Saskatche-what's up?!

Hello friends from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (try saying that three times fast, eh?). The last little bit we've been going around the diocese of Regina, Prince Albert, and Saskatoon. It's been an amazing time. Such amazing experiences have been happening around Saskatchewan, it's crazy. Just when you think God has shown you the best thing you've ever seen, BAM!!! He shows you something greater!

One retreat we had in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, I had an amazing experience. We were in middle of our Prayer Ministry during the retreat and I'd just finished praying over the guys in my small group when one of them went up and got one of our bookmarks. We have these bookmarks with readings from the gospels marked on them (so you can read about Jesus' life in chronological order) but we'd ran out of bibles, so I ran out and got my own personal bible. I gave it to him and opened it up to Luke. I said if he had any questions, just ask me and I'll help as best as I can. He read for about thirty seconds and looked at me and asked 'Why did God send an angel to Mary and not just tell her Himself?' He was reading the Annunciation. It just so happened that that morning in personal prayer, I'd read the part of Exodus where God presented Himself on Mount Sinai to Moses and the Israelites, so the answer was fresh in my mind. I got to explain to him all about it and why God sent the Angel Gabriel. Reading his Encounter Experience Sheet later, I saw he had written this:

Today I saw that there are actually young people who not only talk the talk about the church, but walk the walk and have fun doing it. I never knew that people could both have faith and have fun. I can't wait for next year's retreat.

This really brought me a lot of joy, to see that God worked through us and into him. It's the little moments like these that truly remind us of why we do what we do, to bring youth to Christ.

God bless,
Tim Elliott
Encounter One

The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few

This is an expression in scripture I have heard a lot but I never realized how true it was until this past week. We six team members are here to build a foundation of youth ministry at Saint Thomas More. Six sounds pretty good for one parish right?

The problem being that the six of us aren't able to respond to all of the different opportunities that arise to evangelize. For example we have two high schools and two middle schools that we visit on a weekly basis. That’s hundreds of students, many of whom we simply don't have time to speak to. That’s many sports events and school celebrations we can’t go to, that’s 4 different sets of classroom presentations the six of us have to focus on in addition to already doing (this Sunday to Sunday) 5 different nights (Cornerstone, Leadership training, Conquest and Challenge, Compass, Cornerstone). We devote a full year

of our lives to do this and we still don't have enough time!

I keep getting getting into the mindset I had long before NET that makes it so easy to say ‘someone else will do it’ someone else will take up the call, someone else will evangelize this person. But I keep realizing that is completely the wrong attitude! We have so many opportunities to Love; to bear Christ’s light to the souls of so many of Edmonton’s youth. It is not a burden or a humdrum task, it is life itself! 

Josh Hickman
iNFUSE2
Edmonton Alberta

Dodgeball

Hello again!! Looking back over the past month at Saint Thomas More there have been two developments to our ministry. Firstly our visits to the Catholic schools attached to the parish has gone up from twice a week to thrice a week, and our junior high youth group Compass went from happening once a month to twice a month.

Its really exciting that we are now spending more time in ministry, which is awesome!! We go to both our high schools every week and one of the junior high's biweekly which makes building relationships so much easier. We now get to spend more time and minister our youth in their own comfortable school environment.

This past weekend we had a social night for our high school youth, we played glow in the Dark dodge-ball which was really fun with lots of time to hang out with the youth, eat some pizza and meet some new people who came out. Josh and Jessica even came as Austrian dodge ball superstars come to pump us up and they did a great job!!

Please continue to pray for us and this ministry.

Stay tuned for more on iNFUSE team 2.

God Bless,
Josh Hickman
St. Thomas More Parish
Edmonton

Empowering our Volunteers

We celebrated the Olympics
with Olympic nuggets from
McDonalds on our day off!

This week one of our main objectives was to interview our newly trained youth leaders, which is the final step in their application process! This means that they can now start participating in a more active way with the junior high school youth group by leading games and small groups, giving their testimonies and even start giving some of the talks. It’s been a really exciting week for both us as a team and the volunteers. For us it’s exciting to be able to really start handing over the reins to the volunteers who will be leading this program even after we leave. It’s also been a big week for the volunteers. We could see the excitement and how seriously they’re all taking this commitment as they came in one by one for their interviews.

Saturday night was the first youth night for most of them as volunteers since being interviewed and while, as a group, they were still learning the same roles they’ve been learning for the last few weeks (greeting, helping with snack, set-up, and take-down), we could see that they were taking the jobs all the more seriously knowing that they were officially volunteers. They joined us for our nightly pro/cons session at the end of the night after the youth had left and they showed us that they were very invested in the night and knew what was going on throughout the night. It’s been incredible to be able to watch them grow as leaders!

God bless,

Katelyn Sutton

Les Équipes NET

Caught up in Grace like an Avalanche

Greetings,
Talk about a whirlwind weekend.  So recently we took our youth for a ski trip at Marmot Basin in Jasper and boy was it ever something, the weather was beautiful,  the mountains were awe-inspiring.  But that is not where this story begins, our story begins that same day at 6:00 in the morning when loaded the youth onto a coach bus to head towards Jasper many laughs were shared, and many naps were taken.

When we arrived in Jasper we were all in awe of the mountains.  We continued the day by hitting the slopes, and after everyone was finished we headed to Hinton, a small community about 30 mins outside of Jasper, to Way of Holiness Retreat center where we played games had food and to close the night off we had prayer time, which included Adoration and Confession.  It was such a powerful night.
The next day we had mass and then got back on the buss to head back to Drayton Valley, all in all it was a great experience, and a fantastic way to marvel in God's beautiful Creation.

Fast Forward and we are back into ministry full steam ahead.  Things in the office have been very busy between Youth visiting and meetings abound we have been consumed but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Recently we had a youth night on St.Valentine's Day in which we had the youth act out the reason why we celebrate St.Valentine's Day and his life, these skits were Hilarious and informative.

God Bless,
Jonathon
iNFUSE 3,Drayton Valley