Our First Full Day of WYD Festivities

Tonight’s blog is brought to you by Christine! (I am still trying to get the pictures uploaded!) Before I turn you over to her, I have a few announcements. :)
1. We love and miss all of you so much! It is great reading your blog comments over breakfast.
2. Kristi, we are going to get Brad to call yet. :)
3. Matt, We miss you too! XOXO. The check book could be 1. In my purse, 2. On the desk/counter (somewhere in the kitchen), or 3. In a drawer in my desk. Love ya! MJ
Ok: on to Christine:

Well here we are again after another busy day, Our day started with breakfast at 7am with the same choices as yesterday but today nobody choose the vegemite….hmmmmm I wonder why? Everyone was also very much on time so I guess the threat of having to eat it if you were late worked.

We left the hotel about 7:40 for our first catechesis session. According to the directions we were given it should take about an hour and 15 minutes to get there on the city buses. Well about an hour and 45 minutes later we finally arrived. We were happy to note though that we were not the only late group and not the last ones there. We did arrive in time to hear a very nice talk by Archbishop Langly with additional commentary provided by Archbishop Al who were both from London and made fun of their accents.

The topic today was on the Holy Spirit and Jesus’ life. The part that probably stood out the most was a story told by Archbishop Langly. In the story he talked about a time that he celebrated confirmation in a parish on the West side of London and after the mass was over one of the newly confirmed young men asked him if he could ask a question. The Bishop of course said yes and the young man asked him where he got his “bling”? The Bishop then asked back questioningly “bling?”, because he had no idea what the young man was talking about. The young man then pointed to the cross the Bishop was wearing and the Bishop understood what he was talking about. He responded with an “ohhhh” and informed him that “the “bling” was from the Pope”. He also informed us that we each have a “God sized hole” in our bodies that we need God to help us fill.

We then had time for a question and answer session with them on various topics. When that portion of the morning was over we all celebrated mass together. This will be the basic routine for the next 3 days and we will be with the same people for those 3 day (those people being from Minnesota, Canada, New Foundland, Texas, and others from Ohio….Columbus to be exact). We unfortunately did not have time to sit down and eat with them as we took our lunch to go because we had reservations to see Father Stan the jazz playing, rapping Franciscan extraordinaire and didn’t want to be late…..which we, of course, were anyway. I am seeing a pattern in our day. Anyway, Father Stan was very flamboyant and eccentric but had a very good message which was that we are all called to activ8 God’s love.

After Father Stan’s concert we immediately got back in line in the cue (spelled queue but pronounced cue) to see Jesse Manubusan who was absolutely amazing. He did an awesome job of getting everyone involved and energized. It didn’t hurt that he was very funny and sang an entire song about Spam. The teens really seemed to get involved and he sang songs that they knew.

From there came the challenge of finding dinner, as it was not actually being served where they said it was. Because of this we decided not to go to our last scheduled concert but take the bus back into the city to find food (Jesse also talked a lot about food in his concert so we were all a little hungry). We finally got settled with dinner down at Darling Harbor right outside of where another concert was going on, so we were not completely at a loss for a later night concert and listened to it while we ate.

After dinner we all decided to head back to the hotel since tomorrow will be another early morning and busy day especially since the Pope is arriving. We had to walk through the city to where our bus route goes and decided that the State of Ohio flag was a great idea because it helped keep all of us together. Not to mention it was a huge hit with the other pilgrims because most of them had never seen it before.

Well since it is once again very late and tomorrow is going to be another busy day I am going to finally go to bed. We all hope that things are going well at home and that you aren’t missing us too much. Keep the comments coming, we love reading them!