Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Welcome back this week as we continue to celebrate Easter! Today is the eighth and last day of the Octave of Easter. Today is also the Feast of Divine Mercy. Today we remember how great God’s love and mercy for us really are. There will be Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the main Sanctuary from after the 10:00 AM Mass today until 4:30 PM. The Divine Mercy Chaplet will be prayed, as is tradition, at 3:00 PM. Please come and join us.

Thanks again to EVERYONE who helped make our Holy Week and Easter celebration so awesome! I am still higher than a kite from the Easter Vigil Mass. It was a beautiful experience. I would like to offer special thanks to all of our high school folks who read the meditations at the Eucharistic Adoration following Mass on Holy Thursday. You guys did such a great job! I was so proud of you. The time in prayer following the Mass of the Lord’s Supper until midnight ended up being my favorite time of all of Holy Week and Easter. It was a truly beautiful, moving experience. I will remember it always. Thank you.

Perhaps this week as we move into the Easter Season, we would do well to focus on Faithfulness. We hear a lot more today about UN-faithfulness than we do about Faithfulness. It seems sometimes like our entire world is unfaithful. There’s unfaithfulness in marriage. There’s unfaithfulness in friendship. There’s unfaithfulness in business and work. And there’s our continual unfaithfulness to God. God has promised His on-going faithfulness to us. And God asks for our faithfulness to Him. Maybe this Easter season we could all work a little harder at being faithful to God. I find it most interesting how quick and easy it is for all of us to get angry and upset at God the instant that we THINK that He is being unfaithful to us. He doesn’t do things our way. He doesn’t do what we want Him to do. He doesn’t work on our time-table, and we immediately think He is unfaithful to us. And yet, we live lives continually steeped in sin and sinful ways, and we see none of our own unfaithfulness to God. What gives?

Last weekend, we all renewed our Baptismal promises. Those promises have got to be much, much more than just words. We have to live those promises every minute of every single day. Do we? Of course, we do not. Our working at faithfulness demands that we continue to convert our every day lives to Jesus’ way. We need to be more faithful in our prayer. We need to more faithful in the moral life. We need to be more faithful in service. Our conversion is not over with Lent and Easter. In many ways, it’s just begun. God continues to work in the lives of each one of us. The more we cooperate with Him, the more faithful we are going to be.

Most of us know how important faithfulness is to marriage, or to our friendships, or to our families. Solid relationships depend upon faithfulness. This is also so true of our relationship with God. It’s got to be real. We need to be more faithful to that relationship than any other, because our relationship with God affects every other relationship that we have. Faithfulness doesn’t happen over night. It has to be built up and reinforced with our daily actions. Let us be faithful to Jesus. It is the way for miracles to happen!

It’s hard to believe, but we are now in April. And that means that we are now only weeks away from the 2005 Spring Fling, our biggest fund-raiser of the year. Please keep this effort in your prayers. Volunteers are still needed for the work leading up to the event on April 29 th, and also for helping out that night. If you can help out, please call the numbers listed in the Spring Fling announcement that is carried in this bulletin.

Also, we have been looking for a very special green stone rosary that was lost in the new church. It has exceptional emotional value for one of the members of our Parish family. If you have found it, please let me know. We can all say a prayer to St. Anthony that it might be found.

God Bless! Have a great week!

In Christ
Fr. Kevin

If you can’t sleep, don’t count sheep. Talk to the Shepherd!