team.

We are off to a great New Year and look so forward to everything that is to come in the months ahead with Massive Worship. Keep your eyes open for events in your area and also keep an eye out for our blog as I will let you know what we are up to. Have a great day and thank you for all of your support! You guys rock!

As mentioned above there are still Sessions for the CMW 101 workshop! They're for any musicians from Grade Nine and older, it's $25 per night, and the next ones are on the evenings of Monday January 24^th and 31^st. Beginning at 7 until 9:30. Please bring your own instruments and join us!

Good Shepherd Parish

3092 Innes Road

Gloucester, Ontario

Hope to see you there!

God Bless,

Brandi Olson

NET Encounter Team One is back on the road and ready for the New Year! We have so much to look forward to: we are in Ontario for this first month then will be starting our trek out West. We will be doing retreats in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and my very own British Columbia.

Our first week of retreats has gone really well. Our first retreat back was our second largest, and was in Lindsay, Ontario. The youth were very interested in the rosary and we gave away quite a few at the end of the day. On Thursday we didn't have a retreat, but had a couple unique events. In the morning we helped to put on a Spirit Day at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Lindsay. There were around three hundred youth there, and we had Mass, did a skit, testimony and drama, and had a time of reflection. Later in the day we got to hang out with some members of CORC. CORC starts for 'Catholics on the Road for Christ,' and they describe themselves as 'mini NET teams,' which is quite accurate. They are youth aged 14 to 25 who put on retreats for Confirmation, First Communion and Reconciliation around the Diocese of Peterborough. We were very impressed and inspired by the zeal and hard work that these young people do. It was great to hang out with them and get to know them :) They'll be in our prayers. We also got to meet Cynthia Francavilla, who was on Team One last year! So awesome! :D
Our retreat on Saturday turned out to be an all girls retreat which has never happened to us before. It was different, especially for the guys, but all in all was a great day and a really awesome retreat.
It felt so good to be back with my team after Christmas break and I realized one thing that I missed a lot was team prayer, which is when the whole team gets together to praise God through music and prayer. I feel so joyful and close to God and unified with my team brothers and sisters when we have team prayer, and I realized why when listening to a song by Joe Zambon. The line, “This is what I was created for” stood out to me. This is what we were created for; we were created to praise God, and we were created to evangelize, to bring others to Christ. That is why being here with NET Canada brings me so much joy, it is a taste of heaven here on Earth, to be living out our faith and spending an hour a day doing what we will spend our time in Heaven doing, praising God with a fellowship of faithful.

I thank God for this new year. This second half is going to be filled with so many amazing things, and I thank God for calling us to NET to use us in this way. Please keep us in your prayers as we continue our mission to challenge young Catholics to love Christ and embrace the life of the Church all across our country.

Till next time,
Yours in Christ,
Maria Kalin
Encounter One

My Name is Katie, and I am Not the Mafia!

Hello to all our faithful blog followers! It is me, Katie Doyle reporting for duty here in Wetaskiwin. Unfortunately before Christmas break, Emma Wynker (our previous blogger) had to leave the team because of personal reasons. Please continue to keep her in your prayers.

We all had a wonderful Christmas break spent with our families. It felt so good to be at home for a little while. December retreat and January training was spent here in Wetaskiwin with the Yellowknife team. We had lots of time spent in worship together. NET alumnus Suzi Maclean came to do music for us during Adoration one night during January training. It was absolutely beautiful! Thanks Suzi!! Our time with the Yellowknife team also had its fair share of fun and laughter. A game called "Mafia" became something played very frequently during our retreat/training. When we meet next, I'm sure we will probably play the game again. We became extremely familiar with the way that each player plays the game. Each of our teams had some time during January training to spend seperately as a team. While the Wetaskiwin team was playing games inside, the Yellowknife team was playing a giant prank on us! At the end of the day, we went to go out to our van, but it was no where to be found! They parked our van beside a snow bank, and burried our entire van in the snow!! We ran over to it to find the words "Yellowknife buried you" written in the snow. Don't worry folks, we will get them back!

Being back in ministry has found the whole team very busy. To start off, our whole team has come down with a sickness! We are nearing the end of it, but we needed a couple days to recuperate. We have a lot of events coming up. As always we have our EDGE (Jr. High) and Lifeteen (Highscool) youth groups every week. God is working very powerfully though both of these youth groups. Also, staring on Feb. 2, we will be starting weekly chastity groups called Real Men for the young men and Glass Alabaster for the young women. We have heard many stories from last year and our very excited to start with this year. For our young adults, we will be starting Theology on Tap. We will get together once a month at a local pub for fellowship and to discuss theology and other topics.

We are so excited for what God is doing in this community, especially with our youth. Thank you so much for faithfully reading our blogs and for praying for our ministry. It makes me so happy that there are so many amazing people that support the work of NET.

Until next time...

God Bless,

Katie Doyle

Infuse Team 3

Wetaskiwin, AB