 Thank you and good morning. Dr. Petrock, Dr. Willie Petrock, thank you so much. Sarah and the team, the conference team for the invitation and the privilege of being with you and thank you, thank you for your answer to the call as catechists, as teachers, as those who not only take that baptismal call for your own sanctification and how much work that takes, but that build upon to now take on a burden, a joyful burden, but a burden nonetheless of the souls and of the salvation of so many. So thank you, thank you for all that you do. And what we want to share today in this very short time with my beloved Melanie, it's such a joy to be with her, the opportunities that I have to speak and to travel and to be in ministry together in the same way as you and catechists, it's like this, this building upon building. And it's amazing, even as deeply true as it is, of how interconnected those realities are of our own salvation, of our own working about our own salvation and fear and trembling. And then the great people that we get to work with that are part of that journey. Today is in all days, you get a glimpse into how the grand theology, the grand catechesis, the teachings of our faith really make themselves known in the mundane, in the ordinary stuff. And Melanie is a great gift in keeping me grounded for the last 28 years, said as the theology and all the beautiful language and vocabulary of our faith gets learned and understood. As Petroc said, the reality is it comes to life in our household and in my home. So I love you, Melanie. Thank you. So our presentation today, the family, a pillar of fire in a dark world. I was intrigued by the theme, the Philippians of light, were invited to come. But it's interesting that the image that came to me, beginning was this revelation in Exodus, this reality in Exodus. We'll share some of that pillar of fire and of that cloud. But before we get started, Melanie, let's tell a little about us and where we come from or maybe a glimpse of where we are right now. Just a glimpse here. As David mentioned, we've been married for 28 years and we do have eight children. Oh, thank you. Celebrate that 28 years. We have seven daughters and one son. And our oldest daughter was married a couple of years ago and she just gave birth to our first granddaughter. So we are over the moon. We've joined the grandparents' club. We are so excited about that. And she's the most beautiful baby ever created. Too bad they live so far away from us. We're in Philadelphia, about an hour south of Philadelphia. And yeah, and we have been homeschooling for over 20 years. And there's definitely, it's not a perfect system at all. And there's been ups and downs and highs and lows. And, you know, a lot of times at night, I'm wondering, did we do the right thing? Did we do the right thing? But we do it because God has called us to do it. And I couldn't do it without Damon. And just as he couldn't go out and do the work he does without me. And our family is not perfect at all, by any means, by any means. But we do our best. And we do, we try to listen to the voice of God and we try to do what God has called us to do. So through our work with families and couples and marriages, we've formed Joyful Ever After, which Patrick mentioned. And we hosted the Catholic Marriage Summit that was last June 2020 and we had over 40,000 couples participate in that from all over the world. It was an amazing event. And this year we have another event coming up called Epic Intimacy. And Damon will share a little bit about that probably later. But we love working with families. We love working with couples. We love spreading the message of God's love. You know, St. Paul in Korean things talks about spreading the aroma of Christ. And that's what we try to do in our family and with our couples and whoever we work with. So we're happy to be here. So we'll share more about our story because it kind of weaves into the themes of course that we want to share. But as you saw from the video, we have eight children, all boys, except the first seven. I'm going to use that till the day I die because it just encapsulates everything. All girls, seven girls and Nathan. And the Lord brought us six girls in a row over about eight, nine years, 10 years to the point where I was believing that all girls, babies were girls. And then my daughter had a girl. So I was like, oh, here we go again. And then through adoption, we, beautiful Olivia joined us in 2009. And then our surprise adoption, asterisk, you can ask me later. Surprise adoption was the Lord said, here's your son, Nathan, who came to us in 2010. And he and I will be celebrating our birthday on Saturday. So how cool is that? And this part of this, this story, this arc of how God gives us these constellations, even in, you know, the moments of desolation or darkness as Melanie was saying, you know, trying to be perfect and get this vision. And this whole truth about the family being the center of evangelization, being the place where the new evangelization begins and begins again, it carries with a lot of weight that you and your families in your life, married or otherwise, as a daughter, a son, a brother or sister, we carry with us a certain expectation, a certain ideal, a certain hope that when we get close to it, there's this exhilaration, there's this joy. When we fall far away from it, the despair comes in and we're thinking, what am I doing wrong? What's going on? So that ideal matters. It matters when we talk about the family as being a domestic church, a school of love. Speaking about marriage as being a primordial sacrament, believe that first order where God in creation created in many ways all the sacraments that would then be the seven after the shatter and the entrance of sin, all wrapped up in the reality of Adam and Eve in their marriage. We talk about these lofty ideals about family life and how we worship and all these expressions of our faith that as catechists and as baptized believers, we want to incorporate in our lives and help to incorporate into the lives of the people that God brings to us. Ideals are crucial. And yet the ideal can often grate against the reality of what it takes to get there. And that's what we want to share because you look at this family that God has given us. We met each other 30 years ago. We'll talk about a little again our story. Married 28 years, we had such lofty ideals about what it was. We had a major conversion back to the Lord. We crossed over that great river of growing up in Catholic families that taught the stuff of the faith, of seeing the reverently, the dry bones of what we need to learn, the catechism, the commandments, the moral law, how to worship, how Catholics talk to each other. You learn the stuff of the faith and nobody anybody can learn that. But there's that transition that happens that we now as adults and catechists talk about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ about coming to know the God man who sees, knows and loves us and recognizing through his eyes how we are to be seen and known and loved. How in the most mundane or the most exciting in moments of desolation or in consolation, there's a constant presence of the person of Jesus Christ, amen? It's that transition from the stuff of the faith where the bones start to come to life and they start to dance. And there's that expression and experience with God that we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand but also trying to share. This is a journey that the Lord has worked through and yet at every moment it's almost impossible. I don't want to go that far. It's hard to keep his presence, to be aware of his presence. He's faithful but in the family life which is meant to be the center of all evangelization, I don't know anywhere else. I don't care if you work in a parish office. The family in the house is probably the hardest place to say, oh there's God. Oh, there's the Lord. That's what's happening here. And I think that's why that scripture came to mind here. That even as our vision both in our marriage, our family and in ministry is to learn to live and to proclaim God's plan for joy filled marriage for the salvation reality of marriage. That's the north star of the ideal. And yet reconciling with the mess and the mess of Damon Owens, the mess of Melanie Owens and therefore the mess to the power of two. It's not linear. It's like, oh by the way, I'm a recovering engineer. So you're gonna hear these things like vectors and aspirin. It's just part of who I am. So the recovery is not going well. But it's exponential. When you put the mess times the mess, it becomes this cubist, and then you add a child and it's to the third power. So we're in this place where you're looking at the reality and saying, how does this meet this beautiful ideal? So let's keep that in mind as well. Even as we speak about the pillar of fire, but this great verse, maybe Melanie, you could read this great verse from Exodus 1312, 1321 that ties into the reality of the family. The Lord went in front of them, the Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day to lead them along the way and in a pillar of fire by night to give them light so that they might travel by day and by night. I know you'll remember this, right? Because this is coming out of Egypt. This is pulling together a people more connected through the Lord than even through their own natural connections. They weren't friends. They might have been in some distant relationship, but they're drawn out of this Egyptian culture as slaves. Moses takes them out into the desert after all the plagues and everything else that goes through. And you know the whole story, which they didn't know, is that God would take a whole generation, 40 years, to literally walk the Egypt out of them. The ideals, the expectations, the cultural habits, the personal habits, identity, relationship, and mission, everything. And he took our older brothers and the faith out of this, walked them around the desert. And again, you look at the map, have you ever seen like the dotted map of 40 year exodus? It's pretty funny. I mean, they went from like here to here, but it looks like Bugs Bunny. It looks like here and back and then coming back over here and then moving them for 40 years. And they went from here to here. It wasn't about the distance, right? But we read in exodus, we read some of the highlights and the lowlights of that. And just like you recount the story of a marriage or of a family, and you remember the highlights and the lowlights, what connects the highlights and the lowlights, the consolations and the desolations, is the mundane. It's the ordinary waking up, going to bed, trying to find some water. What are we going to have for a minute? Kids cry and fussing at each other. And if you read between the lines in exodus, you read in Deuteronomy as well, Moses had a tent he had to set up just to deal with these mundane grievances. And we don't get the details of them. But in the midst of this, in this journey, particularly in the beginning, when God leads them out and they're in danger, we have this curious sign of the presence of God, of the Shekinah, right? Like the God during the daytime has this cloud that they follow. And at night, it's a pillar of fire because it's dark. But the presence of God is this tangible, the sensual reality of being able to see, to feel, to know, to follow God. So you've got to believe those first Jews coming out of Egypt or not going to deny that God's not with them. This is the same cloud that when the Egyptian army came, reversed course and went behind in order to separate them from the army. God was active and present. Nobody's going to say, gee, is the Lord with us? That wouldn't happen to later when that cloud was harder to see or gone, when they put the Lord into a tent, when Moses, you know, started to have to go up to the mountain later on. And it was hard to see the God in his presence here and now. Then they start worrying about, I'm thirsty, I'm hungry. And we hear them, the moments where God comes in and the manah, the what is this, comes down and they eat like, hey, we've got to make some bread out of this. That's a highlight. Well, this bread, it's all we ever get to eat. All the quail and the birds come and they eat the birds. Oh, this is great. Well, what about in between those? What's the grumbling look like? You follow? It's the mundane in between when that pillar of fire is not so easy to see in the desolation of night. Or when the cloud during the day is not so easy to see, even though the sun may be out, how do we know in the presence of God during that mundane in between? And how should that affect not just the way we see ourselves in the past, not just how we hope in the future, but about how we live in this present moment? We have such beautiful language in our faith that lays out this aspirational reality, even to this day, speaking about the family and about marriage. But for many of us, including Damon and Melanie, it serves as much as a rebuke as it does an encouragement, even with these beautiful children and the family and what we work hard. This woman has built a home with intentionality. She's had vision. She's taught me so much about the tangible things of building a house, about the ways of reminding when God isn't always clear to the children or to us in how we do that. But even for us, it's been more desolation than consolation. And I think part of it is because there's a romanticizing that we've taken part in about what family life should be in order to be the center of evangelization. We've romanticized what marriage ought to look like during those mundane, ordinary times that makes us deeply know that maybe we're a fraud. Maybe we shouldn't be here at a John Bosco conference. Maybe we shouldn't be in ministry to other couples until we get our stuff together. And especially with events like this come up, with the Catholic marriage summit last year, when we go on retreat, when we have the intimacy summit, when we try to set a bar for something, it's as if the devil himself shows up and reminds me stuff from 1987 to prove, not only should I not be in ministry, how did you get this woman? And it's only funny in the rearview mirror. In the present moment, it's as real as rain. It's like, oh, I got to quit. I got to stop this. You're a fraud. You shouldn't catechize. What are you going to say to these sixth graders during the prep? What are you going to teach them? All right, put on your Catholic mask and talk about Jesus. That's the fear. And I can tell you, especially in the last 10 years, I come in prepared with my Catholic mask just in case somebody thinks I'm a fraud. In the last 10 years, I haven't had to wear it. Amen. Because inevitably what happens with it when the devil works through these things and brings up these memories and the darts and the arrows and the fiery, all this, what happens is I start to close back in. I start to prepare myself for a humiliation. I start to recognize just where the pride has been in and where I'm trying to be something in that aspirational that I'm not yet. And what happens 100 times out of 100 times is I walk into that classroom. I walk into this room. I walk into a conference, whatever the talk is, and immediately say, Lord, I'm yours. And he just snatches all of it away. And he snatches it all away, not by filling me with ideas and concepts and abstracts. He snatches it all by saying, I love you. Just give him me. And no matter where we are in our faith, it's that mundane, ordinary reality that is far more influential in our evangelization than any lofty vision that we feel we're unworthy of. This couple standing before you rarely feels this, rarely feels that we're worthy to talk. And yet with God's grace, it is never about us, but it always is about us. Where do we come from, Mel? You know, we all have our journeys. And if you think for a moment on how you got here, where you are now, you can trace where God has been leading you. You know, sometimes it's a straight route. Sometimes it's circuitous. But Damon and I grew up in a Catholic family. Both my parents were generations, Louisiana, Catholics, Creole Catholics. And the way we were raised in our household, we went to Catholic schools, elementary school, high school. And I learned, as Damon says, all the what. And our Catholic faith was really was really an external. We didn't actually live it in the home per se. My parents had a very rocky marriage, but they sacrificed and they sent us to Catholic schools and they wanted us to learn the Catholic faith. And we did. And when I went to college, I didn't understand what my Catholic faith had to do with me or my life at all. And so I had banded it. And I had a really rough time and a lot of rocky relationships. And through all of that, I still went to church because that was the one constant in my life. And I knew that when I was at Mass, I had peace. No matter how I was living my life, I knew at Mass, I had peace. So I was holding on to that one shred. And Damon, like you said, when we met in Berkeley, I was looking for something. I was looking for Jesus. I wanted to be able to be who I was. I wanted to be able to live out my faith without worrying about what anybody was going to think about me. I wanted to live out my faith in a very natural way. I didn't want it to have to put on my Catholic face and go out and do anything. And I wouldn't have done that because that wasn't who I was. And when Damon and I met, it was the first time that I was able to date someone who was Catholic, who was interested in practicing his Catholic faith. At the time, you weren't, he wasn't. But together, we started on the journey back together. And God let us marriage shortly after, and then the children started to come. And the way we teach our children, you know, well, my default is the what. And it's the externals. You're going to know this, this, and this. And so I struggle a lot with teaching the naturalness of our faith. But we try. We have images in our home. We have when issues come up, we pray. We ask, well, what is the Lord asking you to do? We try to make it as natural as possible because that's how we live. But I still struggle with that. If I'm, if I'm stressed, if I'm tired, I want to go back to just what the rules are, and I don't want to put any of the emotion into that. But God has brought us the family and we're not perfect by any means. We have two of our daughters who've just recently moved out and decided to reject everything they've ever learned about the Catholic faith, and it breaks our hearts. But they still come around, they still want to be with us, and we know that God hasn't abandoned them. And we haven't, and we won't. And we love them, and we're loving them through this. But they, they're testing, they're testing what they know to be true against what the world says is true. And it's so difficult to watch, watch the, the descent. But it's their journey, and we're there for them. So our family life is by no means perfect. But we are trying to and we know that God, it's definitely there in the, in the mundane, in the, in the hard, especially in the hard. And once, when we lean on each other, that's when we're stronger. That's when we're strongest. I don't want to put Melanie, I do want to put Melanie on the spot here, but you have no idea how difficult that was for her to share. It's hard for me, but I'm able to sort of compartmentalize and intellectualize. But when you're a parent, when you're raising your family, and you're growing as it were, you do the best you can. Every one of us does. And that's not a, that's not a oh well. That's the reality. Nobody does the work we think in the rear view mirror. Oh, I could have done that. But that's because we're growing. And I can tell you that from the beginning before we even had children, this woman had such a vision for the house that she wanted to build, of how she wanted to share. And it was a God-breathed one because it challenged me. It challenged me to live the things that I was learning. And as you all know, that's a whole nother order to live what it is that we teach. And yet, I've always aspired to her aspiration, to her vision. She built the homeschool. We met other families that were homeschooling. We never heard of homeschooling when we, even before we had children, like two years before, and we met these families and we were like, we want that. We weren't reactionary in it. It was something that answered a call about how we wanted to have relationship with them. How we wanted the family temperature, the family melody to be based on how she grew up and how I grew up. It was intentional. It was a gift from the Lord. And this wasn't just a homeschool of content. I would come in and do some part-time teaching. And I'm like, y'all do all this? The prayers, the consecration, the silent time, the studying of the saints, and fun laughing. Sometimes they're coming and they're like, y'all are making way too much. Are you sure you have a school? And this is from the first daughter in 1996 to 2010. This is going over decades now of homeschooling. We know what we have taught them. We know what we've modeled, good, bad, and ugly. And to watch at least a couple of these girls in that awkward, late teen, young adult, choosing and speaking in ways we tilt to, God, praise God. They come to dinner every Sunday. They tell us stuff. Praise God. Yes. That's on our list of the mundane that we celebrate because they're still here and they still tell us stuff. And we're struggling now as their parents to say, okay, is this where I go into T.O.B. mode? Or are they expecting T.O.B. speaker mode? Do I do the dad thing? Do I hold back and listen? Do I nod? I'd be like, yeah, that's really stupid. It's a dance, right? Because there's always an answer, but then I don't want to be the dad. It's always got the answer. I want to be the dad. I was like, I can tell my dad anything. But then when you say something stupid, I could be like, that's stupid. And sometimes it just flows out. I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. But I also saw it on Instagram. I also saw it on TicTac. I also, I know where it's coming from. But to see it and hear it come out of my own children's mouths is baffling to me and that grounding, the grounding happens in the memory of our own story. It's just like Melanie, I grew up in a solid Catholic home. Troubles, drama. My dad loves this phrase. He heard me talk 20 years ago. He still uses this phrase, the good, the bad and the ugly. It was a home. My dad was a convert at 16. My mother's generation's Catholic. I grew up in a house that had, you know, gospel music and church every Sunday. And I had my first encounter with the Lord when I was 13. And 13 is a crucial age, right? And this was a moment going to one of these retreats. In fact, it was preparing for confirmation. And I didn't want to go because I was one of the cool kids. Played football, baseball, basketball. I was sports all the time. And I was going to go off on this retreat for Friday, Saturday with all the corny Catholic kids. It's like, dad, I don't want to go. You got to go. I want to go. Father Ray says you got to go. You got to go. So that was that kid in the back who was too cool to do anything with the music. And and I'm in the back and I'm like, you know, cross my toes if I could. I want to give this picture because I want you to hear what happened. And I did not go to a praise or a shouting church. I didn't go to the later church that we go to. It wasn't the spirituality. It was very Irish Catholic. And I, hey, I love my priest, but I'm just saying you got to get the picture here. So where I mean that kind of retreat in the parish basement. You with me? And Jesus showed up. I don't remember the sequence. I don't remember what happened. It was during one corny song. I think they were singing one of the like James Taylor songs or something like, what was that song? You got a friend. So I'm sorry. She likes James Taylor. I was like, but I was full blown like, I got to get out of here. And something happened. It had nothing to do with the guitar, nothing to do with the music, nothing to do with the people, nothing to do with the people, nothing to do with Jesus showed up. And I had this encounter with the Lord. And, you know, decades later, I can hardly explain it just to say I knew God was real. He came to me in that moment. So completely, all I could do, I wept. I'm the cool kid in the back now weeping. And they're thinking, always having a great retreat experience. We're doing it now. This is bringing the Lord. And I'm like in this encounter with the Lord like, oh my Lord, you're real, like a person real. Not like an idea concept, not a moral law, not commandments, not the dry bones. You're person. And here's the, here's the deeper one. You know me. You see me. And you like me. Right? You'll have had this experience. You know that there's a progression. One, there is a God and he's not just an idea. He's not just scripture. He's not just what parents told me was. He's real. Second, he sees me. He acknowledges me. And I know that he does because he's looking at me. And there's a delight and a fear. There's an ecstasy and an agony. Like he's looking really closely, he's going to see. But then I want to be seen, but I don't want to be seen. And then there's that third level of that encounter where there's the knowledge, and I don't mean just intellectual. I mean the knowledge you know, relationally, I delight in you. You're my boy. Where he just says, Damon. And all this happened without words, without, at the time, I don't remember the time, it went from Kronos to Kairos. It went to all the, it was just, and all I could do was weep. And that moment at 13, first of many, but the major conversion, I knew God was real and I gave my life to him. And here's how a 13 year old Damon gives his life to the Lord. Lord, I know you're real. I'm sorry. I will worship you. I will pay attention at mass. I'm not going to mess with my sister so much. I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to smoke. I'm not going to have sex until I'm married. That was a whoa. I made all the big promises to God. I'm going to follow commandments. I'm going to pray. And I meant it. I meant it. And that 13 year old boy making those promises sustained me for five years. Five, I mean, there's the residual after that, but five solid years that later on later years during high school became what I've described over the years as a white knuckle Catholic Catholicism, white knuckles. I was holding on hard. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. Me and my looking at all my friends and my phone like, man, look, I'm having fun drinking, smoking sex. I'm like, oh, but I'm not going to do it because I'm Catholic. How's that for evangelization? Right? How's that for the witness of the person of Jesus Christ? I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. But I made it through high school, a virgin, at least abstinent. Virgin might be pushing it. There was no integration here. There was no joy. There was just, I made it and I don't blame anybody. But that lasted 48 hours at Brown college, first two days at college. I imploded exploded like a cheap paper airplane. Within two days, I was doing everything I swore I would never do. And it was many ways. It was like an out of body experience. So now the 18 year old Damon confronting this five year old promise and thinking, well, all right, I blew it. My life's going to be over. No, it won't because I'm going to get back to you God as soon as I graduate. This is freshman year, second day in. And I'm already looking for like that little asterisk like, okay, Lord, I know you're real. I know what I did. I'm sure it's wrong. I probably need to go to confession. But you know everything. So you know, I need five years off. Lord, I'm not saying you don't exist. I'm not saying I don't believe you do. I'm not saying that I'm not stupid. I know you're real because I met you. I'm just saying maybe I need five years off. I think I originally asked for four and then got an extension for graduate school. So this was the mentality that my age, my girls are at their age right now. They're not in college doing this, but they're in the world in the same sense like I know they know Jesus is real. I know it Mel. I know, I know they know what we taught them. But the decisions they're making are just they're out of their minds and I ought to know. But what helped us come to our senses through the prodigal? He came to his senses in the middle of that pigsty. And what was his senses that he came to? Does anybody remember? What did he come to his senses about? Say it again? It's good at his father's house. And what specifically was good at his father's house? Food. Homeboy was hungry. He didn't have the revelation of Catechism 2261. He didn't go back to any of the 613 or whatever. He didn't come back to the law. He came back to I'm hungry. This is ridiculous. This is important because I came to the point after four years at Brown living like this that I was hungry. I was starving. And I had all the stuff that I had worked for with terms of the the frat and the girls and the fun and all the stuff that was there. It was like a saturation point. Then it was almost like in Genesis 2 where God says, now you're ready. And went from there all the way to California to meet this woman. Went what I thought was for a graduate degree in engineering. And thought I could sort of wipe the slate clean on that other coast. Start over again and be the new 22-year-old Damon man. Still wanted to boy it for a little while. Wasn't ready to man up. And what changed the timetable, what changed the whole ideal, what changed Damon in the present moment was meeting this woman. And I've met beautiful women before. Thank you Jesus. But her beauty changed me. I made promises. But the boy was still there. So the very short, we have a whole talks on this. We were sexually active. And I continued to justify it with my extension with God. But Melanie had enough. And we sat in my apartment one day while I'm riffing on something. And in my absolute arrogance, and I was bad, shamefully. I'm so glad there was no Facebook in 1980s and 90s. Seriously y'all. If there were even video cameras, phones, I know I wouldn't be in ministry. And I said, Mel, I said, what if we stop having sex? I literally said that. Because in my hubris, I thought, Catholic, Catholic, we're in love. And since we have the Damon and Melanie in love exception, we could comfortably talk about what we're supposed to do, but then how we figured out what was really good for us. I really, I thought we'd have this great conversation. Mel, what if we stop having sex? And when I said that, she looked at me and cried, wept. And that was a fast track that was one of those concussion, left turn changes that we not only decided to stop having sex, but for the next two and a half years after serious, like open heart surgery kind of struggle, we were standing at an altar in Oakland, California, exchanging wedding vows, knowing God can do anything. God can do anything. And there's much in there. I hate shortening the story. I really do because it sounds like, oh, you decided, then you stopped and then Jesus came. It's, it's the mundane in between is the real story. The mundane, the heartbreak, the daily, well, how do I learn to love? How do I love you? If we're not going to have sex, how do I show you how much I love you? How do you, how do I, how do I know you love me? That's where the Jesus came in and began to show us what real love is. And he continued to show us not just what love looked like outside of marriage, but he did that to prepare us as brother, sister so that then as husband and wife, we had to learn from that how to live a real conjugal, joyful marriage. And you talk about another concussion the other way. You spend all this time, I'm not going to have sex, sex is bad, outside of marriage, don't have sex, don't have sex, don't have sex, don't have sex. And then you get married, the church says, this is the icon of the Trinity. This is the renewal of your wedding vows, the vows made flesh, the gift given and received, that life itself and the Holy Spirit comes through. And you're like, but it's sex. Yes. I mean, your knuckles are still sore. Every, every wedding, I see these couples that I know have studied and tried to live theology of the body and I know what their knuckles feel like for the first three to seven years, you're trying to figure out, are we supposed to enjoy this? And if we do enjoy this, can we tell anybody? Or just we have to have as many kids, people says, oh, okay, I'm assuming you're having sex, but you're having kids. So it's okay. We've got a schizophrenia that is waiting to be addressed in what we're asking disciples of Jesus Christ to embrace. And the answer is still in the mundane. It's still in the ordinary. It's not extraordinary. It's fellowship. It's friendship. It's good old fashioned journey. It's a transparency of being a disciple of Christ who has been met in the middle of the pigsty, who God uses the very sensual gifts that he created us for, hunger, thirst, loneliness, tired, sickness. When we reach the end of the line, that we come to our senses and that everything that we've been given in the dry bones of our faith now comes to life where we say, well, where do I go? I go back to my father's house because as corny as I called it, as restricting as I thought it was, as withholding me back from all the things that God wants from me, all the things I said when I was that stupid prodigal son so I could be free. I realized that's dumb because I'm hungry. And we need it individually. We need it as couples. We need it as families. And then the parish becomes a family of families. And nothing but the family, nothing but the family can literally engender a new culture. When John Paul II exhorted the family to become what you are, he wasn't just throwing up another ideal. It's familiar, familiar with consortium number 17. He wasn't just saying, oh, be this. He was saying, let the world see you become what you are. It's in all of the struggles. It's in all of the doubts and the fears. But it's all revealed through friendship, through our growing friendship with the Lord God and our growing friendship in this conjugal love and what this can bring in terms of family and then how as families of families we can be real about what it takes to be a source of a new civilization. Because the heart of that source of the new civilization is the very mess that we're ashamed of. It's the very fears that we think make us unworthy to be witnesses and friends of others. It's the sense that somebody else has it better than we do, so we better up our game because look, their kids don't mess in the pews. They're able to sit there during the whole Mass. That must be a holy family. Oh, this one is involved in all the ministry. This one goes to the Latin Mass. This one prays and look at the kid clapping, oh my gosh, your house, your home life must be perfect. And the burden of that on us, the burden on you to have to live up to some ideal that does not exist is as bad as misreading our Lord when He exhorts us to be perfect even as God the Father is perfect. We hear that and we're like, oh gosh, I really suck. Instead of hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ, we hear the gospel of the suck. I suck. You suck. I suck a little bit less than you, so I could be a catechist. Right? Those families, they don't suck, but we don't really talk to them. Everybody else. We have a different gospel. So we paint a new mask, but a renewal of culture is not going to be done with masks. It's going to be done with an authenticity, an intimacy, a friendship that the world will laugh at. They laugh at it now. A transparency that counts against everything that you know to appear to be good enough. And it's not going to be Damon and Melanie in front of 200 people. It's going to be a circle. That's why I love that discipleship quads. Mark Joseph was talking about. It's going to be an intimate group. It's going to be finding ways to transform what focus and Saint Paul outreach and these groups and even marriage encounter, engaged encounter. There are groups in pockets, couples for crisis, figured it out in the Filipino communities. Domestic church is done in the Polish communities. Retrovi has done it in the certain crisis marriage groups, but making that not the exception on the periphery, but the norm. This is how we engage. The question is whether we build the friendships. It's how we do it. If you want to close with two visions, I'll do the first and Melanie will do the second. The first vision is this extrinsic, is this odd extra. What are we to the world? What are we to one another? And what we are to one another are friends. I mean, real friends and friendship in the order of love is this mutual and reciprocal gift. I am yours and you are mine. And this is why marriage is considered a special form of friendship because the depth of that I am yours and you are mine is taking to another level in the totality, the faithfulness and that pledge and the vow and that gift that's given freely one to the other as a whole state of life, but in many ways it's a special type of friendship. It's not the only friendship and anything that we want to do at the Paris level, anything we want to do in the culture, the community is going to happen through the building and the normative building of friendship. Couple to couple, families to families, open up your grill, open up your front porch and your back porch. That means something totally different from the south. Some people come to front porch and other folks come to the back porch, open them up, make friends, speak to people before and after mass. Hi, my name is Damon. Well, you guys haven't seen you before, haven't seen you in a while. Build those friendships. But what comes in that encounter is the joining of two worlds as two families, two couples meet. And I'm asking Melanie just to walk through what we consider sort of the 12 key things. We'll do this quickly. 12 key things that in family life are sort of those mundane, daily, ordinary things. They're not the pillar of fire in the cloud. It's not going to be the parting of the Red Sea. It's not going to be, you know, the wrestling with Jacob. It's not going to be, it's the mundane in between of getting to the promised land. What are the things that we can do in our family that when it doesn't even affectively feel right, when it doesn't meet the romance that we can do within our family? The first one we have is having a vibrant prayer life. And that can be the rosary or it can be other prayers. I know in our own family life we had, we were praying the rosary every night and you know the kids are nodding off. They were sitting there praying but it was just words. No, they were on their knees. They were deciding between Latin and English and Spanish. So what we did was, we prayed the rosary. We just changed it up. We just changed family prayers and we just asked the kids for, you know, what are your intentions? We just tried to make it more personal. You know, we tried with the images and we tried, you know, lots of different things as they've grown up. But it's just, we changed prayers and we make it very personal. Like who are you praying for this week? Who are you praying for? Who can we pray for that we know that's sick? And so we have them become involved in that. But definitely prayer is definitely foundation in our family. That's how we close our nights. Definitely. And it's also good for the teenagers because I know whatever's going on in their life, they know that we are going to be praying at the end of the night. That is the constancy. That is the stability. And also faithful attendants at Holy Mass. Just non-negotiable. We always go to Mass. And if you want to go during the week, then you can do that too. We do that too. And we also have a monthly confession. It's on the calendar. When we do our calendar, we put confession on so everybody knows don't schedule work that day because we're going to be going to confession. As I mentioned earlier, keeping those images, those crucifixes, in your home. So we have crucifixes in the kids' rooms over the doors, consecrating the family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Magical Heart of Mary. We also do that. Seasonal too. So Melanie's really great about the liturgical seasons and we have a banner that's there. The kids are asking for little holy water fonts, you know, who's in charge of making sure that they're full. These are things that, they're just rituals, but this is the dry bones that they'll refer to you later. Okay. And speaking to Jesus, like I mentioned, just naturally making that part of who you are, who you are as a family. And when problems come up, that's the first thing you do go to. Let's pray about this. And that naturalness is we're passed by an accident, and we're praying for them. Like, oh my goodness, I hope they're all right. Remember some percassionate Virgin Mary, never was in the, you know, we pray something like that. We pray coming out of the driveway. They know that we get in the car and drive down the driveway. And all this sounds hyper religious, right? But I'm saying this is the mundane that we can do and have power over. We even pray over dessert. Like the real nights we have dessert, we give you thanks, Almighty God, for, you know, it's, we thank you, Lord, for this sweet treat, may it remind us of the sweetness that awaits us in heaven, right? Isn't that great? Got that from a friend out in Phoenix. We play the beginning of meals. We pray at the end of meals, restaurants in, out, anywhere. So this just, it's something that is fine up until they're about 14. Then they go. And we keep our marriage first. We, we know that we have to have a strong marriage. We have to have a strong foundation. So we'll be able to give to our kids. We encourage quiet time alone and together. This is one we're actually currently struggling with between screens, between work, you know, the teenagers working and all the other charities, the things that are happening, but really making sure that there's some quiet time alone and together prayer or sometimes reading. Sometimes it's just quiet for quiet's beautiful sake. Get used to that. Even going to adoration. The adoration chapel as well. Modeling self sacrifice. And this sounds again, very noble as an ideal, but I'm talking about in the mundane and making it clear, almost like walking them through what that might look like. Do that because, like the Mother Teresa quote that's right next to the sink, right? I wash these dishes, not because they're dirty, but because of, I love the person who's going to use them next, something like that, right? And they roll their eyes like every other kid. They do all this, but it's, it's part of the house. Be joyful in the duty of the moment. Joy is a big theme in our own witness and our own life and in our marriage and in our ministry. Joyful ever after joy to be, because I think that is far more encouraging, far more tangible than even understanding love. And the joy in the moment really is Melanie's so good at this. It's just, he's just, well, they're fussing. They're complaining. They want this and this isn't working out. And I don't like this hotel room. I was supposed to have my own bed and how come I have to sleep with this one and why do I have to do this? And we're like, guys, we're in Ohio. They're like, so we're not home. This, that's like the mountains and the tunnels and the teaching them sort of this gratitude to look at the moment like this is not the ordinary. And you will get no praise for it. Tell them again, Melanie, none, but it gets baked into their bones. And our time is up. But here's our final, final exhortation, which is what we're working on right now is what I said, make real friends with other couples and families. And I would add priests and religious as well. Bring them up the naturalness of having sister over for some barbecue. The naturalist of father coming over for a beer or from, you know, for lunch or having this family, they did and will the kids start to ask, who's coming over this weekend? There's a naturalist to it that teaches them that we're not just on the insular unit that's meant to get through and not commit any mortal sins. We have a missionary reality that requires us not only to build friendships within the house, but to know how to make friends outside of the house. And that's one of the things that if Melanie and I would go back in time, and we had an opportunity, we would spend more time focusing on that and probably lose something we were actually good at. But that's the problem with regrets, right? You can't do everything. So just so in our quote here, the family, this is the place where the theology of the body and the theology of love are interwoven. Love that quote. This is where it happens. This is what a school looks like. A school is not graduates walking through the hallways. A school of love is messy. You got detention, you got bad breath, you got kids who didn't have breakfast, you got teachers grumpy, you got life. It's a school of love and to honor that. And as Petrox said, and probably will continue as well, this has been a privilege, a privilege for you this week to come together as a community of believers of disciples, ministers, and catechists to be renewed, to be strengthened, to be empowered. This is a mountaintop experience, all right? But don't let this mountaintop experience make you eschew or to, you know, thumb your nose at the mundane, the ordinary that this weekend is, this week is meant to, to encourage you. That even in the challenges of our church, in your family and personal life, in your parish, in your community, in the world, for God's sakes. This coming together is meant to encourage us to go forward and to not make every experience a mountaintop experience, but to recognize that what happens in between is the field of sanctification. This is where God makes the stuff holy. And if we start hating the stuff, then we're taking from God the very things that he needs and wants for us to bring in our own holiness. May the Holy Spirit bring a new renewal to your ministry, to ours, to your life and to my hearts. And in doing so, for the entire church at large, we know that the family and the church are mutually dependent. And it's been that way from the beginning, that God created, as we call two churches, the domestic and we call it the universal church. It's just recognizing that from the beginning, God wants us to be fully human. And that humanity made the image and likeness of God is essentially a call to divinity. And he will make that divinity in the ordinary. Thank you, all, and thank you for your work. And God bless you and all the Lord has.