What's Your Story?
Our Spiritual Advisor
We begin a great month of celebrating the Lord’s gifts to us and sharing our faith to grow ourselves better and help our families and friends and workmates also grow themselves. We start with the celebration of All Saints and can share the precious stories of our favorite saints like our first name and Confirmation choice and the happenings and occasions in our lives that have brought a saint or several into our ways of life.
I may have shared this before, but I love sharing the story of my connection with St. Anthony the Patron of lost articles. I’ve needed him quite a few times in my life and learned the value of the friendship with him from my dad with whom I worked a lot in the summers of my youth. My dad was a marble contractor – installing marble sills for windows, and hearths and mantels for fireplaces in homes AND altars and communion rails in quite a few churches around Toledo (including Michigan) and other places in Ohio. Dad shared with me that St. Anthony is a great help in finding things that get lost. The older I’m getting, the more I need to pray to St. Anthony, and it is absolutely amazing how often that prayer works! My sense is that it’s working 100% right now. I catch myself chuckling and smiling and thanking God for faith!!!
My first name is Edward, middle is John, and I chose Joseph as my Confirmation Saint because I had a brother born right after me whom my parents named Joseph and he died of leukemia while still very young. I wanted to honor him (and them) by choosing Joseph as my Confirmation name and I’m still very happy with that move because I see St. Joseph, spouse of Mary the Mother of Jesus as a tremendous helper to make “family” so important a part of our human condition designed by God to save the world…
This is pretty long already, and I’ve only mentioned two of my favorite saints. All Souls’ Day and Thanksgiving are important too – to remember those who have already died and are very hopefully in heaven as we pray for them (part of our LARGE family, right?); and the holiday of Thanksgiving celebrates the first coming together of pilgrims and native Americans in the New World in 1621. That’s a good sign of our ancestors praising God and forming a nation doing it! Faith is a bedrock to keep building on, eh?
Have a great November and share your stories…..!
Fr Skip (story behind this too)