AO Teens

I know what you are thinking. How can Covid-19 be good for you? It is a virus...and one with a bad reputation!  Covid-19 is not good for us physically. But it is good for our souls.  We often get so caught up in living our own lives that we forget about our Creator. He uses events like Covid-19 for building our souls and helping us to trust in Him even more.  I have been read a book by Lee Strobel called The Case For Faith. Strobel discusses suffering with a friend. He wonders how a loving God can watch all the suffering going on in the world. Strobel's friend points out that Jesus suffered so much more than any of us ever will. Then his friend shared a story. He told how his young daughter had been accidentally run over by his wife. They were both heartbroken. It felt like the end of the world to them. But God helped them both through and strengthened them, and then blessed them with two more children. In the long run God made it work out. Though it hurt at first, he acc...

 First of all, a quick disclaimer: This form of scripture reading is Catholic only in the sense that Ignatius of Loyola originally had the idea. No acceptance of any quirky Catholic beliefs is required for this! Anyway. I haven't written much on here, not since a meme post early on during quarantine, but I'm back in a more serious light. Today I want to discuss a different take on reading God's Word that even many Catholics don't know about, simply because it is an older form of prayer. So what is  Ignatian Contemplation? Ignatian Contemplation was developed, as I mentioned, by Ignatius of Loyola, who also founded the Society of Jesus, AKA the Jesuit Order. Ignatius believed that God can and does speak to us through our imagination as much as through anything else. The Gospels, are, in fact, littered with examples of Jesus using his listeners' imaginations to attempt to communicate ideas to them. All of His parables are fictions that use metaphors they understood mu...