Witness Sunday

Today is the Sunday before Sign Up Sunday. A participant from an Arise Session was to speak at each of our Masses and tell of their experience.

I was at the 7:00 PM, Saturday and my Witness rocked! She said it all. You'd think I paid her! Here is her testimony:

Good evening. My name is Carleen Delio and I am here to ask you to consider signing up for the Arise Program, next weekend. I participated in the Arise Program last year and I'm signing up again.

In all honesty I was a tad hesitant about committing for six weeks because I knew I would not be able to attend one session during that time period. No problem. The program is very flexible and not sequential, it is individualized and I had no trouble completing the lesson on my own. We met in small groups either during the day or at night, depending upon schedules, and I met people from all walks of life, in our parish, whom I had never seen before.

Another thing I wondered about was preparation and whether I would have the time to prepare adequately. I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to read the material; I actually enjoyed setting a little time aside each week because it made me take the time to think about God, read the Bible and relate the readings to my own life.

Even better was coming together as a group and talking about the lesson. The program made me realize that even though we adults are at various stages of faith development we have a common bond, our faith. So by coming together we learn from each other and benefit from others' view points.

I found Arise to be personally enriching and spiritually nourishing. For me it was an opportunity to share experiences of God working in our lives and to build community within our parish here at St. Mary's...I invite you to come and see!

Amen? Amen!