Saturday, February 05, 2011

this is life

beautiful things

One of my favorite songs of the moment is "Beautiful Things" by Gungor. A few days ago I wrote down different lyrics from the song and stuck them on post-its around my room. Today I realized how the song can be very closely related to Project Rachel, a post-abortive women's healing organization.

giddy

me & Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests For Life
Just to document that this happened, while I was at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC for the Vigil Mass for Life I got to meet one of my heroes- Fr. Frank Pavone!

I'd read on his Twitter that he would be there signing books so I was running around like a crazy woman trying to meet the Priest behind one of my favorite Twitter accounts.

And I found him and I was giddy like a 12 year old girl meeting Justin Bieber and Fr. Frank remembered talking to me on Twitter! It was great. I bought his book Ending Abortion and he signed it for me! I highly recommend his book by the way.

inspired by Lila

After an amazing & hope restoring 5 days in DC at the March for Life, I came back to TX for about 36 hours before I was headed out again. Somehow a spot ended up becoming available to go to the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) conference in Nashville at no cost, so I figured... why not.

Honestly, I was really tired and still trying to recover, catch up, and unpack from DC, but my friend talked me into saying yes and I ended up having a really great time.

The amazing thing about the trip was how incredibly Pro-Life it was. Being a Catholic conference, it would be expected to be Pro-Life but so I've found that far too often we, as Catholics & Christians, shy away from talking about abortion and the hard topics like Life issues. This was not the case at FOCUS. The first night's keynote speaker was Lila Rose. Lila is the President of LiveAction Films and she has been one of my personal heroes for a while now. She is truly an amazing example of the Pro-Life movement among the youth and does an amazing job utilizing the media as she promotes a culture of Life. Just this week LiveAction released a video showing some less than moral happenings in a Planned Parenthood. Lila has done undercover work exposing the illegal treatment of minors within Planned Parenthood also and really just embodies a spirit of morality and justice and bravery... and she has great hair, so all in all she is just awesome.

When Lila spoke that night people listened. As a Pro-Lifer, it made me so happy that they were bringing this issue up at the beginning of the conference; they didn't push it to the side and make it an optional talk or just mention it in a speech- it was the first message people heard. I looked around to watch people's reactions as she spoke and it made me really happy to see the impact Lila's words were having on my friends and the other students. This is what we need to hear, I thought.

After an amazing speech (by the way, Lila didn't look down at the podium a single time during her entire speech; her words came straight from the heart), a friend of mine found me and told me that Lila was upstairs at a booth with some LiveAction info. Well... I was running up there to meet her. It was like meeting Fr. Frank Pavone all over again (have I written about that in here yet? Oh man...).

info card from the LiveAction booth
So I got to meet Lila and it was awesome and she is just my hero.


The rest of the conference was really great too because Lila wasn't the only person to mention Life issues. The topic just kept coming up! It was great to see people, Priests, religious sisters, and even the band L'Angelus mentioning the tragedy of abortion in their speeches, homilies, and in song. Just goes to show that this isn't just an issue for women or for babies, it's an issue for everyone. People in churches need to hear the message just as much as people outside of churches. I was just so proud of each person that mentioned Life.

life's a mess yet I am blessed

"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." -Oscar Wilde.
Lately God has been doing an excellent job disguising His blessings.
Students for Life Activism Book

Monday, I had the incredible pleasure of meeting Kristan Hawkins from Students for Life of America. What a BLESSING! Of course, simply meeting her would've been too easy for God so he had to disguise it behind a morning filled with confusing phone calls between me and members of our Pro-Life club (while I was also running on no sleep for 48 hours and working and crying over stupid reasons- great mix!) and some weird miscommunications. In the end, the way everything worked out ended up more beautiful than I could have ever planned. About 25 students attended the meeting that started around 9:00 where Kristan spoke to us & answered our questions for about 45 minutes. After that, about a dozen of us went to Whataburger with her and just talked about the movement and she gave us some incredible ideas for outreach on campus. It was such a wonderful opportunity and I am so happy to have met such an inspiring person promoting respect for life!
 

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