 We thank you, Jesus, that you send us your Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love, the Spirit of adoption that allows us to cry out of our Father from our hearts, to know who we are, why we're here. Holy Spirit, we ask that you'd fall afresh on us. Guide us to the heart of Christ. Shower your gifts upon us, the charisms, the things that we need to fulfill the mission that Christ has called us to. Holy Spirit, pour the love of the Father into our hearts. We give you permission. Have your way now. Have your way in our lives forever. In blessed mother, spouse of the Spirit, we turn to you. And we pray that we may have the grace to imitate your humility and docility before the Holy Spirit. That we too might know the fullness of Christ within our hearts and within our lives. Pray for us, blessed mother, as we spend this time together as we pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Please be seated. I wanna thank you once again for being a part of this. Doing this, being with men like yourself, such a tremendous blessing for me personally. My name is John, I've been working in the Christian Outreach office since 2003. So this is my 17th summer of conferences since I've come back to the university. Prior to that, I spent 15 years doing full-time parish ministry, mostly in youth ministry. Prior to that, I was a student at Francisc University and I had this very goofy roommate named Dave Pavanka who's now the president of the university, which is pretty cool, say, hey, my old roommate's now the president of the whole shebang. So pray with me, I mean, I pray for him every day. Please continue to pray, this is a very special place and we want the Holy Spirit to be leading it at every step and I believe that the Holy Spirit has chosen the right person. Prior to being a student at Franciscan University, I spent two years as a missionary with net ministries out of St. Paul, Minnesota and prior to that, I was just a lost teenager wondering why I was here on the face of this earth and it wasn't until I opened my heart to the Holy Spirit that everything came together for me as a child of God, as a Catholic disciple, and as somebody that I feel has just been blessed beyond what I could ever thank God for. I was reflecting as I was praying the other morning. Oftentimes, I talk to people and I just don't know how to pray or what to pray for. I don't know how to move into God's presence and for me it's always gratitude and thanksgiving. But the danger in that is you start thinking of everything that you need to thank God for and you should be thanking God for. You could spend your entire time in prayer just in thanksgiving and that wouldn't be a bad thing but God is so worthy of our praise, so worthy of our love. And I wanna share about the Holy Spirit because for me the Holy Spirit is just the most magnificent thing in my life. I'm so grateful for his working in my life for all that he's done in me and through me and I remain humble and grateful for this every day. And I wanna talk about life in the Spirit. Today I'm gonna talk about life in the Spirit. Tomorrow we're gonna talk about baptism in the Spirit and on Thursday we're gonna pray. On Thursday night it's just gonna be like, okay God have your way and I just wanna say buckle up right now because I have a feeling that with what you're going through with Neil and Matt and Jen getting your hearts clean, knocking down all these barriers, the things that inhibit the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives, when he shows up he is going to do some serious work in revitalizing, renewing us and just causing us to go to places with him that we've never gone before. So what is life in the Spirit? Because I think many of us who've been around for a while and I've been involved with the renewal since the 80s, wonder what is the role of the Holy Spirit and definitely when we start talking about the charismatic gifts and living a life in the Holy Spirit what is that supposed to look like? What does that mean for us today? And I first wanna say before I get into that I wanna talk about what it's not. Life in the Spirit's not a seminar, it's not a retreat, it's not a training, it's not two sessions at the priest's and seminarian's retreat and it's not an eccentric spirituality for the would-be and wanna be puffed up saints and wanna be mystics because I think sometimes it gets categorized like that. It's a brand of spirituality for people who are kinda out there but for me if you could sum up what life in the Holy Spirit's all about it is a way of life where you live moment to moment aware of how the Spirit wants to guide you open to whatever the Holy Spirit wants for you and in tune with his desires to transform us from the inside out and use us as instruments of transformation in the world. It's rooted deeply in discipleship and a daily walk with the Lord. And I think one of the things that it's easy to look back at the 2020 hindsight that maybe one of the things that the renewal as it progressed through the 70s and 80s got wrong was yes there was a need for community and yes there was a need for people to come together and pray but there was also a need for people to go out. This grace that was being poured out on the church was for the whole church and unfortunately there were people who grabbed onto it and circled the way and said okay, let's form this little charismatic group here or there and didn't realize that I think God wanted to do a broader movement. But I'm thankful because what I see now the Holy Spirit has busted loose. He is running wild in the church today. Even with all the scandals, I might even say that these scandals are coming to surface right now because the Holy Spirit is at work and it's the Holy Spirit that's gonna see us through this and it's the Holy Spirit that's gonna renew the church, renew the priesthood and keep us moving forward to complete the mission that Christ has given us. So this way of life, this baptism in the Holy Spirit, this life in the spirit, it begins in baptism. And I think that's important to remember because people say well what is baptism in the Holy Spirit if you've been baptized, why do you need to be baptized again? And I'll talk about that a little bit more later but fully acknowledging that our life in the spirit comes from our baptismal grace. I wanna quote some passages from the catechism of the Catholic church that kind of highlight this aspect and what baptism does for us, especially in terms of the life of grace, the life of the Holy Spirit. And I'll start with paragraph 1996 and just go through about four of them in a row. It says grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. So we realize that baptism begins this life in the Holy Spirit and where we receive the favor, the free and undeserved help, it's a free gift that God freely offers us to respond to his call to become children of God. There's an indelible mark that's put on our heart but we need to respond to the grace that's there. There always in every sacrament is a necessary response. And I think oftentimes we don't talk about what is the ongoing daily response and what are we responding to when we say yes to Jesus? We're responding to that moment in our baptism when this grace was first poured into our hearts. Most people that I know who are practicing the faith still have yet to tap into this reserve of grace that was poured into their life at the moment of their baptism. And it's like an atomic bomb of grace as it were in their soul that if they were just to hit it right it would just explode with new joy, new peace, new confidence in who they are as children of God. But for most people that grace is unrealized, untapped, unused for their own development and growth as children of God and in holiness. It says in the next paragraph, it says by baptism the children, the Christian participates in the grace of Christ. He receives the life of the spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the church. So at that moment that you're baptized God breezes life into us, that charity, his divine love. And he makes you a living stone in the church. We become a part of a body, a member of this body of Christ. It says in the next paragraph, 1998, it says the vocation to eternal life is supernatural. It depends entirely on God's gratuitous initiative for he alone can reveal and give himself. So when we talk about baptism in the Holy Spirit it's nothing that we conjure. I know a lot of people I think sometimes feel like they have to kind of struggle to have this breakthrough with God. Like if I just concentrate or if I can focus more, or if I can get myself in the right place I can break through and I'll find more of God. And actually I think in our prayer, especially in our prayer of the Holy Spirit, we need a lot less trying and a lot more just dying and just being peaceful and patient and letting God have his way. I think life in the Spirit, one of the main words that uses this docility, like God is the one who initiates this because life in the Holy Spirit is supernatural. It comes down from us, comes down to us from on high, from God's will to stir up in us. His divine nature. It's almost scandalous to think, but early saints and church fathers like St. Irenaeus said, you know, God became man so that man could become God. And we hear those words, we kind of cringe and it's like, oh, that seems to be crossing a line. There's God and there's us, but God freely wants us to participate fully in his divine nature, to be deified as you would. It says in paragraph 1990, it says, it is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in baptism. It is the source of the work of sanctification. So there it is, right in our own catechism. We're going back to this idea that baptism is to make us like God. So life in the Holy Spirit isn't just about a style of prayer, the posture of your hands, your hands in the air, are you like one of these open guys that, you know, all that stuff should not be the focus of our pursuit of the Holy Spirit and life in the Spirit. It is about this inward transformation. So many things, and I was talking about this with Matt on the side of the stage as I was getting ready, it's like so much of what we want to see happen in our lives through doing unbound is first and foremost, the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the one that leads us and guides us into this life that we want to be. How important is life in the Holy Spirit to us as disciples of Jesus Christ? Well, if you look in the catechism, there's these different parts. Part three of the catechism is called life in Christ. So this is how we live our life day to day, live out our vocation, our life in Christ. Section one of part three is man's vocation, life in the Spirit. So the first part of living a life in Christ is having a life in the Spirit. Why? Because it's not us. It's not our effort that makes us Christ-like. It's the Holy Spirit outworking us, drawing us into the heart of Jesus, giving us what we need, the courage, the strength, the perseverance to follow him. And the more we receive the Holy Spirit, the better we're gonna be at this and the better equipped we're going to be at it. It says in paragraph 1699, this is the first line under that section, man's vocation, life in the Spirit. It says, life in the Spirit fulfills the vocation of man. It fulfills the vocation of man. This life is made up of divine charity and human solidarity. It is graciously offered as salvation. So when we think about life in the Spirit, it is about learning how to receive God's love. And Neil shared the passage from Romans chapter five. And I love that, that is my life scripture. And I actually, I have a ministry called Romans 5.5 because I believe that the best, most important experience we can have as children of God is have the Holy Spirit. Pour the Father's love into our hearts, to receive that grace, to receive that love into our souls. And the first part of this, as it says in this paragraph, it says it's made up first of God's love being poured into our lives, but then it finds us fulfillment when we share that love with one another. Receiving God's love is the first step. It's fulfilled and become satisfying to us when we share it with one another. And I love this last line. It's graciously offered as salvation. It fulfills the vocation of man. So our fundamental call to live as children of God, to be children of God as fulfilled, but I think it's also very specific to the vocation of your life. If you're a priest, life in the Spirit will fulfill your vocation. If you're a deacon, if you're on your way to become a deacon or you're on your way to become a priest, it will fulfill your vocation. And I can tell you as somebody who's about to celebrate 29 years of marriage, it definitely is a necessary component of a good Catholic marriage. I tell you, I don't know where I would be in my life without the Holy Spirit. I do not think I'd still be married because it's not my effort that has accomplished anything in my life. Left to my own device, my own power, I'm really prone mostly to failure. There's not much that I can do on my own. I need God. I need the Holy Spirit at work in my life. So what specifically does the Holy Spirit want to do in our lives? What does life and the Spirit do for us? Because first John 419 says we love because he first loved us. Everything that we do as men to serve the Lord should be in response to something that we first let God do for us. We should be taught and shown and brought into a deeper relationship with Christ by an outpouring of grace that draws us there. People say, have you found Jesus Christ? That's a common question. Do you know Jesus Christ? Have you found him? I don't think we're found by God. We don't find God as much as he finds us and meets us where we're at and draws us to where we need to be. And he sends us the Holy Spirit. The first thing that he does is he brings us into deeper community with the Trinity. This is why we need to remember that the Holy Spirit's not just a distinct person, the third person of the Holy Spirit. He's the manifestation of the love between the Father and the Son. And I love being a married man to the extent that I can say, man, my marriage with my wife is an icon for the life of God in heaven. So you have the Father who loves his Son and pours out everything he has, all his love, all his goodness upon the Son. You have the Son in love of the Father emptying himself, pouring his love back upon the Father. So there's this whirlwind of giving between the Father and the Son. It becomes so powerful and so tangible, this force of love that it becomes the manifestation, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. And in the same way, a husband gives himself completely to his wife. The wife gives herself completely to the husband. And in that exchange of grace and love, it becomes so real and tangible that nine months later, you've got to give it a name. And then you've got to give them another name. And I've got five children. Three of them are students here at the university. A fourth has gone on and she got married in February. And then just to make sure my life never gets boring, after my 18-year-old was 10 or eight, my wife and I had one more baby. So we had four and six years. We had a number of miscarriages. And then we have a little 10-year-old at home still. So it's always fun. It never gets boring. You know, I can distinctly remember changing diapers right before I went out to teach one of my kids to drive. That's a surreal experience, but I loved it. And it was probably a good thing because there were times I think when I was teaching my kids to drive that I needed the diaper because it was not good sometimes, but this love of God, this being brought into the life of the Trinity, it's so mysterious and deep that sometimes we just wanna look at it more as a theological concept rather than a lived reality because it just seems so overwhelming. How can I participate in the life of God? How can I have God's very life run through my soul? I'm so weak, I'm so broken, I'm so this, I'm so far away from you, God. I'm so far from the ideal. I mean, the Trinity in heaven is this perfect body of love and you wanna bring me into this? I'm a mess, God, you don't wanna bring me into this, but the answer is he does because when you're brought into that, you're changed by it. And it's the only way you're gonna get changed. I used to struggle for years, like am I good enough for God? And I realized I was never gonna be good enough for God until I just threw myself into the fact that I'm loved by God and let the Spirit draw me into this love and change me with this love. Because of all the gifts that the Holy Spirit can give us, and we think about wisdom, courage, knowledge, understanding, all these great gifts, the fruit that He can give us, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, all the things, all the supernatural gifts, speaking in tongues, healing, prophesying, words of knowledge, you can go through the list, the gift to heal, the greatest gift that the Holy Spirit gives us beyond all of those gifts is Himself. The manifestation of the love of God comes to us and He dwells in us in such a way that St. Paul calls us temples of the Holy Spirit, the Catechism. Once again, paragraph 260. It says, the ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect unity of the blessed Trinity. Everything that God has done since the beginning of time, since the creation of Adam and Eve and God through the fall, through the covenants of the Old Testament, through sending His Son to pay the price for every one of our sins, to tear down the wall that separated us from God, to the moment on that day of Pentecost when finally Heaven opened up and God's divine life was poured out upon the church in a super abundant way, taking St. Peter who Jesus called rock and finally forming Him into a rock. Cause up to that point, He was pretty much mud. I mean, He couldn't say one thing without putting His foot in His mouth and when it came down to it, He ran away in fear because He was accused by a slave girl of being a follower of Jesus Christ. There was nothing rock-like in Peter's life until the Holy Spirit came upon him. And that's what the Holy Spirit does. It enables us to fully develop our abilities, our character, our spiritual nature and how that's played out in our vocation. It completes us. It makes us fully human. To be fully human means to be fully alive in God. I feel like sometimes when you go to Mass and I'd imagine you have the same experience as you're up there celebrating Mass, you feel like you're watching the sixth sense. I see dead people. They don't know they're dead, but they're dead. You know, the way some people go to Mass, they don't know what's happening on the altar. If their spiritual eyes were awoke, if they could see and just for a second glimpse into heaven as you elevate the consecrated body and blood of Christ before them, they wouldn't shuffle up to the altar with disinterested looks on their faces and mumbling, amen. I think if we fully understood what was happening around us in the spiritual realm, we'd be in tears most of the time. Either that or we wouldn't stop smiling like idiots because it'd be so joyful. God is everywhere and He wants to draw us into this fully human, fully realizing that He is with us always and He is constantly doing miracles around us. But even more so, He dwells within us. He chooses to take up residence. And each one of us, so much so that St. Paul calls us temples of the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit that makes us holy. Holiness for me is the perfection of love. And how else are we going to be able to love like Christ unless we ask the Holy Spirit, the embodiment of love, the spirit of love to be fully released in our lives, to transform us into people who are prone to sin, prone to selfishness, prone to beating ourselves up and failure to people who have victory and joy and love in our hearts. You know, to forgive is a divine thing and we can't do that without divine grace. Our effort and our seeking holiness is absolutely essential. I would never preach quietism or passivity when it comes to holiness. But as much and as essential as our effort is needed for holiness, it'll never be enough on its own. Ultimately, holiness comes to us through our union to those things that are holy. But if the Holy Spirit is alive in us, it's going, He's going to release the grace of holiness so that we can see real change in our lives. The greatest lie that Satan has put on so many people's lives is you can't change. It's just the way you are. And I work with students on our campus. This is what the world has been telling them. You don't have to change. I'm okay, you're okay, and that's okay. Don't strive, don't worry, don't put any pressure on yourself, just be. And to try to awaken them in the sense that God might be calling you to something amazing, this journey of holiness and transformation. It can be challenging. And I think it's sometimes even harder with people my age who may have just been in a rut of sin most of their adult life and have just kind of settled. This is it. This is my new normal. This is my best. And then remember here in Sumbed, and I forget who said it, but mediocre people are always at their best. But God isn't looking for mediocrity. And He's not looking for you to figure it out and get your act together. What He's looking for you, and Father Boniface said this so well, He's looking for you to throw your lives without hesitation and reservation into His arms and to open wide your heart to the power of the Holy Spirit and trust that He who created you knows what you need. And if you say yes, the way that blessed mother said yes to the Holy Spirit, that Christ will be manifested in your flesh, Christ will become incarnate through you. He already is because of your ordination, but I know, and I'm in the same boat, that every day there's little parts of my life that the Lord reveals He wants to be more in control of. The only thing I stop in Him is two things, the sluggishness of my own heart and my resistance to the grace that He's poured out. And I was challenged by Father Dave's homily. How much grace do we just let slide away and not respond to? And this matters because that last part of that paragraph, 1699, it says it's graciously offered to us as salvation. The Holy Spirit is what saves us from ourselves. I know what happens when the Holy Spirit leaves my life, when I push Him away, when I do things that block the way He works in my life. My life falls apart, but it's graciously offered, which means it's not forced on anyone. This is your choice. God loves us enough to say, look, there's a door in your heart that I wanna enter into, but guess what? There's only a door knob on the inside. I can't open the door from the outside. As much as God would want to be able to kick down the door, He's never going to do that. Instead, as Revelation 3 says, He knocks on the door. I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens up, I will come in and I will commune with Him. To understand how the Holy Spirit works, let's look at what Jesus said at the Last Supper. He says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. I will ask the Father and He will give you another advocate to be with you always. He calls the Holy Spirit the advocate. The word advocate comes from the Latin, ad vocatus. Literally translated to the one who's called to your side. The Holy Spirit has been called to walk with us, to guide us, to lead us. And I love how Jesus says that. I'll give you another advocate. Meaning He's our first advocate, Christ Himself. Walking by our side, and what does an advocate do? He defends, he counsels, he mediates, he comforts, he teaches, and he always acts on behalf of the good of another. Do we believe that? Do we trust that? Do we give Jesus and the Holy Spirit our two advocates, the ones who've been called to our side to guide us from this life into eternal life, all the space, time, and room that they need in our lives to do the work that they alone can do. To bring about salvation in our lives, to make us nude creatures in Jesus Christ. Jesus says in John 14, 26, the advocate, the Holy Spirit that my Father will send in my name, He will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I told you. Now Jesus was not limited by time and space the way you and I are, so when He was saying this to His apostles, He knew that they would soon forget His teachings, His miracles, the way of life that He taught them, unless He sent them power from unhigh. He knew that they would need this, or it was not going to work. He knew that when the lies of the enemy would fall upon the ears of His disciples, that unless there was somebody to defend them against these lies who could speak truth into the depths of their heart, that they would crumble under the weight of these lies. He knew in the face of persecution that fear and anxiety would try to rear its ugly head and dissuade them to become discouraged and run from the mission. And He knew that He had to give someone who would comfort them in those times and strengthen them. Courage is two words, you know, love breathed into us. Strengthening of the heart, the core, caratio. He knew that He was going to set them on the task of building His church on earth and they would need someone to give them a good counsel on how to do that. And He wanted to let them know, He will teach you everything. He will teach you how to build the church. He will teach you how to stand up against persecution. He will teach you everything. And that's what we have in the Holy Spirit. He will teach us everything. There's nothing that the Holy Spirit will make us, leave us orphaned in. There's absolutely nothing that the Holy Spirit will not teach us in the name of Jesus Christ. And so we need to accept the Holy Spirit because in the same way, you know, the Spirit knows us. He knows our weaknesses, where we're broken. He knows our sins, our struggles, where we get discouraged, our anxieties, our fears. He also knows when you're gifted. He knows your strengths and He wants to enhance those. He knows what you need, exactly what you need to follow Jesus Christ as a disciple because first and foremost, you're a child of God, a follower of Jesus Christ. The particular path, the call in your life that you live out your discipleship is the priesthood, which means that not only do you have all the challenges that every other man, woman, and child who tries to follow Jesus has, you have also, by your own free will, painted a big target on your back for Satan to take aim at. And Satan has taken notice and he's assigned many, many demons to try to take you out. And we need the Holy Spirit at work in our lives to defend us, to strengthen us, because we are all under attack. The only people who aren't under attack are people who are not a threat to the kingdom of darkness. Those who Satan already has firmly in their palm, he doesn't worry about tempting them. He's got them in chains. And even as we're here right now, maybe you felt God wanting to bring new freedom in your life against a particular sin, a particular struggle, something that's tripped you up for years. And even now as you plan on letting God have permission to work in your life in a new way, Satan is trying, he's already thinking steps ahead on how he's gonna try to trip you up, rob you of this truth, this grace to draw you back into yourself. And we need the Holy Spirit, more of the Holy Spirit. We can never have enough of the Holy Spirit to be released in our lives so that we can say yes to the grace in that moment, to respond fully and wholeheartedly to God and his love. The Holy Spirit will teach us what we need to find victory, to have this full life that Christ desires to pour into us. When he looks out at people and he says, I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly. And people are looking around like, do we look like a bunch of corpses? We have life, Jesus, we're alive. What are you talking about? What Jesus is then alluding to is the deeper life, this life in the Holy Spirit. That's what I desire for you. The divine life that comes to us through the power of God at work in our lives. And he will teach you how to love. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to forgive, how to serve, how to teach, how to share the gospel, how to pray, how to have greater obedience in your life moment to moment, day to day. How to stay pure. How to spiritually lead your parish. How to understand the scriptures and other spiritual readings that you pick up to feed your soul. He will teach us how to let go of past hurts. He will teach us everything that we need to be alive in Christ. And I will tell you that the struggles that we have in this world, the struggles that Jesus Christ allows us to deal with, are so that we will find a way of reaching and finding more of that Holy Spirit in our lives. Here's what I mean. Five years ago, my mom died of cancer. She battled cancer for six years. And I was with her the night before she died. She had lung cancer, it was in her spine, her liver, her kidneys, she was riddled with cancer by the time she passed away. But the thing that caused her decline was the pleural sac, a fluid around her lungs was full of dead tissue from her lungs basically being riddled with cancer and she couldn't breathe. So I had to help her out of bed, help her to the toilet, help her use the toilet, clean her up and get her back into bed. The whole process took about 30 minutes. And I'm so grateful for those moments. I'm so grateful for that particular moment because as I was getting her back in bed and tucking her in, she just looked up at me and she said, you know, I've been offering up my suffering for your siblings and their children. You know, that they will come back to the church because at the time I was really the only one of my four siblings. I was the only one practicing the faith. And then she said, if I tell you I'm offering up my sin, my suffering, does that take it? I mean, it's not gonna work. I'm like, no, no, it's not like a birthday wish, mom, it works. Anyway, the next morning, she woke up and she was having a hard time breathing. We took her to the emergency room. They transferred her to another hospital because they didn't have someone at the hospital in my hometown that could deal with this. I was gonna drive my family back from Michigan to Ohio. We were gonna celebrate Christmas together. And then I was gonna drive back up on the 26th. So we got home on the 24th or on the 23rd. My mom was in the hospital. While I was driving home, I called her. Actually, my sister had herself one. I said, have mom call me. And I just said to her, I said, mom, six years you've been fighting this. If you're tired and you're ready to go, I wanna see you again. I'd love to give you one last kiss and tell you I love you. But if you're ready to go, just go. And sure enough, at 1.30 in the morning on Christmas Eve, my mom passed away. And I got the call from my sister who was with her. And it was such a blessing. There was such, I just can't describe it, such grace. I asked if they would pray a rosary, if we could pray a rosary together for my mom and all of my siblings, my dad over the phone prayed a rosary together. And after we had done praying the rosary, I told them all that I loved them, that I was gonna go back to bed, but I didn't go back to bed. I cried for about an hour. And when I had finally cried myself into exhaustion, I fell asleep. And as I slept, I had a dream, the most vivid, beautiful dream I ever had. And it was my mom walking through these big, beautiful doors into the throne room of God. And as she walked in there, my mom was your classic flannel nightgown, slipper at night watching Jeopardy. That's how she ended her day. So she walks in and she's shuffling cause she's weak and tired, but as she looks up, she sees Jesus and Jesus starts running towards her and she starts running towards Jesus. And as she's running towards Jesus, she completely turns from this frail old woman into a young girl and just jumps into the arms of Jesus and just twirls around with Jesus. And he's got a big smile on his face and she's got a big smile on her face. And I woke up again from that, just with tears in my eyes. It was such a gift of the spirit to know that my mom, all of her suffering had come to an end. And she was where she wanted to be. Two months later, I was up visiting my dad and my brother Chris, who's five years younger than me, comes to me and says, I'm falling apart. Like, yeah, since mom died, everything just, nothing makes sense. I can't handle it. I just feel so overwhelmed. And I just looked at him and said, let's pray. I prayed over him for half an hour of the Holy Spirit to fall upon him. And God came along with his two by four and whacked my brother in the head with a two by four of love. My brother is now well on his own journey with Christ. His whole life has been transformed. He's brought his wife along with him just through his witness and love. My brother, my other sister, who had been away from the church was now back in, still working on my second brother, but you know, God, you know, like my mom and what the Holy Spirit has done through my mom's intercession, bringing everybody in contact with the grace and love through the power of the Holy Spirit. Two years after my mom died, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I remember coming home from the doctor after receiving this diagnosis and just saying, okay, God, this is the woman I love more than anything. We have five beautiful children here on earth. We have another five children up in heaven. I've loved her through so many things. She's loved me through so many things. She had a brother that committed suicide, our five miscarriages, all the things that we'd gone through as a couple, but I'd never had to love my wife through cancer. And I remember falling on my knees in my bedroom after I put my wife to bed and she was sleeping and I still couldn't sleep. I just got down on my knees and I said, okay, Jesus, come with your Holy Spirit. You're gonna have to teach me how to do this because I have no idea how to do it. And I didn't get all the answers I was looking for. I didn't get anything like a specific direction, but what I got in that moment was just this overwhelming sense of peace and the Holy Spirit saying to me, I'm with you. It's gonna be all right. I've got this. And it took a year of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for my wife to be done because she had a very aggressive form of breast cancer. But that experience just made us kind of reboot as a family and just come around the fact that we loved each other deeply and it just purified our love and started like a fresh chapter of love in our relationship, strengthened our faith. And the reason I think it did is cause I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of my son, my oldest son, he just turned 25. He was in the back seat of a car asleep. His girlfriend at the time was driving. When the driver on the other side of the road crossed over the center line and hit them head on. My son had no other internal injuries or broken bones but took the full brunt of the impact on the upper left side of his head. He had 18 fractures in his forehead, his left eye socket and his left cheek. He was left with some very intense traumatic brain injury. I was in Minnesota at the time running one of our conferences when I got the call. I had no information other than my son was being airlifted to the hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. He was driving with his girlfriend on the way to Pittsburgh at the time. I flew back from Minnesota. I got to the hospital first thing on Sunday morning with my wife. The team of doctors told me this. They try to be as compassionate as they are but they're giving the worst kind of news that you can receive, right? With this level of traumatic brain injury, what we had to do is we had to take a big part of his skull off. An emergency craniotomy so that the swelling wouldn't kill him. But he was pretty swollen. They talked about the eye socket, the cheek bone, all the stuff. Doctors said it may be weeks before he wakes up. When he wakes up, he might not be able to speak. Speech-of-phase is very common with his son where Andrew's brain was injured. He might not remember how to feed himself. He may not remember who you are. He's gonna need at least months if not years of therapy. He just wants you to be prepared. And I listened to what the doctors had to say. And as soon as they left the room, I got done on my knees next to my son's bed. I laid hands on him. I just started praying in the spirit, praying in tongues, praying over my son for healing, for grace. And what the doctors didn't know is before I left, while I was in the airport getting ready to fly home, I sent about 10 text messages to some key people in my life. I sent them to all the hosts that were hosting the other conferences we had going on because we had six youth conferences going on. And I said, my son has been in an accident. I don't know how bad it is, but would you have all the teens at your conference during the holy hour on Saturday night, pray for my son? They all responded, yes, we're praying. I sent out a couple other text messages and before I knew it, I was getting tons of text messages back. My parish is praying for you. We're offering up masses tomorrow for your son. Don't worry, we got you covered in prayer. That Saturday night, 11,000 teenagers across the United States and Canada prayed for my son before the blessed sacrament. So two days after the accident, it didn't surprise me at all that my son woke up. Sat up in bed, could name all of his siblings, could name his address. He couldn't remember why he was there, which is, and he doesn't really really remember the first three weeks after the accident. But we got him fitted for a hockey helmet because he had this craniotomy and he had no skull. And with the help of a nurse, he and I walked 100 feet down to the one end of the ICU and back to the other end. The next morning, the next day, he was sitting up in bed feeding himself. Three weeks after that, he was in outpatient therapy. Six weeks after the accident, he was home and done with therapy. He just completed his fourth class towards his MBA and he's gotten nothing but A's. The only lasting effect of this accident is he lost sight in his left eye. The optic nerve was crushed. And I will tell you, there was never a moment when I did not cry out to the Holy Spirit, where the Holy Spirit didn't show up with grace and peace for me. My son is a walking miracle. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that this Holy Spirit wants to do miracles. This life in the Holy Spirit, what does it look like? I'll make sure we get us out of here in time. The Holy Spirit wants to be alive and active in each one of our lives. He wants to have real communion with us and guide us. This is why I think, like so many efforts, the new evangelization has been around long enough. I don't think we can call it the new evangelization anymore, right? Am I right? The problem with the new evangelization is it wasn't preceded with the new Pentecost. The only reason the first evangelization worked was first the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, the apostles as they prayed and empowered them to do this work. And the Holy Spirit wants to come upon each one of us and give us everything we need so that we can be madly in love with Jesus, live a life of holiness, love our brothers and sisters as we love ourselves, and become saints. The Holy Spirit's this necessary power and he continues to show up and he wants to show up even more so. A few years ago, I'm driving to the beach with my wife. The Holy Spirit taps me on the shoulder as I'm going down to the lobby for my morning coffee at this hotel and says, go pray with that person. Are you serious? So I'm like, okay, I walk over and I'm getting a cup of coffee and I'm looking at this one. I'm like, hey, good morning, how you doing? How does this work? All right, mixing a little coffee and I said, how you doing today? And you could tell just the moment I asked her that question. She wasn't expecting anyone to ask her that question. Her face was just shook and kind of downtrodden. She's, well, not good. I'm saying, what's going on? She explained to me that her sister had a brain aneurysm. She was in surgery the night before. She was in intensive care at a hospital two hours away that she had no money for gas, that she had to work. She was just scared to death. Everything was just overwhelming her and she was just broken inside. And I just said, can I pray with you? She said, absolutely. So I just put my hand on her shoulder right there in the middle of the hotel lobby and just prayed Holy Spirit come. And as I'm praying over her and praying with her, tears are streaming down her face. God is working, revealing his heart of love for her, ministering to her heart in that moment. And when I'm done praying, I just, I said, what did God do? And he says like, he just told me it's gonna be okay. I said, God, when do you get off work? She goes, we'll have to work until three. What are you gonna do then? She goes, well, I'm gonna try to get down there. I'm not sure I don't have gas money. So I took out 40 bucks and there she goes, yes. I don't know what happened after that. Never saw her again. But when the Holy Spirit shows, he shows up, he asks you to do this, this life in the spirit is supposed to be marked by, you know, radical obedience, doing crazy things. And I'm thinking, well, is this normal? Yes, it is pretty normal. I mean, the Acts of the Apostles in chapter nine, it says there was a disciple from Damascus named Ananias and Jesus shows up to him one day in prayer and says, go pray with this Saul of Tarsus. And Ananias says yes to the Holy Spirit. And he goes and he prays with Saul of Tarsus and as we know, he becomes Paul, the apostle, who laid the foundational cornerstone for our ecclesiology and Christology, a man who suffered greatly for the gospel because of his own relationship with the Holy Spirit. After that, no one knows what happens to Ananias. He just kind of disappears. He showed up, he did his part, he played his role. But this is what the Holy Spirit wants to do. He wants to use us to do miraculous things. He wants us to do great things. He wants to pour gifts upon us that we don't currently know we have, but we're poured into our hearts at baptism, poured into our lives at baptism. He needs to activate those gifts for the building up of the church. He not only wants to awaken our faith and enable us to communicate with Jesus. That's the beauty of Ananias. Jesus shows up and says Ananias. He goes, yes, Lord. Like, he recognizes instantly the voice of Jesus Christ speaking to him. Just suppose that with Saul of Tarsus who on the road to Damascus has said, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And his response is, who are you? He doesn't recognize the voice of Jesus. Jesus is a stranger to Saul, but for the disciple, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the voice of Jesus rings clear in our lives, giving us the ability to radically obey and do miracles and go change the world. Without Ananias, is there St. Paul? This one disciple was the lynchpin, the unsung hero of so much of what we take for granted as Catholics in terms of who we know, what we know about Christ and his church. Things that were revealed to St. Paul that he shares with us through the scriptures that continue to speak to us through the power of the Holy Spirit thousands of years later. We might not have a great role to play, but we have a role to play. It may not look like great from the outside, but God through the Holy Spirit wants to do something amazing, and are we willing to say yes to this life in the Spirit? Yes to the Holy Spirit, run wild in my life. Because the three most dangerous words that we can pray are come Holy Spirit. You take all the power out of yourself. You surrender when you say come Holy Spirit. You're letting a very dangerous God who likes to put people in risky situations. Ananias is like, oh, well, you know that Saul of Tarsus has letters that he could throw me in jail or have me killed, and you sure about this God? And what does Jesus say to him in prayer? He says the same words he says to his apostles, go! Go! Go! God has chosen us. Our lives are intended to be a source of blessing, a source of inspiration and transformation for the world around us in the same way that God has been changing the lives of saints for thousands of years. This happens because of the Holy Spirit. And this is the heart of discipleship, to be so filled with the life of God that we overflow upon the world around us. And that's my prayer for my life. It's my prayer for everyone I minister to. It's like, I want the Holy Spirit to be so alive in your life that you overflow with the Holy Spirit. And you can't help as you walk, wherever God sends you, you're just walking and the Holy Spirit's just splashing off of you. You're not even aware of it. It's always best when we're not aware of when God is using us. Because when as soon as we become aware of how God is using us, we kind of like want to hang under like, oh, look what I'm doing now. Hey, that's pretty special. Like, no, no, we're just, we're the vessels. We're the instruments. God is the maestro. The Holy Spirit is the music. I love life and the Spirit because in it I have found every source of joy and fulfillment I could ever look for and long for. I have walked in the valley of the shadow of death with the Holy Spirit and have come out the other side without fear. I really am to the point in my life where I just don't think there's anything God could throw at me that I, and I'm 100% confident that I could handle. Yet I know so many people in their life are even afraid to give their hearts to Jesus for fear of what he might ask. And that's not how God wants us to live and that's not how he wants you to live. Like, he wants to live us, help us to live with courage and boldness and joy. And he wants to be the abiding love of the Father in our hearts. Amen. I'm gonna end this in prayer. Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. Just come, Holy Spirit. Fill our hearts to overflow. As we go through this time, Holy Spirit, we give you permission. Work in our lives. Deep in us are fundamental identity as children of God. Strengthen us for the mission you've called us to. Make us holy as we cooperate day to day, moment in moment with the graces that you alone can give. I pray for every man in this room. I thank you for the heroic call that you've put on their lives to serve you, to serve the church, to lay down their lives as a living sacrifice. Holy Spirit, pour out the grace, the courage, the docility, the wisdom, every spiritual gift they need to fulfill the challenging role of being a holy priest in this world today. Give them the boldness to proclaim your gospel with love and in power. Just heal whatever needs to be healed. Restore whatever needs to be restored and redeem whatever needs to be redeemed. And Lord Jesus, I thank you. I thank you for your love. Lord Jesus, lover and healer of our soul, have your way. Let me give you all the glory and honor and praise due to your holy name now and forever. Amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. All right, gentlemen, enjoy your dinner. Look forward to praying with you all tonight. God, God is good, amen. Thank you.