Hey all! Peace in Christ to you! My prayers are with you during this October month of the Holy Rosary. Also, it's Respect Life Month and last week was national OCD Awareness Week. So much goodness! And this Sunday is World Mission Sunday! So much to look forward to as well. World Youth Day is just around the corner, January 2019, in Panama! My dear, dear friends, I just got out of Confession, so that might be why I'm on a writing high and you'll be getting lots of exclamation points. During Confession, the priest was telling me about the World Mission Rosary. It was started by the famously awesome Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For each decade of the rosary, there is a different color, each representing a different region of the world. Check it out! What I'm getting at here are our unexpected church members. This is a wide subject, but this episode is for our friends all around the whole wide world. See, I can get so stuck in my own world of Jacqueline; my own family and circle of friends; my parish up at school; my parish at home; the Central Michigan University community; my city of Bloomfield Hills. Lately, God has been shooting fireworks to get my attention. Really cool, startling bright fireworks. It's as if, I originally saw fireworks in the color orange. Orange and nothing else--that's how fireworks used to be--the color of fire. But technology has advanced, creating all sorts of colors of fireworks with different effects. Think of the sparkly ones, the crackle ones, the multi-colored ones, and the weird circle ones, and the swimming fish fireworks (not sure if all of those descriptions make sense...4th of July opinions...). My point is that orange is a great looking firework and all, it's bright and beautiful, but God is showing me so many more colors in different languages, cultures, and races. During my internship this summer with the Archdiocese of Detroit, I got to work a couple of events with our Hispanic Ministry and Evangelization teams. Guys, it was so cool, humbling, and eye-opening to be the only person in a room who didn't speak Spanish! What a gift--an uncomfortable gift--but a gift nonetheless. I mean, if you want to see advanced fireworks, you gotta get out of your own store-bought fireworks in your backyard. You gotta go out into the dark, cold, crowded, buggy, and sometimes rainy night to see the fireworks. Seeing other cultures, hearing different languages, and feeling like you look like the odd-one-out is like going out into the cold night air--it's a bit shocking and chilling. And it's out of your backyard (at least for me in the suburbs. I know some people see professional fireworks from their lake-view backyards). But what a display!!! Ok, I'm so excited. Check this link out. This website contains pictures from the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel. Countries from all around the world have donated paintings, statues, and mosaics depicting Mary, the Mother of God, to this Basilica. So when you visit the Basilica, you get to see images of Mary from Indonesia, to Canada, to Hungary! Each image is a depiction of Mary but from a different angle and different perspective. God is not flat! Just as the earth He created is not flat! He is beyond three dimensional! So, I'm celebrating and enjoying the members of the Church from all over. And think! I live in Detroit! I can pull into the Mother of God Chaldean Catholic Church and then Most Holy Redeemer in Mexicantown, and then St. Moses the Black Parish all in one day! What is God asking me to do with this colorful insight? Well, I'm going to share some inspirations and ideas:
Other members of our Church may have ways, methods, practices, and styles that are foreign to me, but they are not foreign to God. Here is to the unfamiliar! Here is to our precious Body of Christ!
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AuthorJacqueline St. Clare: I spent six months in a cloistered convent, and now I'm a college student! Archives
April 2021
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Unexpected Church MembersAll words that are underlined can be found on the "Glossary" page
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