Young Neighbors in Action
St. Louis, Missouri
June 20th – 26th, 2010
Saint Mary’s Parish Bellevue
For over ten years teams of high school youth from St. Mary’s parish have participated in the Young Neighbors in Action program, a week long Catholic service learning experience. Our mission teams have served in Detroit, Chicago, Omaha, Winnebago, Tijuana, El Paso/Juarez, and now St. Louis.
Our team of seven youth and two adults spent the week working for Home Services, a nonprofit organization that builds and maintains wheelchair ramps for disabled residents in the St. Louis area. Working alongside Woodrow and Roger the Home Services crew, our young people constructed a ramp for an elderly disabled woman who had been unable to leave her house. The team worked hard through the triple digit heat and were able to close the work site down at the end of the week knowing they had taken the project as far as they could. It was an amazing week of service learning for our young people who were truly changed by the people they met and the memories they made this year at YNIA.
Youth Serve
Omaha, Nebraska
June 27th – 29th, 2010
Saint Mary’s Parish Bellevue
During the last eight summers, teams of junior high school youth from St. Mary’s parish have participated in the YOUTH SERVE program, a three day local service learning experience where 7th & 8th grade students from around the Omaha Archdiocese come together and serve the local community.
This year our team spent two days at Crestview Village in La Vista which is low income housing operated by Mercy Housing. The students started their first day of service pulling weeds in an over grown garden in the center of the housing facility. When the children spotted our youth, they slowly came out to help one by one. What began as a tedious and difficult task, turned into a lot of fun as kids of all ages got to know each by working side by side and sharing quality time having fun together. The second day was spent finishing off the garden, playing basketball, tag and taking a nature walk with the children and then finishing the day with a presentation of their experience during the closing Mass at the Columban Fathers Chapel.
Our St. Mary’s Parish can be very proud of the young people who represented them during these few days. Many memories were made, lessons learned and new friendships began. Thank you for supporting this very worthy cause that gives our young people a chance to grow and experience that they can make a difference in the world.
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill
At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by
I was hungry and you gave me to eat
I was naked and you clothed me
I was homeless and you took me in.
Hungry not only for bread – but for love. Naked not only for clothing – but naked of human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a room of bricks – but homeless because of rejection. This is Christ in distressing disguise.
- Mother Teresa
The heart of the Christian gospel is precisely that God the all holy One, the all powerful One is also the One full of mercy and compassion.
He is not a neutral God inhabiting some inaccessible Mont Olympus. He is a God who cares about his children and cares enormously for the weak, the poor, the naked, the downtrodden, the despised.
He takes their side not because they are good, since many of them are demonstrably not so.
He takes their side because He is that kind of God, and they have no one else to champion them.
- Desmond Tutu
Real happiness and satisfaction come from who we are and how we care for one another rather than from what we have.
- US Catholic Conference of Bishops
At this stage of history, the liberating message of the Gospel of life has been put into your hands. And the mission of proclaiming it to the ends of the earth is now passing to your generation… The church needs your energies, your enthusiasm, your wonderful ideas, in order to make the Gospel of life penetrate the fabric of society, transforming people’s hearts and the structures of society in order to create civilization of true justice and love. Now more than ever, in a world that is often without light and without the courage of noble ideas, people need the fresh, vital spirituality of the Gospel.
- Pope John Paul II