To those of you whom I met at the Courage Conference:

Welcome to my blog!

I was on vacation last week, and what a great vacation it was!

I spent Wednesday and Thursday visiting a religious order I'm looking into, and finished out the week with the annual Courage Conference on Friday through Sunday. I want to write about both experiences, but for now I'm only going to give highlights:

The religious order is the Oblates of Saint Joseph. I visited the Pennsylvania Province. When I first contacted Father Paul McDonnell, he sent me a little booklet entitled Perpetual Novena in Honor of Saint Joseph and Saint Joseph Marello. In the Pennsylvania Province (I don't know about the California Province), the novena is held every Wednesday evening, and it has pretty good attendance. Ever since Father Paul sent me that little booklet, I've wanted to pray the novena with the community there, and was finally able to do so during my trip. Also, every first Thursday of the month, the Oblates hold a Holy Hour for vocations. This last Thursday was the first Thursday of August, and so I was able to participate in that, too! Whenever you get a chance to go before the Blessed Sacrament, do it!

The Courage conference was from Thursday, August 7 to Sunday, August 10. My original plan had been to visit the Oblates from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday morning, making the full conference, but my car gave me trouble on Tuesday morning. Hence, I got to the conference on Friday morning, just at the end of the first session.

Highlights of the conference:

Meeting J. Frank Pate of And Also With You! He and I were becoming friends before the conference thanks to e-mail, phone conversations, and each others' blogs, but meeting in person rather cemented our friendship, I think. I wish we'd had more one-on-one time together, as we'd planned to spend some prayer time together, but weren't able to accomplish it.

On the last day of the conference I spoke with Father John Harvey, the founder of Courage. He retired recently; his 90th birthday was inApril. I hope I wasn't rude, but I told him he'd probably be getting to Heaven before I do (if I make it--dear readers, let us pray for one another!), and asked him to pray for me there. He said he would. On an impulse, I asked him if I could hug him, he said "Of course" and then said, "Here, I'll give you a blessing now," at which point he placed his hand on my head and called for God's blessing on me and my loved ones.

I met some great people at the conference, heard some great talks, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. The Men's Courage meetings were the two best workshops. During the first one, we had a meditation on the Stations of the Cross adapted to the trials of men bearing the cross of SSA. At the time, it didn't move me, but as the days wore on, it grew on me. I have a copy of them and have the permission of their author to post them on my blog, which I will do so over the next few weeks or months.

One of the workshops was "Releasing the Gifts of the Holy Spirit". It was about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and asking Him to give His gifts to you. One of the exercises was writing letters to Jesus telling Him how you feel about knowing Him better, His healing in your life, and helping other people know Him better. This was awesome, and I think letter writing will become part of my devotional life again (I used to do this as a teenager).

The great thing of the conference was meeting everyone I was able to meet! There's a Star Trek novel, the name of which escapes me, wherein the Enterprise visits a planet with a global transporter network. In the novel, it takes something like 30 seconds to travel anywhere else on the planet. I would love to have such a thing so we could all visit each other. Oh well.

There's more to write about, but I'm sleepy! It's 1:25pm which makes it 3 hours past my bedtime! Good night!