Now, if you go to eucharistic revival.org, you will see kind of the framework of the Bishops vision for this Eucharistic revival. And I wanted to just share with you a couple sentences on the main page that I find to be so beautiful and so profound. So here it is, it, the title is, says Revival is in the Air, an exciting journey ahead. And this is what our bishops have to say. Our world is hurting, we all need healing, yet many of us are separated from the very source of our strength. Jesus Christ invites us to return to the source and the summit of our faith in the celebration of the Eucharist. The National Eucharistic Revival is a movement to restore understanding and devotion to this great mystery here in the United States by helping us to renew our worship of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Wow, so powerful.

And what an exciting time for us to be living in. Now, I know that the bishops are kind of responding to the reality that so many Catholics don’t really understand that Jesus is fully present in the Eucharist and don’t completely understand this mystery. And so I believe the bishops and the church guided by the Holy Spirit is recognizing this need for our church to have this type of renewal, this revival. And it really is an exciting time for us as Catholics, and especially for those of us that truly do believe in the true presence of Christ and the Eucharist, and love the Eucharist, and love going to mass and love going to adoration. This is a time for us to be sharing that profound love for the Eucharist with others. I think just like the bishops are being called and guided by the Holy Spirit to really set this in motion, so are we as the faithful, we’re called to respond in the same way, to participate in this Eucharistic revival and to share the depth and the joy of our faith and our understanding in this world that is so me in need of Christ’s healing, his presence, his love, his mercy.

So this is a time for all of us, not just our bishops and our, not just our priests and our pastors, but for all of us to really come to our Lord and and grow in our relationship with him in a relationship with the Eucharist, and then also in our desire to help lead others to him as well. And so for me, I wanted to do this podcast episode. It’s been something that has been on my heart for a while, and I’m really excited to share with you some of the things that myself, my husband, and our family has done because we have had a holy hour throughout our entire marriage, and we take our children, our teenagers every week to adoration. And we have also seen and witnessed firsthand so many miracles in bringing both children and teens to adoration throughout the ministries that we’ve been involved with.

And so that’s what I’m gonna dive into today. I’m gonna share some stories, share some things that we do as a family that might be helpful if, if taking your kids to adoration is something that you maybe you’re already doing or want to start doing. And then I just wanna share with you also a little bit about the ways in which I’ve experienced the profound love of Christ through Eucharistic Adoration. So let’s do this. First of all I grew up in the church, went to mass every Sunday with my family, but honestly, I think it was just kind of the timeframe that I grew up in. I never was exposed to Eucharistic Adoration until my early twenties. I was already a youth minister and I went on a retreat and the priest exposed the Eucharist and I remember thinking, what is going on?

What is this? Nobody explained it to me. I had no idea what was going on. I had never in my entire life up until that point ever experienced Eucharistic adoration. But once I started to understand it and had the opportunities to go on retreats, at that time, there was no parish in my area that offered Eucharistic adoration. So it was more of a kind of a special thing that maybe occurred on retreats every once in a while. But every time I had the opportunity to go to adoration, I was deeply, deeply moved. And then in my mid twenties, that’s when I first started dating my husband now. And I’ll never forget on our first date, he took me to play miniature golf. Then we went to dinner and then to a movie. It was a Star Wars movie. Of course, my husband is like a big time Star Wars fan, but after the movie he was, we got in the car and he was gonna drive me home and he said to me, Hey, would you like to go visit my best friend?

And I was like, of course, of course I would. Here is this amazing man that I was, you know, starting to really have a lot of interest in. And of course I wanted to meet his best friend or visit his best friend. And so he said, okay. So we started driving and we were talking, and then he pulled into this church and we get out and I’m like, your, your friend is here. And he’s like, come on. And so we go in and we go to this back door and he opens this like, he has this like padlock thing and we go into it and I’m like, what is going on? And we walk in and there is a little Eucharistic chapel, adoration chapel in this church. And we go in and we kneel. And seriously, up to this point I was thinking, is his friend meeting us here at this church ?

And we kneel down, we start praying. And it instantly hit me at that moment as I was looking at our beloved Lord in the Holy Eucharist, that this is who my husband was referring to as his best friend. And I kinda nudged him with my, with my elbow. And I said, ah, it’s so cool to see that your best friend is also my best friend. And he said, I know, I know. And so we spent the end of our day, spent about a half an hour there in adoration together. And I remember just kneeling before our Lord, thanking him for the gift of this new friendship that was developing my life with my now husband. And just the ways in which our Lord always seems to surprise me with his love. And so that was it. A couple months later, like six months later, my husband then proposed to me outside of that adoration chapel.

And it was really then at the beginning of our engagement that we started that we actually, you know, signed up to take a holy hour. So we officially signed up for a Holy Hour. We were assigned a Holy hour, and throughout our engagement, we went every single week. And that was such an incredible blessing during our engagement to, I mean, we had several date nights a week because we were engaged and, and young. But that night with our Lord, that was like the most profound. And I think it really set a foundation for our relationship and for our marriage that Christ would be at the very center of it. And then we just decided to keep that holy hour. We just kept it going after we got married. And then we just started to really know that this was gonna be such an important and integral part of our family’s life, was having this holy hour every week.

We know that Sunday mass is the most important hour of our week, but this holy hour would truly become a special hour of grace for us. And it has been for the last 20 years. And in that holy and sacred chapel we have throughout the years, you know, welcomed seven children and, you know, had babies and toddlers, infants, you know, young ones. Now we have teenagers and all the ages really have grown up going to adoration every week. And that’s one of the questions that I get so often is how do you take little ones to adoration? How do you take toddlers and infants and four-year-olds and six year olds to adoration and expect them to sit there and be quiet and reverent and respectful and adoration? That’s the big question, right? And I actually think that’s probably one of the biggest concerns or fears that people have when they think about taking their children to adoration.

Like, is this going to, how does this work? And how do you do it? And one of the first things that I tell people is that we don’t expect our babies and toddlers and small children to sit and be enthralled in adoration. It’s not possible. It’s not realistic. We know that babies and toddlers and children are going to be children. And although we have somewhat of expectations, like if they’re three and four years old, we don’t, you know, we have expectations that they’re not running around like crazy or throwing toys across the room, but we also know that their little bodies are gonna be moving, they’re gonna be making noises. They might cry at times, they might spit up in the chapel. There’s things that are gonna happen and we know that that’s gonna be okay. So one of the first things we’ve done is we’ve really dropped that expectation that our children are gonna sit there and be perfect.

That is not what I, I believe our Lord is asking of us, but the scriptures make it very clear and the gospel and, and our Lord makes it very clear, bring the children to me, let the children come to me. And that is what we’ve done. And so we know that they’re gonna move around. We give them books and little toys to play with you know, little wooden rosaries and, and some of the, the religious toys that can kind of keep them, you know, active during it. There have been times that my husband or I have had to take them out for periods just because, you know, maybe they needed a little bit of a break at times. But I have to say this, our children have loved it as well. They don’t fight us about it, and probably because they know, like, this is just something we do and we just go every week and we try to get them involved as much as possible.

And I’m gonna share that with you in a minute. But I also wanna share some of the miracles that we’ve experienced in adoration and going to adoration as a family. Now, this episode is like, I don’t have enough time to go into all of them, but what I can say is this, when we bring our children and we come to adoration and we bring them before the Lord, undoubtedly miracles are gonna happen because we know that we are there in front of him before him and his glory. We know that we are surrounded by thousands of angels and the saints, and we know that our blessed mother is there praying with us. And so of course, miracles are gonna happen. And I’m sure that there have been countless miracles that we’re not even aware of. But one miracle happened early on. This was actually before we had children, we, it was just my husband and I, we were married at the time.

And I had, I was pregnant. I had been pregnant with my first child who we ended up miscarriage. We had a miscarriage with that, with that first baby right around 16 weeks. And I was absolutely devastated. I mean, it was the first miscarriage I had experienced. It was my first pregnancy. I was so excited for this baby, for this life, and I was really in a grieving process. We went to our holy hour about a day or two after I had miscarried. And so the pain was still so raw and so, so heavy, and so there, and right after I had had the miscarriage, a good friend of mine said to me, she said, Larissa, it might be helpful if you name this baby so that you can include this child in your daily prayers and ask for their intercession, knowing that they are in the arms of our Lord.

And so I wanted to name this child, and I had gone to adoration hoping to pray for a name. But when I went into the adoration chapel, I had prayed, Lord, it would be nice to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, because I thought it would just be helpful in picking a name. And so I was in adoration with my husband. We were praying quietly. I was just kind of trying to hold back tears and just really wishing I had some way of knowing if the baby was a boy or a girl, and really discerning the name. And at the time that we were in this chapel, there was an older Hispanic woman also in there praying quietly. And with the three of us, we were just in there praying silently when all of a sudden this woman said to me, she pointed at me and had, she had really broken English, but she looked at me and she pointed to my stomach area, and she kind of put her hand on her stomach. And she said to me, she said, you baby. And then she kind of pointed to her stomach and I shook my head and I said, no, no baby. And she looked at the Eucharist and she looked back at me and she said it again, and she pointed to me and, and my stomach. And she said, you, you baby. And now with tears like burning in my eyes, I said, no, no, there’s no baby.

And she looked back at the Eucharist and I could tell she was frustrated a little bit, that she was having a hard time communicating. She prayed a little bit longer, and then she turned back at me one more time again, she said, you baby. And then she pointed up towards heaven and she said, baby was a girl, baby girl. And she looked back at the Eucharist and kept praying. And I looked at our Lord . And I remember just being in total awe in that moment that he was, that he had answered that prayer so profoundly. And we named her Francis after my grandmother. And she is one of our little saints in heaven. And we asked for her intercession all the time for our family. Shortly after that we got pregnant again, and we had our first son, Joshua. A year later we had our second son, Caleb.

And then a year later, , our third son Noah. And I remember being in adoration with the three of them. Noah was our newborn little infant when I was holding him in my arms. And Joshua and Caleb, I think Joshua was three at the time. Caleb was two. And they were very active little boys in adoration. And there were definitely times that I could not keep them still. And again, that was fine. They would just kind of crawl around most of the time because we had our own assigned holy Hour. There were oftentimes, like there was very few times anyways, that other people were in there with us. But if somebody else came in, it just always seemed to me that they were delighted to see the children there. It didn’t seem to bother them. Nobody ever complained about it. If we asked them if our children were upsetting them or bothering them, they would often reply, no, I love being in here with you and your children.

I love praying with you and your family. We’ve never in all these years ever encountered someone that seemed to be put off by our children. And so if you’re thinking about this, I want to share with you just from the depths of my heart, don’t let the fear of the noises or activities of your children scare you from taking them to adoration. Especially if you do sign up for your own hour. Now, certainly you would, it might be different if you were going into somebody else’s hour and and bringing all of them in, but if you were able to get your own hour or to take your children occasionally to adoration at different times I just, my experience has been that those other people that are in adoration are delighted to see young families, young children, teenagers in the adoration chapel.

So I just wanted to kind of soften some of your concerns around that. But I wanna come back to this story of Joshua and Caleb. They were in there and just kind of wiggling around, moving around, moving around, crawling under the chairs, things like that. We were praying, my husband and I were praying the rosary, and all of a sudden my two year old Caleb stopped and froze in front of the Eucharist. His little two year old body just froze right there in front of the, in front of the Eucharistic monstrous. And he just stared at Jesus in the Eucharist for five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds. My husband and I were just kind of watching him. We were like, what? He never sits still. What is he doing? He just was standing frozen, looking at our Lord. And after about 30 to 40 seconds of him just standing there staring at our, at our Lord, my other son, Joshua, said, Caleb, Caleb, what are you doing?

What are you looking at? He kept asking him, Caleb was totally frozen, speechless, not moving, not making a sound, just looking at the Eucharist. A minute goes by more seconds, 15 more seconds, 20 more seconds. My husband and I are now just completely in awe of what is happening before us. And finally my oldest son yells at him, Caleb, what are you doing? What do you see? And all of a sudden Caleb kind of shakes his head a little bit and, and looks at us, and he points to the Eucharist and he says, Jesus, I see Jesus.

And then moments later, he starts moving around, crawling around again under the chairs. But at that moment, my husband and I looked at it ourselves and we thought, oh my gosh, we know that our little boy just saw our Lord. He just had a moment where he saw something that our eyes couldn’t see, but he had an encounter with our Lord that we believe was incredibly profound for him. Throughout the years, it’s been also very powerful to watch my children bring their hearts and their prayers to our Lord in adoration particularly when they’re struggling with something or when our family has had, you know, major prayer requests, things like that. I know that it is significant for them to see us as a family coming to our Lord every week and bringing those big prayer intentions to him. I’ll never forget one time picking up my children from school.

One day they went to a Catholic school, and as they were coming out, walking out to the car, one of my little guys, he was probably second or third grade, was crying. He was pretty upset. And I, I got out of the car and I was trying to comfort him, and I said, what’s going on? And he said, oh my gosh, it’s just been such a terrible day. And all of this stuff had happened, and he had gotten into an argument with one of his friends, and there it just sounded like it was just kind of one of those really bad days. And I knew that adoration was taking place in the parish church, which is right there on the same block as the school. And so I said to him, would you like to go and spend a few minutes with our Lord and just share with him what’s on your heart?

And my son, through his tears, began to nod and said, yes, can we go for a few minutes? And so we all went in there and knelt before our Lord in adoration. And I just let him have some moments where he could just tell Jesus what he was feeling and bring the sadness to him. And as a family, we prayed for his friend in the class and for the situation that had happened earlier in the day. And we set a decade of the rosary and then we left. And as we were walking out to the car, I’ll never forget my son, he just wrapped his arms around me and he said, thank you, mommy. I feel so much better now. And I remember thinking, what a blessing it is that we have the Eucharist, that we can bring our children to our Lord anytime, but especially when they’re hurting, when they’re struggling, when they need a few minutes to just have some quiet time and to be, you know, spiritually nourished by our Lord who loves them so very much.

And so these are just a few things. We’ve had so many miracles actually happen in adoration. People that have randomly come in that were in really difficult situations. We had the opportunities to pray with them and to pray over them. And again, we’ve brought many intentions over the years and our children have seen the ways in which our Lord has answered those prayers. Maybe not always in accordance with our wills, but, but they have seen how our Lord has heard those prayers and answered them in his own perfect way. And so I wish I had hours and hours to share with you many more stories, but I really wanted to get into sharing with you some of the things we do as a family in adoration. So for us, it’s kind of cool, our holy hour, it takes us about 25 to 30 minutes to drive there.

Again, when my husband and I first started adoration, when we were engaged, this happened to be the only chapel in our entire valley at the time that had just started offering adoration. So there were no parishes close to us that had it. Now pretty much all of our parishes in our area have adoration, which is so amazing. But we still go to this chapel, which is about a 30 minute drive from where we live because this has just been kind of our eucharistic adoration home. And for us, it feels like a little bit of a pilgrimage every time we go there, we get in the car and just drive there, we’re preparing our hearts, talking to the kids about what they wanna bring to our Lord. And it just kind of gives our kids an opportunity to settle in before we even get to the chapel.

But we go in there and our Holy Hour usually looks something like this. We go in, we spend a little bit of time in silent prayer, anywhere between five, seven to seven, eight minutes in prayer, just silently. And then oftentimes we will start our rosary. And the way we do our rosary is every child. So we have seven children, but our five oldest usually lead a decade of the rosary. So they’re involved in leading it, offering their intentions at the beginning of each of their mysteries that they lead. And then in between, so after each decade when we do the Fatima Prayer, after we say the Fatima Prayer, we sing Ave Maria. So I’m a terrible singer, but we just sing like Ave Ave Ave Maria, like , oh my gosh, I can’t believe I just sing that because I’m terrified of singing.

But we just kind of sing that little version of Ave Maria. I obviously just gave you a little snippet of it, but the thing that’s really cool about that is that when our children are young, like 2, 3, 4 years old, and maybe they don’t know all of the prayers yet, or don’t know, are, are not able to say the prayers, they are all able to sing that prayer and they love singing it. So just singing that part in between each decade gives them a chance to feel like they’re involved, which is very, very cool. And so we do that, which usually takes about 20 minutes to pray our rosary. And then again, we might spend some time in silence, or we will ask one of our children to read the upcoming gospel for Sunday. So we like to usually read the gospel that’s coming up just so we can all be thinking about it and reflecting on it.

And so sometimes we’ll ask our kids, Hey, you know, think about this gospel. How does it relate to your life? What do you think the priest on Sunday might talk about or preach about in his homily? In regards to this, to this gospel Reading, things like that. We kind of get them thinking about that. Sometimes when we are in adoration, we will lead our children. Either my husband and I will lead them in some Le Davina. So depending on the gospel reading or maybe a different scripture passage, we might read a sentence or two. And we’ll just read it and then ask them to reflect on it. Maybe we might ask them a little question like, what word or phrase stood out to you from this scripture passage? We’ll invite them to share that, just what the word or phrase was.

We might do that several times with that scripture passage as a form of Le Davina. And then sometimes we will encourage them to just read on their own, maybe read scripture or read from a spiritual book or a book about a saint. Sometimes we will play the Hallow app, which is a great app. There’s some really beautiful meditations on there. There’s also the gospel reading some powerful talks, things like that. But usually in adoration, we will play some sort of meditation, or even again, sometimes my husband and I will lead them in a reflection or a meditation. Sometimes it’ll be as simple as this. We will just invite our children to look at the Eucharist, to look at Jesus. And we’ll say to them, okay just take a moment to thank Jesus for the things in your life that you’re most thankful for.

And then we’ll give them a few, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, to just silently think about the things they’re thankful for. Then we might say something like, now spend a few moments thinking about the things that you are sorry for. What are the things that you wanna say to Jesus that you are sorry for? And so we’ll just again, give them some moments in silence to think about those things. And then we’ll invite them to think about the prayer intentions that they have or the people in their lives that maybe need our prayers, maybe friends at school or peers or teachers or family, friends that need, you know, need some prayers. And we’ll give them some time to do that. Sometimes we will invite them on a kind of a journey with Jesus. Like, we’ll ask them to imagine walking with our Lord and having a conversation with him.

And what does Jesus wanna say to you in your life regarding a particular circumstance or situation? And will allow the kids to kind of envision what it might feel like to be sitting on a bench with our Lord or walking down a little path with him. What does our Lord wanna say to you at this moment? And we just invite our kids to just sit and listen or maybe to sit and journal and write down what it is our Lord wants to say to them. And so these are some examples of some meditations that we might walk through also sometimes when we’re in adoration, we will just put some quiet praise and worship music on. Maybe it’ll be like a song like, Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher. Or maybe a Hillsong song like Oceans or a Bethel song.

Those are kind of some of our favorites. We’ll just play a simple song and let them just sit and either just listen. Sometimes our kids, depending on what song it is, it’s been really powerful. They’ve started to sing along and we’ve found ourselves in some really beautiful moments of worship in adoration as a family. And so that has also been very, very powerful. I think that one of the things that I have come to love so much about our Holy Hour as a family is this moment of time that we’re all together each week where we disconnect from the world. It is almost as though it is a little mini retreat for us as a family where nobody has their cell phones, nobody has tablets, distractions, then the noise of the world is shut out. And our children have the opportunity to be in a very sacred and peaceful space where they have opportunities for silence, opportunities to speak to our Lord and to listen to him, and opportunities to pray both individually and together as a family.

And that is something that is such a treasure. It is such a precious treasure, and it has been an incredible blessing in our lives. And as a family, it has brought us closer together. And I know that God’s grace has penetrated into our hearts time and time again. I also know that it has been these moments in adoration that have brought healing at times in our family, maybe when there’s been some hurt or pain where we’ve maybe hurt one another. It’s been in those moments in adoration that a lot of healing has happened, where opportunities for forgiveness for saying, I’m sorry to one another has happened, and where our Lord has given us the graces that we need to be able to see the gift that we are to each other. And so I just know that he is working, he is there, he’s working, and we are so close to him.

We are so close to heaven. Every time we’re at mass or at adoration, we know that for our loved ones who have passed away, that when we wanna feel close to them, when we come to adoration, we often just really feel their presence. They’re with us because we know that they’re just on the other side of the veil, right? That you’re so close. And especially every time that we’re in the presence of our Lord, we are so close to those that we love, both the ones that are still living today and those who are past, you know, have passed on. And so that gives us a lot of comfort as well every time we go to adoration. And one of the things in the work that I’ve done in the last 20 years of doing youth ministry, both my husband and I so many times have had the great honor and privilege and blessing of taking teenagers, young people, middle school and high school students to adoration.

Both at our parish, like in our, within our youth groups, within retreats, and also with running conferences, dioceses and youth conferences and taking kids to conferences. We’ve had the opportunity to have adoration and to lead literally thousands of young people to our Lord in through the blessed sacrament. And this is the thing of all the things that we do in ministry with young people from, you know, powerful talks and, and showing videos and having discussion and playing games and building community, all of that, diving into scripture is so, so important and meaningful. But again, there is nothing more important than just bringing

Our young people to our Lord and just letting, like, getting out of the way that has been always kind of my mantra in the back of my mind is like, lead teens to Christ and then get out of the way and let our Lord do what he does best, which is break down the walls and penetrate into their hearts and reveal his love and his mercy in, in the ways that only he can. And every single time we’ve brought teens to adoration there have been some, some incredibly beautiful, beautiful moments. Again, moments of healing, moments of encounter, moments where kids just, who maybe were struggling or doubting, had these glimpses of God’s glory and knew that he was there and knew that they were loved by him. And I think those for me, have been some of the most profound moments. I feel it as a youth minister, I tell people that I kind of have had the honor and blessing of getting front row seats to watch God work in his glory and do some pretty amazing, amazing things in bringing about conversion in the hearts of young people.

And so often that has happened in adoration, in eucharistic adoration of course a mass. And even through the sacrament of reconciliation, all of these graces were just, God pours out his love in such extraordinary ways. And so there’s this one situation, one story that I wanted to share with you kind of as I wrap up this podcast of a young man who over my years of my many years of ministry, this young man probably had the hardest heart I have ever encountered in a person. He was coming to our youth group and to our confirmation classes completely beyond his will. He did not wanna go. His parents were forcing him to come, making him come. He was miserable. He hated being there. He did not want to be there. It showed in his attitude, in his body language, in everything. And so often, in fact, this young man would often hide at class like he would hide.

In the bathroom, we had these little like, kind of closet areas where we would kind of store these dividers. And he was just hiding there. I was always looking for him. And for the most part, I oftentimes just kind of let him be because he was just so angry and so negative that his presence often just brought other people down. So I kind of gave him space and, and let him do what he kind of was doing on his own. And I knew that forcing him to sit down and participate would probably not be a great thing for him or for any of us.

And yet our youth group was getting ready to go to our diocese and youth conference. It’s called I CYC, the Idaho Catholic Youth Conference. And at the time, my husband and I were helping to plan this conference. We were some of the leaders of it, and we were also taking our youth group. And we would, we would take like a hundred teens from our parish to this conference every year. And I couldn’t believe it when this young man, when I, when I saw that his parents had turned in his registration form for him to go to this conference and , I was like, why, why did they sign him up? I knew he would be absolutely miserable. And so I called his parents thinking that maybe they thought it was a confirmation requirement, and I wanted to let them know that he was not required to come to this conference and that it might not be the best scenario given how miserable he was at our youth group.

And so the mom assured me that she knew that it wasn’t a requirement, but that her and her husband had plans to go out of town for the weekend and they didn’t have any place that they could send their son. And so they thought that I C Y C would be the perfect place to send him for the weekend. So I couldn’t believe it. I was like, no, he’s gonna be miserable. He is gonna have a terrible attitude, all of these things. And yet I knew I didn’t really have a choice. And so the next weekend he came to the youth group. This was gonna be the weekend before I C Y C where we were gonna go over all the expectations and the, the small groups and who the chaperones were and all of that. And this young man happened to be hiding back by the bathrooms.

And I went and I found him and I said to him, and I said, listen, I know that you probably don’t really wanna go to I C Y C, I know your parents made you sign up, but I need you to come in and sit down because we’re going over all the expectations. And in this one moment, he absolutely lost it on me. I have never in all my life had this happen with a teenager. But he started screaming at me, swearing at me. I mean, his face turned bright red that like the veins in his neck were popping out and he just lost it. He was screaming, telling me how much he hates the church, how much he doesn’t believe in God, how he doesn’t wanna be Catholic, how his parents are forcing him to come to this. How, I mean like every imaginable word you could, Ima you could imagine he was saying and screaming.

And I kind of backed up. I actually thought he might like, I don’t know, I, he just was so angry and so upset and I tried to get him to calm down. I was like, listen, take a deep breath. And I got him to calm down and I started talking to him and I said, listen, I am so sorry. I’m so sorry that you have to be here. I’m so sorry that you hate this so much. I’m so sorry that you hate the church, that you don’t believe in God. And I said, listen, I can understand when I was a teenager, I was really struggling with my own faith. I had a lot of doubts. And when my parents signed me up for confirmation, I didn’t wanna go either. And so I said to him, I said, I can understand where you are.

And that really, I think just kind of letting him know that I understood what he was feeling, kind of helped to diffuse the situation and to diffuse him a little bit. He kind of calmed down and started listening to me. And I said, I honestly, like, I, I feel bad for you. I don’t, I don’t want you to be here either when you are this miserable and this unhappy. Like this is not fun for any of us. And I said, and I’m sorry that your parents signed you up for the re you know, for the conference and that they’re going outta town. And this is just kind of the situation that we’re both dealing with right now. And I said this, I said, but I wanna challenge you or invite you to do one thing next weekend out of the three at this conference. And I said, I know that most of it, you may absolutely, you may hate all of it.

And I said, but what if you could find one thing that you don’t hate ? I said, is that, is that possible? Like, cuz you find maybe just one thing that you don’t hate, maybe you don’t have to love it all or love anything, but just one thing you don’t hate. And I said, cuz listen, I go, there’s gonna be this really amazing Catholic rapper who’s gonna come. There’s gonna be some incredible music. There’s gonna be some really good food. We’re gonna be staying at hotels. It’s gonna be kind of fun staying in a hotel room with some of the other guys. And I said, I signed you up to be with probably the coolest chaperone that we have here. Cause I think you’d really like to hit it off with him. And I said, I just, I wanna invite you just, could you just try to find one thing that maybe you just don’t hate?

And he looked at me and he said, I doubt that I could do that, but I will try. And then I said, and then I just have one more request. I said, I just need you to try to stay with your chaperone. And I said, at the youth group, I give you a lot of leeway. You kind of hideout, you go in the bathroom. And I said, but at this conference there’s gonna be over 2000 teenagers there. And we like, you can’t just take off and hide somewhere. Like we need to know where you are. And in that moment he kind of rolled his eyes and he was like, fine, I’ll stay with my chaperone, but I know I’m gonna have a miserable time. And, and I said, okay. I said, well, let’s just go into it and try to make this, you know, a not horrible experience .

Anyways, that was kinda my pep talk for him. And so we came into the room, we got through that youth group. He met his chaperone and the next weekend was I C Y C. And he came and I saw him several times there with his chaperone. Again, I was kind of running the conference. And so I wasn’t directly with our parish kids the whole time, but I kept checking in with his chaperone. He said that he was doing okay. And every time I saw this young man, he kind of had his arms folded, he kind of rolled his eyes, he looked at me and he was like, I’m staying with my chaperone. I’m not, you know, he kind of just had this negative attitude. And I said, okay, great, thank you. And then at this conference, the Saturday night of this event we had Eucharistic adoration and it was so beautiful in this room, if any of you have been to a Steubenville conference or another diocese conference where they have like a Eucharistic where the, where the priest processes around the, throughout the crowd and the music is playing.

And there we had a spotlight right on our Lord. And it is so moving. It is so profound, so powerful. A lot of young people are in tears. They’re reaching their hands out praising our Lord. And it is such a powerful experience and it lasts for like an hour. Oftentimes teens are just kneeling on the, on the floor on this gym floor, throughout the whole time. And it really is just a beautiful expression of, of worship and adoration of our Lord. And then at this particular conference, when adoration ended there was some, some time left and our priest that was MCing the event, he invited teens to come up and share if they had had any sort of powerful experiences on the weekend. And this was actually the last year we did this because we ended up having over a hundred kids come up and wanna share about their experiences.

And there just wasn’t enough time. But this particular night after adoration a number of kids lined up on the stage to come up and share just a short little testimony, 32nd, one minute testimony of what, how they had experienced Christ that week in this weekend. And as I’m standing there, I was standing back by the sound booth looking up on the stage and two or three people in, I saw him, I saw this young man up on the stage and I couldn’t believe it. I was like, oh my gosh, what is he doing up there? And I started trying to make my way through the crowd to get to the stage because I was mortified. I thought he was gonna take the microphone and start screaming about how angry he was and how much he hates Scott and hates the church and hates everybody.

And I was like, no, he can’t . Like, I was trying to get the priest’s attention really to try to get him from speaking into the microphone. But just as I got close to the stage, the priest handed him the microphone and this young man stepped forward. And I was standing right at the foot of the stage ready to kind of jump up there if I needed to. But this young man took the microphone, his hand was shaking and he looked out at the audience and he said, I do not know what happened to me tonight. And he said, before this conference, I didn’t wanna be Catholic. I didn’t believe in God and I didn’t wanna have anything to do with the church. He said my parents have forced me to go to confirmation classes. They have forced me and they made me sign up for this, this conference and I didn’t wanna be here all weekend.

And he said, but, but before I got here, my youth minister asked me to look for one thing that I didn’t hate about this conference. And he said, and to be honest with you, the Catholic rapper guy is pretty cool. And I kind of like him. And everybody started laughing. And then he said this, he said, I don’t know what happened tonight during adoration. And he said, but I was sitting there, everybody else was kneeling. He goes, I can even bring myself to Neil. I was just sitting there thinking how stupid this whole thing is. Well, what an act this all is. And he said, I just sat there, the music was playing. And he said, but then I looked up and I saw the Eucharist about 15 feet away, coming closer to me. And I felt something in me tell me to, to kneel in that moment. And he said, and as I was kneeling and I looked up at the Eucharist, the priest brought the Eucharist right in front of me and held it right in front of me. And in that moment I heard our Lord say to me that he loves me.

And in that moment, I have felt, I felt more love than I ever had in my life. And I knew that our Lord was there. I knew that Jesus was there in the Eucharist and I know that he loves me. And as he was saying this, he was tearing up. He was like holding back tears and the audience started clapping and he stood there and he looked out and he said, before this weekend, I didn’t wanna be Catholic. I didn’t wanna be confirmed, but now I do. I want to be Catholic, I wanna be confirmed, and I know that our Lord loves me. And as he stepped down off that stage, and I was standing right there with tears streaming down my face, he fell and collapsed into my arms and started to sob. And I just held him and I sobbed along with him.

And it is in this moment, it was in this moment. It is in several other moments I’ve had with other young people, very similar to this, that I have been in such extraordinary awe of our Lord. To see this young man a week before his heart so hardened, so filled with anger and hatred and rage towards God, like to see a complete transformation is absolutely mind blowing. It’s just like, it’s just indescribable. And if someone would have told me a week earlier that this young man would be on stage telling people that he was excited to become ca to be confirmed and to continue to be Catholic, I would’ve never believed you. Not in a million years would I have ever believed anyone if they told me that if I had not seen it with my own eyes. And this is where I just know, like this is the power of our Lord who is fully present, truly present in the Eucharist body, blood, soul, and divinity.

And this is what he wants to do in our hearts. And this is why our bishops are calling for a eucharistic revival, because they know that it is our Lord and Him alone who is capable of moments and miracles and conversions and transformations like this. It is only our Lord. And so it is up to us, it is up to us to come to him. It’s up to us to bring our children and our teenagers and our friends to our Lord. And then we just get out of the way and let our Lord do what he does and the ways in which he does them. Every time I come to the Eucharist, I, you know, sometimes I struggle because my mind is like I, I see a piece of, or I see a host, and I sometimes, like even in my own doubt, I’m like, are you, are you really here Lord?

But then, like my heart and my soul knows that he’s there. And I often like to imagine that when I’m in front of the Eucharist. And I often think, you know, for many years, Lord, I’m coming to you because I want to come and I wanna worship and adore you and, and love you in the ways that I know you deserve to be loved. But more and more, and as I’ve gotten older and the more I’ve gone to the Eucharist and into Eucharistic adoration, what I really have come to see is that our Lord is saying, I invite you, Larissa, to come and be close to me. Not because I need your worship or because I need your adoration, but because I want to love you. That this time of adoration is about me loving you, Larissa, it’s about me loving your husband. It’s about me loving your children and these teenagers and everyone that you bring.

It’s about me loving them in such a personal and intimate way. And I so often think about several scripture or passages like so many times when I’m in adoration, I like to imagine some of these stories, these gospel stories. One is Mary Magdalene when she comes and she sits at the feet of Jesus and she washes his feet with her tears and her hair. Like I, that’s like I imagine sometimes when I’m in adoration, like I just am sitting there at his feet pouring at my tears and just wanting to, to wash his feet with my tears and just wanting to be so intimately close with him in those moments that I don’t even need to say a thing. I just need to sit in his presence and be an adoration with him, loving him and being loved by him. Sometimes when I’m in adoration, I love to think of the story of Zayas who, whose heart was moved.

He knew that there was something very special about our Lord. And he climbed the tree, the sycamore tree, right? And he climbed this tree because why? He just wanted to, he wanted to gaze. He wanted to see our Lord. And sometimes I find myself like, wanting to be like that, like curious, like, is Z K like zaya is like, are you, are you really, Lord? Is this like, are you really the one I wanna see you, I wanna do whatever it takes to get up close to see you and to see you the best that I can. And adoration makes that possible. Sometimes when I am in adoration, I imagine myself being like the hemorrhaging woman. The woman who is wounded, who has pain and suffering, and yet just wants to like to, is in the crowd trying to get close to him.

And there’s these moments where sometimes I think if I can just get close enough, if I can just reach out, touch him, be that close, that I know that he is capable of bringing healing to the deepest parts of my woundedness. And that is oftentimes what I bring to him in adoration. Lord, these are my wounds and no one else in the world can do anything about it but you. So I will bring them to you. I just wanna be close. I just wanna feel your touch, your presence. Can you heal me, Lord? And the answer is always, yes, I can heal your wounds. Maybe not in the ways you anticipate, but in far greater ways I can, can bring healing to the depths of your soul and I can quench your deepest thirst. And finally, sometimes in adoration, I think of those dear and beloved friends that brought their paralyzed friend to our Lord.

And, you know, rip through the roof of the house and Lord lowered their friend in just so that they could get their friend close enough to Jesus again. Like what a beautiful, miraculous story of faith and trust. And so sometimes when I come to adoration, I envision myself being like those friends. Like, Lord, I have some people I want to bring to you. Sometimes literally I’m like bringing people to adoration with me and saying, here, Lord, I want to bring these people to you. But sometimes it’s just my intentions, right? Like, Lord, there are friends in my life. There are people in my life that are hurting that need you. And I just bring to you there are intentions and I trust in you and your goodness to bring them whatever it is they need. And so I, I like to envision like, and just bring these intentions on this mat, on this, on this mat with a paralyzed friend and say, Lord, I know you can forgive.

I know you can heal. I know you can renew and restore. Please, oh Lord, do that my friends, my family, my children, my marriage, whatever it happens to be. And I love these stories of the gospel because really what they tell us were these people who knew that they needed a, a savior, they needed a l their Lord, and they did whatever it took to get close to him. What does it take? Do I need to climb a tree? Do I need to like to pry open a roof? Do I need to force my way through a crowd? Do I need to humble myself and just place myself at his feet? What do I need to do to be close to him? And this is what Eucharistic adoration offers to us. Opportunities to draw close to him, to separate from the noise of the world and the chaos and the darkness and to come and to sit in the light of his presence and grace and his love.

There is nothing more profound on this side of heaven than to come and to receive our Lord at mass and to be nourished by his holy presence. That is his body, blood, soul, and divinity enters into our humanity and into our bodies so that his divine life may live and be within us, but then also for us to come and worship and adore the king of kings and the Lord of Lords. The king of the universe humbles himself to be there right before us in Eucharistic adoration. And he says to us, come to me, my child. I want you to be this close to me. And how blessed are we that

We are given this opportunity to draw close to him? And so I wanna close out this episode with a few quotes from some of our beloved saints about the glory of the Eucharist. So here they are. This first one is from St. Maximilian Colby. And it is this, if angels could be jealous of men, they would be for, they would be so for one reason, holy communion. And this is the reality. And we know that the angels get to see God in their glory. But we as human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, like we actually get to receive our Lord in the Eucharist into our bodies. How profound is that? This quote is by saying, Alfonz leg gori the divine Eucharist bestows upon the soul, the grace and love of God. Nothing is capable of affording greater consolation to a soul than that love of Jesus Christ.

I love this next quote by St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The Eucharist is the secret of my day. It gives me strength and meaning to all my activities of service to the church and the whole world. Many of you have probably heard this one by Saint Padre Pio. It would be easier for the world to exist without the sun than to do so without the holy mass and thus the Holy Eucharist. And then a new recent blessed saint blessed Carlo Kutu, who is the patron saint for this first year of the Eucharistic revival that the bishops have put in place. They have declared him kind of the patron for this year because he had a deep and profound love for the Eucharist. He is a saint or a blessing that I love to tell teenagers about. He was a teenager, a very recent teenager.

He died in the early two thousands. He was a computer programmer. He died, I think at the age of 15, but he had a tremendous love and devotion for the Eucharist. And he has several really fun and powerful quotes that I love to share with teens especially. But this is one, the Eucharist is my highway to heaven. He also said the Eucharist is the greatest gift of God to mankind. And then he said this quote, which I think is really profound: when we face the sun, we get tan, but when we stand before Jesus and the Eucharist, we become saints by standing before Christ, we become holy. Wow, . Now I could go on and on. There’s hundreds and hundreds of profound and amazing quotes about the Eucharist from saints throughout the centuries. These are awesome saint saint quotes to look at and to share with our families, our children, to inspire our hearts when we go to adoration.

But I want to let you know that if you are a family that you are maybe considering wanting to start talking to your family to adoration, maybe once a month or weekly. If you have any questions, please, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I would love to email or have a conversation with you. If there’s anything I could do to help you answer any questions or give you some advice or just, you know, like encouragement to, to, to try this. If, if you might feel like you’re being called to this just please know I’m here for you. I’m praying for you. And I just pray that all of us as Catholic moms, especially in light of this Eucharistic revival, would really pray about ways in which we all can, can grow in our love for the Eucharist ourselves as mothers and in our marriages and with our children. Let’s do this. Let’s bring our kids to our beloved Lord and then we can just kind of like get out of the way and let him do what he does and be blessed in the process because of it. Listen, mamas, remember, you are not made for comfort, but you are made for greatness. I hope you have an amazing and blessed week, and we can’t wait to talk to you soon. God bless.