On October 28, we kicked off another exciting season of Families In Christ. It was encouraging to see that we had about 400 parishioners in attendance. During this Year of Faith, our parish wants to redouble our efforts to reach out to families in order to help parents and children to grow in their faith in a way that will impact their daily lives together.
We are committed to providing a welcoming and comfortable environment for all our families. This year, we have incorporated music and songs in our program. It is really awesome to see children smiling, laughing, dancing and singing their hearts out. Our music leader, Tom Oram, has a real gift and talent for drawing people in to experience faith through song.
We’re also bringing a bit of the youth ministry spirit to this event through games, fun, prizes and talks that are easily relatable to the children and the adults. Our first speaker, Matt Laboda, captured the attention of both the young and not-so-young. Matt has a great sense of humor and also has the ability to go deep into the faith in a way that is relevant to real life.
All families are welcome to attend our next Families In Christ event on Sunday, November 18. All families are asked to bring canned goods that will be donated to St. Matthew’s House. John Paul II taught that the way of the family is the way of the Church. He showed us how Christ came to redeem the human person and fulfill the deepest longings in our heart for love, joy and meaning even in the midst of suffering. The Holy Father’s great insight, however, was that each human person enters into the world by way of the family and that the family is our first school of love, which is meant to provide each of us with our first experience of unconditional love. In fact, the communion of persons in the family is meant to be an icon of the divine communion of Persons in the Trinity. At Families In Christ, we try to make sense of all this. We try to answer John Paul II’s calls for families to become who we are: communities of life, love and meaning.