Hello again from Wetaskiwin!

I hope that this blog finds everyone well! I pray that God blesses you today and always. Thanks for being faithful followers! I am here to tell you about how our past two weeks have gone. It has been blessed, for sure, as always. Thank you Cecile for writing the last blog! This is Katie reporting to you once again! Sorry for missing a blog last week!

January 28th's EDGE night was cleverly named "Worth Waiting For." The theme was Chastity. I gave a talk on how Chastity is more than abstinence. Chastity is about true love and living purely in God's love. At first the youth reacted like they didn't want to hear about it, but once they got settled in, they soaked up everything that I had to say. I really feel like the Holy Spirit worked through the EDGE night. We did two dramas and relayed them back to the topic of Chastity. The prayer time was also amazing. It really is so cool the way that everyone just quiets down to see what God has to say to them. In Emily's small group, the young Grade 8 girls decided by themselves to make a commitment to a life of Chastity! Praise God for that!

After the EDGE night, we made our way to our favourite 'ol camp, OLVC for a highschool retreat run by Face 2 Face. It was amazing! We got to know a couple of our voluteers a bit better, and we ministered to amazing teens. I know that I was impacted during this retreat, and many of the teens were as well.

After our wonderful weekend at OLVC, we had a spontaneous team day at BANFF NATIONAL PARK! It was absolutely fabulous. A little chilly, but perfect nonetheless. We went into all the shops and walked around the beautiful town. We even got to tour a little bit of the Banff Springs Hotel. We got an outsiders view of the Hotel as well, going up the other side of the mountain to view it from afar. We got to look at the Hot Springs as well. We had an amazing day! I love my team!

This past Friday's EDGE night was on our mother, Mary. Marcus gave a great talk, and the small goup was filled with lots of discussion. Our prayer time was amazing! We had a candle-lit rosary, and the kids joined with us in praying to Mary, and then offered her an intention to bring to Jesus.

Sunday, we had an "Ice Cream SundaY." It brought in a lot of donations for our youth ministry, and we got to have a lot of fun with our awesome parishioners! As a promo after mass, Emily and I danced around to 'Ice Cream' from 'Anne of Green Gables' with Ice Cream Cones in our hands! It was quite embarasing, but extremely funny!!!

Yesterday's team day finished with us going to see the local Highschool boys basketball game! It felt like we were all back in highschool just for a moment! We cheered and cheered our little hearts out! We can't wait to continue going to support our youth as they play sports! So much fun!

Tonight, we are going to have our first 'main' Glass Alabaster night! We are really excited for this one, and we would continue to ask you to pray for this!

Until next week,

Katie Doyle
iNFUSE Team 3
Wetaskiwin, AB

God's Never-ceasing Glory

Greetings fellow inhabitants of the world wide web!

This is April Fogle again here, and I am excited to tell you more about God’s never ceasing glory in the life of Yellowknife Infuse Team 1.

On Tuesday, we put on a Rally for all the grade 5/6 students in the Catholic schools of Yellowknife. There were over 200 kids, and let me tell you they were little balls of energy! We had so much fun doing with the games, skits, and music (we had the whole band set up... we felt like Massive Worship.) Even more so, it was incredible because we got to see God move yet again. They were actually very attentive during Adele’s “Who R U?” talk, and seemed to get a lot out of it. As well I heard from many of them that they loved the dramas and understood the messages behind them. And the greatest of these in my opinion is that during prayer time they all were really receptive, and when Tyler asked them all who enjoyed having the quiet time, hands shot up everywhere. It amazes me how God works even in the hearts of people so young. His work is so beautiful and glorious to be a part of.

Wednesday we had a wonderful team day in the sunny -9 degrees weather. We got tons of sun and fresh air playing ice hockey on Frame Lake for the entire afternoon. Although many of us got a few bumps and bruises, we all were thankful to get the exercise and to enjoy the beautiful weather.

Friday was our Ignite called “Yours To Discover” where we focused on showing the teens more of their own strengths. We gave a personality/temperaments test to them which classified them into 4 types: Lion, Beaver, Golden Retriever, and Otter. They seemed to really enjoy it, and the night was yet again a great success all thanks to our incredible Saviour.

We had a very new and exciting event added to our plethora of weekly occurrences; our first “Awaken.” Awaken is our high school youth group for grades 9-12 which happens on Saturday nights right after our youth mass, and let me tell you we started it off with a bang.

The night was themed after the ever so popular game show “Minute to Win It.” We set up the projector and blasted the music creating a somewhat similar scene to the real game. We all thoroughly enjoyed the night and all the games, and the victorious “Team Fistpump” triumphed after winning the majority of the games and seemed to appreciate their prizes of gift cards to Tim Hortons. We had a great turnout, and we are expecting even more next week because there was a school play that was going on, and many of the teens really wanted to come couldn’t.

Our team was very excited for the success of the night, and were so thankful for God’s work in the night. To top everything else, God blessed us even more with the most incredible northern lights I have ever seen in my life. The colors were so vibrant, and they danced like they were alive. I could not imagine anyone witnessing such a wonder and not believing there is a God. It was simply breath-taking!

As for this week coming up, we have much in store. We have lots of planning meetings, and Movie Night this Friday for Ignite. We are also doing another overnight retreat at Trappers Lake retreat facility for students from Behchoko, a community an hour outside of Yellowknife. We would greatly appreciate your continued prayers for this ministry, especially for the retreat. I look forward to next week to tell you more about the work of our glorious God!

God Bless,

April Fogle

Yellowknife iNFUSE Team 1

Encountering Team 1

Hey Y’all! This is Encounter Team One coming at you from Saskatchewan! In the last couple weeks we have traveled from the Peterborough Diocese, to Mississauga, and then to Saskatchewan!

Our time in Mississauga was great. We put on four Confirmation retreats for the four schools there. They all went well, and we’ve found that we have grown as a team in our adaptability and communication since being back on the road. Claire, Marc and Katie did fantastic jobs on the talks, and I think those youth have a good grasp of the magnitude of the sacrament they will be receiving.

We had a cool experience at one of the retreats. We were having a bit of trouble keeping the youth’s attention, being the fun-loving bunch that they were. During prayer ministry though, Judith gave a little spiel on the rosary before we started, and handed rosaries out. It was something we decided to try because we want to spread the message of the power of the rosary. Almost all the youth took one and I have never seen a quieter or more reverent prayer time. They didn’t want to leave at the end of it. It was beautiful. Fr. Peter, Fr. Vid and Miri, the youth minister, were so welcoming at Merciful Redeemer Parish and made us feel at home. We had Mass on every retreat while in Mississauga, which was wonderful. Seeing the Church filled with youth really filled me with a renewed appreciation of the importance of the Mass and an urgency to help the youth of the country realize its importance.

We spent four days traveling. Our days have been, on average, 9 hours of traveling. The trip was great and I feel our team has grown, not only closer as you only can when spending 40 hours in a van, but also in zeal for our mission because of the amazing host homes that we have stayed in. Since so much happened in those four days, I have made this video to try and capture a glimpse of our trip to Saskatchewan. Enjoy! We sure did :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Api8cMlWSM

Now we are in Regina, Saskatchewan, after spending a few days in Wilcox putting on retreats at the school, Notre Dame. We got to stay in dorms and hang out with the youth for two days which was so cool. We also celebrated my birthday on January 31st, which is also the feast day of one of our patron saints, St. John Bosco. My team created a hunt with clues in which I had to find all my team, my ‘fellowship,’ in Walmart. They kidnapped and blindfolded me and took me there. It was hilarious and so much fun. I love my team so much.

Until next time,
Stay Sweet and God bless,
Maria Kalin
NET Encounter Team One

LifeLine, here we come!

Greetings and salutations once again from Steinbach, Manitoba!

As our first month back is flying by, things are really moving along for our team. We had our first host home switch of the second half and us women of iNFUSE two have come to realize the impact of the game "Dutch Blitz" on our host homes. Almost every host home we have stayed with has joined us in this game and it has been great for our relational ministry.

We also had our first leadership training workshop for some of our volunteers. Being able to tell the leaders exactly what our plans are for youth ministry in this parish was refreshing and really helped us to re-visualize why we are doing what we are doing and how exactly we are going to do it. It also helped our leaders feel a bit more empowered about evangelizing and getting involved in this wonderful ministry.

Coming from BC I have never had to experience not having a priest for Mass due to the weather, but here in Manitoba it is a normal occurrence during the winter. Due to this fact our second youth Mass was converted into a Praise and Worship session followed by the Sunday readings and a reflection. We had quite a few people come out despite the weather. One woman I spoke with who wasn’t sure about whether or not she should be coming out to the youth Mass (she joked that maybe she was too old), but told me after that she loved what we did and she wants to keep coming back for the youth Mass.

Thankfully the weather improved enough for our team to go into Winnipeg for our team day on Tuesday. Each of us was able to obtain a pair of skates, either from parishioners or the local sports store. And although we are all at varying levels of skating ability and varying levels of affection for ice, we had a ton of fun and were able to enjoy the beautiful day on the ice. Phylicia, Amanda and I were also able to spend a bit of time at a lovely place called Baked Expectations. A number of people had recommended that we visit there for one of our women’s sessions and it definitely met, if not exceeded, our “expectations”. Brownies, cheesecake and hot drinks made our winter day in Winnipeg perfect.

One of my passions in life is books - especially books that are inspiring, insightful, and that lead people into a better understanding of their faith. Because of this I am so excited about a book fundraiser we are doing here in our parish to support the youth ministry program. We were able to obtain 250 copies of Matthew Kelly’s “Rediscover Catholicism” book which we are selling for a steal at $5 each. I have heard so many good things about this book and cannot wait to get feedback from the parishioners who have bought it so far. As a team, we think that this book will be incredibly helpful in getting people fired up about being Catholic and about the Church in general.

Our high school retreat, “Open the Door” was a great success with 11 teens and 3 adult volunteers coming out to learn more about how we can open the door of our hearts to Christ and to finally throw away the keys to that door so that Christ can come with us into the rest of our lives. Prayer ministry was especially incredible! Seeing all those teens praying in the church was beautiful.

REACT this past weekend, entitled “Propaganda”, saw grade 6, 7 and 8 teens looking at the effects of the media in our everyday lives and how we can choose what to listen to, watch and believe. And next weekend is the start of our high school youth group, “Lifeline”. I know that this is one of the ministries I have been waiting for…keep it in your prayers!

God bless! And see you next week.

Signing off. Elizabeth Fitzmaurice

Lots Going On In The YK

Greetings fellow inhabitants of the world wide web!

Do I ever have an exciting week to tell you all about in the life of Yellowknife iNFUSE Team 1. As I mentioned last week we were busy preparing for our upcoming High School weekend retreat on Friday and Saturday, as well as our Ignite night on self image. It is very safe to say our gracious and glorious God has done His works in both.

Ignite was very successful, and the team did a great job together pulling it off. We took pictures and advertisements out of magazines and plastered the walls with them, which the guys could only describe as “overwhelming,” and used it as the basis of our set up. Tyler and Adele gave a talk on self-image, which we found the youth were very receptive to from our discussion in small groups.We also had a prayer time which included a self reflection, and a drama which our team wrote. Both seemed to move the hearts of everyone. We also introduced two-on-one prayer to them which involves two of us netters praying with each person individually, praying for their intentions and so forth. The feedback from the youth was that they really appreciated and enjoyed the prayer time. Altogether everyone enjoyed the night and they want to come back for more and to bring their friends.

Sandwiched between two amazing events, we received our new Ignite shirts, and also our high school youth group “Awaken” t-shirts. If I do say so myself they look rather good, and our team was very excited to get them and try them on. It felt like a late Christmas for us all.

After a long week of preparation and slight anxiety, our team finally found ourselves at “Encounter,” our high school overnight retreat this past weekend. Let me tell you, God is so incredibly good. I was unsure of whether or not our unpracticed parish team could take on the task of a NET Encounter Team, but my uneasiness was quickly dissolved when we began the retreat Friday night.

The team did amazing all thanks to Holy Spirit, and tons of amazing volunteers, including the Catholic Women's League and members of the Knights of Columbus. We owe them a great amount of credit to the success of the weekend, and for feeding the hungry bellies of all 33 of us.

The weekend was so much fun, and we got to build many great and new relationships with all the youth who attended. All of the talks, dramas, skits, and prayer times went amazing, and the retreatants had so much positive feedback and didn’t want to leave. Prayer time especially seemed to be a very powerful experience, and many of them said that it has given them a desire to pray more.

The team is so especially excited because unlike an Encounter team, we are able to witness the continuation of their journey of faith, and continue to lead them throughout their journey. This retreat allowed this to happen and left them eager to attend our first “Awaken” night which we will be this Saturday coming up.

God is doing wondrous things in Yellowknife, and all I can do is lift my eyes to Him and thank Him. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, and please continue to keep us, and this ministry, in them.

Until next time, God bless!

April Fogle

Yellowknife iNFUSE Team 1