 One of the questions I always get from students and people when they first find out that Father Dave and I were roommates in college is, what was he like in college? What was he like? And I would say that he was the same person he is now. He's probably a lot holier than he was now, you know, because God has been working in him. And he had more hair. Other than that, you guys, I still recall being convicted. Like we lived on the second floor of St. Francis dorm and like almost kiddie quarter from our dorm room was the chapel on the second floor. And I knew if I came back to the room and I was wondering, Dave was just here. Where is he? Inevitably, I would find him in the chapel praying. And it convicted me. It kept me honest to say, look, am I really living out this faith? And so he, Dave has been a Father Dave has been a blessing in my life for so many years. And it's good to be able to be here and minister under his leadership here at Franciscan. It's such a tremendous blessing. It should have happened 10 years ago, but we were patient and it happened. And I'm just glad he's here. And I'm glad to be able to minister alongside of him. This morning, I want to talk about hope. The name of my talk is witness to hope, because right now we need people who can witness to the hope and glory that God brings to our lives. Amen. My story of hope. Many of you might have heard some of this story before. I'm going to share it again, only because it really encapsulates for me what God has been doing in my life really for the last seven years. And three years ago, it'll be three years this July, I was in Rochester, Minnesota, running one of our youth conferences. 2000 teenagers all fired up for Jesus. We had a great Friday night, a great Saturday morning. We sat down for our team lunch on Saturday. And as I sat down to eat, my phone rang. And I got one of the most chilling calls I'd ever received in my life. At first, I didn't recognize the number, but I answered it, because normally I'm the kind of guy like, if I don't recognize the number that pops up on my cell phone, I don't answer it. I'm going to introvert any introverts in this room. Guys who are extroverts, look at all these introverts, adopt them and bring them into conversations, because sometimes we just don't know how to do that. Help us. But this number popped up and I felt compelled to answer it and I answered it. It was my son, Andrew's girlfriend, Christa, letting me know that they had just been in a car accident. That she wasn't sure exactly what was going on with Andrew, because he was unconscious. He was just airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. She didn't even know the name of the hospital that he had been taken to. But she said it was very serious. And my heart just sank. I'm like, here I am sitting in a convention center in Rochester, Minnesota. I hung up. I called my wife. I said, honey, I don't know what's going on. You need to get to Pittsburgh as quickly as possible. And I don't even know which hospital it'll send you to. So just start calling and find out, you know, who has Andrew. So he gathered up. Our daughters got in the car and drove to Pittsburgh to find out what was going on with our son. Meanwhile, I'm scrambling. I'm on my phone trying to book a flight back to Pittsburgh as soon as I can. Packing up my stuff, trying to, you know, get everything together. And it was the first flight that I could get out, didn't leave until five o'clock in the evening. It was flying out of St. Paul, Minnesota. It was going to take me through Atlanta because there was no direct flights left. And I wasn't going to get into about until about 11 o'clock at night. And I just stopped in my room and I got down on my knees and I just said, okay, Lord, I don't know what's going on, but I surrender this all to you. And I just got a sense of peace that came over me. I was still kind of days trying to absorb and trying to process everything I, you know, that was going on in my heart. When my son was three years old, it was a Christmas day. And we were at my in-laws celebrating with my wife's family. And my son running out the back door completely misjudged the staff, tripped on the door, you know, the door, the lip and fell head first into a planter and split open his forehead. I had to take him to the emergency room and he had to get stitches on Christmas Day. He was only three years old at the time. He's a squirmy little kid. And they had to wrap him in one of these little mummy suits to keep him still. And I just remember standing over him watching the doctors, you know, stitch up his forehead and his eyes just locked on mine. You know, locked on mine like, Daddy, he's going to be okay. I'm so scared. I'm like, it's going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. And, you know, and all the emotions you have as a father in that moment where I was brought right back to that, it's my son going to be fine. And I felt in my heart, the Lord saying, I've got this. Trust in me. And so I said, okay, Lord, I trust in you. I know that you're going to take care of this. And as I was getting ready, I started just texting some people that were important to me, letting them know, start praying. You know, and this is one of these moments when you realize how blessed you are to be Catholic and how God lines up things in your life. Long before you're aware that he's preparing and making things going to happen in a beautiful, miraculous way, we had six youth conferences going on that weekend across the United States and Canada. And so I was able to send out six text messages to all the hosts of the conference saying, tonight, when all the youth are before the blessed sacrament, please pray for my son. His life is hanging in the balance. In the night of my son's accident, there were over 12,000 high school students across the United States and Canada praying for my son before the blessed sacrament. I got on my plane. I was delayed getting out of St. Paul. So now at 6.30, almost 7 o'clock, I finally get on in the air. I fly to Atlanta. I get to Atlanta. Another flight delay. I don't get back to Pittsburgh until 1.30 in the morning. And as I'm in Atlanta saying, honey, I'm not going to get back to late. Just go home, get a good night's sleep. When I land in Pittsburgh, I'll drive home. In the morning, we can go into Pittsburgh and take care of Andrew. Meanwhile, another good friend of ours, who's a TOR, went to the hospital and gave my son the anointing of the sick. They had to do an emergency craniotomy because my son, he didn't have any broken bones. He did not have any internal injuries like, you know, bruised liver or anything like that. What happened was he was driving down, his girlfriend was driving down the road and a car coming the other way, the driver fell asleep, crossed the center line and just veered into them, hit them head on doing about 55 miles an hour. My son was not wearing a seatbelt. My son can sometimes be an idiot. He was lying in the back seat asleep and took the full brunt of the accident in the upper left side of his skull. He had 19 fractures across his forehead, into his eye socket and into his cheek. He had severe brain trauma. They operated on him. They reconstructed the bone. They actually had to pull some pieces of the skull out of his brain to reconstruct. And then they had to do an emergency craniotomy. They took the upper one-third of his skull out completely. And in case you're ever wondering what they do in situations like that, they actually just put it in a jar of solution and put it in the refrigerator somewhere. Kept it on ice until it was time to put it back in. But in that moment, he was hanging on to life. They had him on heavy anti-seizure medicine. He hadn't regained consciousness. They had him on a breathing tube. And he was in the intensive care unit at UPMC hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. So I got home, went to bed, got about three hours of sleep, woke up at 5.30, got up, took a shower, and drove with my wife into Pittsburgh. I was not prepared in any way, shape, or form for what I was going to see when I walked into the intensive care unit. My son was there. His face was swollen. His eye was swollen shut. There was blood oozing from his eye. He had blood on his neck from the injury. They had done the surgery. They had got him as much as they could. He had a drainage tube coming out of his skull to keep the fluid from building up because the biggest threat was the pressure on the brain. It could damage his brain even more than it already was. And I walked into the room, saw him lying there, and I just fell to my knees at the side of his bed and put my hands on him and just started praying, come Holy Spirit, Lord Jesus Christ, heal my son, restore him. Be there, help him. All the prayers that a father would pray are like, oh my God, I love this boy, Lord Jesus, just keep him here. Whatever it takes, Lord, I'll do whatever it takes. Don't take my son from me. I'm not ready for that. The doctors came in a couple hours later and sat my wife and I down and basically laid this out in front of us and said, we want to be completely honest with you. In our experience, the level of brain trauma that your son has experienced, it may be weeks before he wakes up. And when he does, he might not remember who he is, he might not remember who you are. He might not even remember how to talk. We may have to reteach him how to tie his shoes to feed himself, everything. We're not sure the extent. We'll begin to learn over the next few days the extent of his brain trauma, but we want you to be prepared for months, if not years of rehabilitation and therapy for your son. And they came with some literature, like here's some, you know, this is where you can find rehab. This is, you know, like they were the nursing staff, the doctors were wonderful. And as I listened to this, you know, like once again, there was just this sense of, okay, God, whatever you want, I know you're going to give me whatever I need. The next day, my son was lying in his bed and my daughter Madeline, who's a nurse, started wiping the blood off his face, you know, because she's a nurse. She wanted him to clean him up because he really hadn't been cleaned up since his accident. The swelling in his face had gone down significantly. They had taken him off of his breathing tube because they had balanced out his medication. They were sure he wasn't going to see easy. He wasn't going to die, but they wanted to make sure that, you know, like that everything was going to be all right before they took out the breathing tube. So they took out the breathing tube. And then my daughter's like wiping off his face. And as she's wiping his face off, my son starts to twitch a little bit. Like he's being bothered by this. We're all looking at this like, what? My daughter Madeline keeps doing it. And she's a nurse. So she's talking to him, like, Andrew, it's going to be okay. I'm just cleaning you up. Just let me do what I'm doing here. And about a minute later, after she's continuing to wipe him up and clean up his neck and his face, he just turns to her and says, will you please stop that? And we're all like, what? Did he just talk? Because he hadn't said a word, hadn't said, and no signs of consciousness. And I realize in the moment, in that moment, there's two things that are more powerful than anything in the world. Number one, of course, the power of prayer and the power of God to heal and to restore. The second is the power of sibling to annoy another sibling. Because my daughter Madeline literally annoyed him out of a coma. Before we knew it, they had taken out his IVs from his legs, had him sitting up in a chair, and then he, you know, he, you know, he, they started asking him questions like, do you know your name? I'm Andrew. Do you know your siblings? Madeline, Catherine, John Paul, and Therese? Do you know where you are? I'm at work. You know, like he started, after they started asking questions like, do you know where you are and what's going on? He had no idea. He was speaking some really wild stuff. It was crazy, but he remembered who he was. He remembered where he lived. He remembered his siblings. And they told me, he said, look, you know, his, his recovery is going to go a lot better if he sits up and gets out of bed a little bit. So I helped him up with the help of a nurse. And I'm on one side, the nurse is the other, and we're going to take him to the bathroom to use the bathroom. He can bear, he can't see out of this. I can barely, you know, he can barely get his balance. So we're just holding him. He looks past the bathroom and he points to the door of the, of his room in the ICU. And he just wants to walk. I walk a hundred feet down to the end of the hall and back with him and get him back into his chair. The next day they bring him his breakfast. He sits up in bed and starts eating his breakfast on his own. Now my son will tell you, he doesn't remember anything from the first two and a half weeks after his accident. And it was really dicey. They would, they were coming in and they started doing the therapy right away. And they would say, okay, Andrew, I'm going to give you three words, apple, pear, umbrella. Can you repeat those three words? Apple, pear, um, umbrella. Great. Then they'd ask him some more questions and they'd come back and say, Andrew, I gave you three words just a couple of minutes ago. Can you tell me what they were? And he would go apple, pear, I don't know. You know, they, they would show him pictures of, here's some orange juice and here's a frying pan and here's some eggs and here's some milk, you know, in the kitchen. What are you, what are you trying to do? And he, he couldn't even say, well, that's for making breakfast. Like there were, he was totally disconnected. He couldn't, couldn't put things together at all. And so I was just grateful. Like my son is alive. So about a week later that he got out of ICU, five days after that, we transferred him from UPMC to a rehabilitation center in Harmerville, which is right outside of Pittsburgh. He was there for another, I would say, week and a half. And after four days of being there, it was like God flipped another switch. Boom. And all of a sudden, everything that he was struggling with was gone. He was going, just ripping through his occupational therapy, ripping through his physical therapy, ripping through his speech therapy and just nailing everything. And I was absolutely amazed and overwhelmed and so grateful. There were so many tears of joy during those days. And when they turned to me and said, we think he's ready to go home. And I'm looking at my watch and it's like, okay, it's August 10th. Are you sure he's ready to go home? It's not even been a month since his accident. They're like, yeah, there's nothing more that he needs from us. He's fine. We are going to prescribe that you do some outpatient therapy to keep him growing and moving forward. So we took him back over to a place that's local where he could continue his therapy. After four days of therapy, they said to us, we don't want to waste your time or your insurance company's money. He does not need any more physical, occupational, or speech therapy. He's fine. Two months later, he was back taking classes here at Franciscan towards his MBA. He completed his MBA with almost a 4.0 grade point average and now is finishing up a nursing degree. And the only lingering effect of his accident is he doesn't see out of his left eye. And I share all this with you because I remember the prayer surrender that I said to God, whatever it takes, whatever you want, whatever it takes, I will do whatever it takes to get my son well. And I think this is what hope is like. And people used to come up to my wife and I during this whole thing and say, your family's so strong. It's so beautiful to see your faith. It's so beautiful to see what God is doing. And I was so humbled by the whole experience. I said, I'm not strong. I'm not strong at all. Actually, I'm very weak. But I've put all my faith and all my hope. And even when my faith felt like a mustard seed or even smaller, I put all of that in my God who is very, very strong. And I truly believe in that moment God had revealed to me what hope is really all about. And I want to share it because we need hope right now. Hope not as a concept, but as a living reality in our souls. If we don't have a living hope, then we do not have hope. For there is no other hope other than a living hope. It says in the Catechism 1870, it says, hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promise and rely not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Hope is a surrender to something bigger than ourselves to a God who loves us, who's always on our side. The problem is that we put our hope in a desired outcome. We see hope portrayed in movies and on television as this is like we've tried everything else. I guess all we can do now is hope. Like it's this depressing little last ditch effort that hopefully what we want to happen will come true. And if we put our hope in a desired outcome, that's not hope. That's a wish. I told Father Dave, if I win the lottery, I'll give you $10 million. I haven't won the lottery yet, and I realize you have to buy tickets to win the lottery. And I would say, if I say, oh man, I hope I win the lottery, that's not hope. That's a wish. Lord, I want this. But that's not where my hope lies. My hope lies in heaven and God and His promise to be there with me no matter what. My dad is Charles Borromeo Bolio III. That's a pretty cool name. I wish I was Charles Borromeo IV sometimes, but he just decided that it was, he wanted me to be John. My brother is Michael. My other brother is Christopher. What's St. Charles Borromeo says is God wishes us not to rest upon anything but His infinite goodness. Do not let us expect anything, hope anything, or desire anything but from Him. And let us put our trust and confidence in Him alone. What a powerful saying. What a powerful challenge for us that we would not expect anything. That's the problem. I think we've become very entitled, and we expect things to work out for us. I know where my pride, when I get angry, I know exactly why I get angry. 99.9% of the time is because I've created some sort of expectation of something that should happen my way, and when it doesn't, I get easily angered and frustrated by that. Because I've placed hope in something that isn't worthy of my hope. And hope is both a movement of grace. It is God's initiative drawing us into this confidence in Him, but it's also a decisive response on our part, because every movement of grace requires, demands, a decisive response on our part. Grace is not magic. God cannot wave a magic wand over you and give you hope. We need to yield who we are and what we desire to God and let Him transform our desires until they're in Him and Him alone. And right now, the world is dying because it's lost hope. The suicide rate, the United States has gone up every year for the last 13 years. It's up 30% since the year 2000. For our young people, 10 to 18, suicide is a second leading cause of death. The number of 25 to 33-year-olds dying from alcohol-related liver disease has tripled since 1999. The United States, which has 5% of the world's population, consumes 80% of the world's opioids. Do you see what we're dealing with? In 2019, 70,000 Americans died of a drug overdose. In 1999, that number was under 20,000. We are literally killing ourselves, medicating ourselves into death. It's not enough. People cannot see that there's something greater that they can place their faith in, their hope in, their trust in. Meanwhile, in our church, we see regular mass tendons on the decline. In some diocese, that number is now well below 20% of baptized Catholics are regular church attendees. We've all heard the statistic that only 30% of Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. And we have countless former Catholics who've lost all faith in the institutional church because of the scandals. So where do we, as men who love the church and who desire to see the church renewed, where are we going to turn to find the strength and courage to persevere? We have to once again recommit ourselves to put our hope in heaven and a hope in the Lord. And the perfect example for us to look at is the Blessed Mother. Mary's hope was absolute and unshakable in the promise of God. Even in the most mysterious, dark, and difficult moments in her life, she never lost hope. At the Annunciation, she desired no other explanation after revealing her humility before the message of the angel. When the angel comes to her and says, you're going to become the mother of God, this child will be holy. Her response is, how can this be since I'm a virgin? And that's not a response of questioning or doubt. That's a response of understanding her limitedness, that she was looking to God like you are the hope for this. So I will wait upon you to show me how this is going to be. And the angel says to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child will be born, will be holy and be called the Son of God. And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God. Then Mary said, here I am, the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word. Then the angel departed from her. When she says, how can this be? She's like, I know myself. I'm just the humble servant of the Lord. I cannot make this happen on my own. What you're saying is not about me. And when the angel says, you know, the Holy Spirit is going to come upon you, you'll be overshadowed by his power and you will conceive. For me, I would have about 300 follow-up questions. You know, wait, the Holy Spirit's going to come to me. How's that going to work? Am I going to be aware? When is it going to happen? How can I prepare? What do I need to do? I need to start planning. Is this going to happen soon? Because I've got to figure out like, okay, I've got to get a stroller. I've got to get a baby crib. I've got to be like, okay, I'm going to have a baby. Okay. All these things that like, okay, angel, tell me like, how, how's this going to work? You know, like, how am I going to tell Joseph? This is, this is crazy. Like, I would have had all these follow-up statements and questions, but hers was like, simply let it be done to me. I trust. I believe and I hope. As we look around, we, you know, we were on a, okay, we got a plan. What is the plan? How are we going to fix the church? How are we going to restore the church and renew the church? The first thing that we need to do is like Mary's just fall silent before the Holy Spirit, let the Holy Spirit come upon us. Renewal of the church starts with us and our personal renewal, our personal yes, so that we can be witnesses to hope, so that we can, with quiet patience, wait upon the Lord to reveal and lead us to these things that are going to allow us to be renewed personally and to be agents of renewal in a church that so desperately needs it. You know, when Joseph became aware of her pregnancy, he resolved to send her away quietly. He didn't want to cause scandal, but he just knew that whatever is going on, I'm not a part of it. And Mary must have detected the anguish, the emotional turmoil that maybe Joseph was going through as he was thinking about these things. And she did not run to Joseph and try to justify herself. Joseph just chill. An angel came to me and said, this is all from God. She didn't want to stand up and defend herself and make herself something other than she was, other than the handmade. She knew that God was going to justify and reveal and lead Joseph through this as well. And we know that God fulfilled the hope of Mary by letting Joseph understand that he had an intimate part, an intimate role in bringing salvation into the world, to protect the Blessed Mother, to provide for the incarnation, to be the stepfather of the Son of God. Mary often pondered things in her heart, which is such a great kind of posture, a disposition for us to have. It's just to meditate upon what God is doing. She must have pondered the words of Isaiah from chapter 30 verse 15 when it says, In quietness and in trust shall be your strength. That's where Mary drew her strength, by just waiting upon the Lord and continually placing her hope in the Lord. And Mary, it didn't end with that with Mary. As Jesus grew into a toddler and then to a young boy and then a teenager and then an adolescent and then a young adult, Mary had to wait patiently because maybe there weren't outward signs of Christ's divinity or his fulfillment of the prophetic word that he would become, you know, the king of many nations and be called holy. He in many ways looked like everyone else's children, but she never lost hope in the promise that this was the Savior promised by God. And when Jesus was betrayed and arrested and scourged and beaten and spat upon and crowned with thorns and mocked and led away carrying a cross and crucified, when all seemed lost, Mary's hope was unaltered. And it didn't just diminish in any way and rather it grew, it became the courage that allowed her to walk with Jesus. And where do we find Mary in the midst of this tragedy at the foot of the cross? She had the courage. She had a quiet confidence, a courage to go where even most of the apostles were afraid to go. When they ran and hid in their houses, she walked with her son to the very end because her quiet hope grew into courage and confidence. It became something that we need to look at and say, okay, if this is the pattern of how we grow to be courageous, to follow Christ all the way to the cross, then what do I need to change about the way I approach God and see God and give my heart to God and surrender to God? What do I need to change? How do I need to be stripped the way Jesus was stripped? You know, this invitation to hope is the call to go with Christ to the cross. As he's tied to the pillar and the whips are coming down and the flesh is being torn from his body, the Lord is inviting us to join him there, to be vulnerable, to be stripped of these things of our flesh that we cling to, that we put our confidence in, our talents, our gifts, to be stripped of those things that we use as our comforts that protect us from being naked in the world and having to rely completely on God for our stability and our peace. Like all these false little things that we cling to, God wants to strip us of them so that we can be worthy of the cross. By Christ's stripes, we are healed by us being stripped by God of all our unhealthy attachments and false comforts that we cling to. We will become more like Christ, more confident, more full of courage and boldness, more given this grace to go forward and to proclaim the love of Jesus Christ. And as I was going through this whole thing with my son, and I kept hearing people say, man, it's amazing that the witness of your family and the faith and this miracle that God has done because my son is a miracle. The doctors, if I had a dollar for every time the doctor used the word remarkable with me in discussing my son's recovery, it's remarkable. I'm like, ah, it's miraculous. No, it's remarkable. It's miraculous. I'm like, and I actually said this to the surgeon. He was, you know, a great guy. I mean, like I said, God blesses this guy with some tremendous gifts, but he would not acknowledge that they came from God. I said, wouldn't you like to put on your resume that you assisted God in a miracle? Is that not a cool thing to be able to put on your resume? I assisted God in a miracle, but he didn't want to be looked as the assistant. He's like, no, my skills, you know, I saved your son. You assisted God in a miracle, and I wasn't trying to be rude about it. I was just trying to like help him understand like, God, how does that work in this situation? And I realized, you know, like I did not receive a special grace in that moment when my son was in his accident. I didn't receive a gift of hope, but rather God had been forming in me over the last three years leading up to that the grace that I needed in that moment. Let me explain. Three years prior to that, my mom had died of cancer. She suffered with cancer for seven years before she died. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, she had been kind of nominally Catholic. She converted when she got married. She was Methodist, converted when she married my dad. And while she made sure that we had a Catholic home where all of us went to Mass together on Sunday, that we all received our sacraments and went to faith formation, there was not, I would say, an explicit devotional kind of experience of prayer within our house. My mom didn't really have any interest in saints and the rosary and things like that. I had my conversion at 18. I started talking about these things with her and her response always was, well, I have a relationship with Jesus. Why would I want to talk to his mother when I can just talk to him? And she had very simple, beautiful faith in Christ. She really did. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, she wanted to up her game, so to speak. And she called me and she said, I want to do a novena. I have a friend of mine who said I should do a novena in preparation for my surgery because she was overwhelmed. Cancer is a scary thing. And God used this sort of, this poverty of her being, having to deal with something that she really couldn't deal with. She was overwhelmed by the idea of cancer and surrendered, it's okay, I need something more. So she asked me, what novena should I do? And I suggested to St. Therese of LaSue, novena, you know, pray to her. And she liked that because it came with the promise that at some point you're going to get a rose. And she wanted a sign from God that God was going to hear her prayers. So they scheduled her surgery. She had colon cancer, they were going to remove the tumor. I drive up from Michigan, she starts her novena nine days before her surgery. We get up there for a couple of days to be with her, to come for her, to pray with her. And then we go to the hospital, she checks in. And the night before her surgery, I'm alone with her in a room. And I'm talking with her and praying with her. And I wrap up praying with her and I said, Mom, it's going to be all right, God has got this, you've got to believe. Just trust. And she looked at me with this look on her face and I'm like, Mom, is everything okay? And she goes, well, I've been praying this novena, John, and I did not get my rose. You know, and what do you say in those moments? Like, my mom is just, this is her first toe in the water of Catholic devotion. And I don't want to crush her. And I don't want to dissuade her from believing that God is going to, you know, fulfill his promise that he's heard her prayers. It's going to be all right. So I just say something. I'm, I'm scrambling here. Like, so I'm like, well, Mom, the signs are to affirm our faith, but our faith comes from Jesus. You know, all this is coming from the Lord and His grace. And you believe that He heard your prayer and you believe. So even if you don't get the rose, you can put your faith in Jesus that He's heard your prayer. And let me tell you, brothers, she was not satisfied with that answer. Not a bit. She just, okay. So I kissed her good night. They were going to wake her up at five in the morning, prep her for surgery, go in for surgery around six. Surgery was going to take a couple of hours, a couple hours of recovery, around one, one 30 in the afternoon. They said she should be out of the effects of her anesthesia. You can go in and talk with her. So they do the surgery. Everything goes smoothly. Early afternoon, we walk into her room to be with her. And she's sitting there in bed kind of groggy. And on the train in front of her is her glass of water and another glass with a rose in it. And I'm like, mom, you got a rose. She goes, yes, yes. So this is what she said that night before her surgery, the Lord, you know, she was praying and she gets wake, she, they wake up at five in the morning. This nurse comes in to put an IV in her arm. And it was a younger nurse and the nurse could not find a vein in my mom's arms. Like she tried five times to find the vein and missed every time. And on the fifth attempt ended up sticking my mom in the tendon with a needle. And my mom was in tears. And the woman's very apologetic. She goes, let me get another nurse. I'm sorry. I don't know why I can't do this this morning. The other nurse comes in and my mom's like, please, you know, just, I feel awful. My arm is killing me. Please do a good job. Just find the vein. And the nurse is like, don't worry about it. I find the vein first time every time. No problem. And my mom's like, well, why don't you teach your little trick to the other nurses? And the nurse is like, it's not a trick. When I go to do a procedure, especially where I have to poke a patient or any kind of instrument on them, I always pray to my guardian angel to guide my hand. And the guardian angel always helps me. And my mom's like, you pray to your guardian angel. And the one was like, you don't. And my mom was like, I don't even know. I didn't even know I had a guardian angel. She's like, everyone has a guardian angel. God gives you a special angel to watch over and guide you no matter where you go, to strengthen you, to pray for you, to give you assistance. And my mom's like, really? She goes, yeah, I've been praying to my guardian angel for years. In fact, I was praying one time, I asked God to show me, to tell me what was the name of my guardian angel so I could talk to my guardian angel with its name. And my mom's like, really? She goes, yeah. Well, what's your guardian angel's name? And the nurse goes, it's Rose. And my mom's like, and the nurse is like, what? You know, and she's like, well, I've been waiting for this sign. I think your guardian angel being named Rose is the Rose I've been waiting for because I've been praying this Navina to St. Therese Lissue. And the woman is wrapped up. She's got the IVM, first time, went in smoothly. My mom's all ready. And she goes, I'll be right back. She leaves for a few minutes, comes back and gives my mom this Rose. And my mom's like, it's like 5.30 in the morning. Where did you get a Rose at 5.30 in the morning? And the nurse explains, she goes, well, at seven o'clock I get off my shift. I'm going to go pick up my daughter and take her to the airport. She's flying to Florida, but she hates to fly. So every time she flies, I give her two roses. One for her guardian angel and one for mine. But today, when I was at the florist shop, the Lord just told me to buy a third Rose. And I didn't know why, but now I do. Here you go. And my mom, that moment of God intervening and working at such power just broke open my mom's heart. This sign, this wonder, this miracle, broke open my mom's heart. All of a sudden, she was hungry to know everything she could about Mary and the saints. And she wanted more of this. And as it were, I was right across the street at the hotel I was staying at from a Catholic bookstore. So I went and got a statue, you know, a medal, a couple of books. I gave her the St. Therese LaSue starter pack. I said, here you go, mom. Dive in. So she started to learn everything she can about St. Therese LaSue and her faith just takes off. And then the cancer went to her lungs. And she had surgery to remove one of the lobes in her lungs. And it went to her spine. And there was nothing they could do about the cancer there. Then it showed up in her liver, then her other lung, and then her kidneys, and then her ribs. And after seven years and four rounds of chemotherapy, there was nothing more that she could do that they could do. And but because of what God had done with my mom, I too doubled down on my devotion to Mary. I made it a vow like because of what St. Therese LaSue had done for my mom and awakening her faith and being her strength throughout these seven years. By the time, you know, leading up to the time on my mom's death, she was a regular communicant, daily communicant, doing her holy hours. She was all in in a way that I had hoped she would have been all her life, but I seemed so impotent to be able to lead her to. And the night before she died, I was with her again. And she told me, and she told me like, John, I'm offering up all of my suffering for the conversion of your siblings and for your children and for their children. And I'm like, Mom, that's beautiful. She goes, how does that work? I'm like, well, Christ has through his suffering has made suffering a beautiful thing that has the power to transform that when we unite our suffering with his, it brings about real grace in the lives of those we pray for. She goes, oh, that's awesome. Then she asked me like, because I told you, will it still work? And I'm like, Mom, it's not a birthday wish. Okay, it's you've been offering up your suffering. It works. Believe me, it works. And my mom passed away on Christmas Eve in just a very beautiful, peaceful way. A month and a half after my mom passed away, I went up to go be with my dad, drove up from Ohio to Michigan. And while I was there, my brother Chris calls me up. John, I'm struggling. I was not prepared, you know, because my dad was a funeral director and he sold his business to my brother Chris. So my brother Chris was actually the one that had to do all the preparations for my mom's funeral. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. And he was just an emotional wreck. And he calls me up and he says, can I just talk with you? So he comes up to my dad's house and we start talking. And all of a sudden this door opens up and I'm starting to share who Jesus is to me. The confidence I have in God and the grace that gives me peace and strength. And he says, I need that. I said, let's pray. I ended up praying over him for 20 minutes. Come Holy Spirit, praying in tongues. I mean, I went for it. I didn't just like, okay, God, bless my brother. I'm like, we're going for it. God, just show your love, reveal your love. Come Holy Spirit. I'm praying in tongues and just pray. He had this massive conversion. You know, like this past year, he was a, you know, he wasn't able to, but this year he's going to be a chaperone for some of his kids. He's taken them all to a Steubenville conference. Like he wants to, he's like wants to be the, you know, lead other people. He's been teaching confirmation, teaching these young people about the Holy Spirit. He became a Eucharistic minister. Like all these great things are happening in his life. My brother might came back to the church. My sister, who was twice divorced and felt like she had lost all hope in God, came back to the church, went to confession for the first time in like 15 years. Like all the things that my mom said she wanted to see happen, started to happen. And I realized that when I saw this, I got more invested in, in, in following the, the example of our blessed mother and praying into that. And when my son was in the hospital and after, after everything had happened, he was miraculously raised from the dead and completely healed. I remember going to the Lord and saying, Lord, why are you blessing me like this? I don't deserve this. You're so wonderful. And he said to me, John, do you know all those times you got out of bed and prayed? Yeah. And you didn't feel anything? Yeah. I was preparing you. Remember all those times when you were praying and, and, and just, you know, you didn't think I was listening or you didn't sense that I was doing something? Yeah. I was preparing you. And what the Lord let me know is that there's never been a time in my life when I've wasted any prayer, every prayer that I ever prayed, God was using that to bring about his good in my life, unawares to me. And I think that sometimes that's the way the world works because if we start to say, okay, God is praying or I'm praying and God is doing this, we put more stock in our own ability to pray. And we grab onto it and like, this is what I've done. I've given myself hope through my prayer. And all I can do is say, I surrendered over and over again and stayed faithful to prayer. And God gave me something that I could never get there on my own. He did this miracle inside of me. When I prayed for my mom, I wanted my mom to live. If I would have said, God, I'm only going to pray for my mom to be healed of cancer, she would not have gone through the radical transformation that she went through. And God used that to bring about the conversion of my siblings. But this is how God does it. Our virtues are formed in the fire of trial and in the practice of godly habits, where we ask the fire of the Holy Spirit to conform our wills to the will of the father. Listen to what St. Paul writes in Romans chapter five. Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So first we put our faith in Jesus Christ. We say Jesus Christ, you are bigger and better than anything in this world. I put my faith in you and you alone. It goes on to say, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. Peter, Sister Mary, I'm all talk about the grace, this need to stand in grace. Even if that's all we can do as K, Lord, I stand where I receive grace. I will put myself in a place where I can receive grace because grace is enough. And we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings. Knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Like this is the process. We put our faith in Jesus. We endure our sufferings. We place our confidence in God. This produces the character and the virtue of hoping us. And it goes on to say, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. This is how God works. The trials and tribulations of this last year, God has been using it to prepare you for what's coming next to rise up with confidence in boldness. Romans chapter 8, verse 28, is the most audacious piece of scripture. It says, we know that all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to His purpose. So if I love God and I'm called and doing His will, all things will work for my good. That's hard to believe. But if this isn't true, then none of it's true. We need to stake our lives on that singular idea that no matter what, if we love God and stake and feel called to His purpose and stay in that, that all the things that happen in our lives will work for good. I stand before you as a witness of that singular reality. If I have nothing else to say, I've endured with God, and He's made so many things in my life that seemed hopeless work for my good and the good of those I love. And He's still doing it. He's still producing the fruit of all the things that I've had to endure. Because what I didn't share is in between my mom, my mom dying of cancer, my son's accident, I had to walk with a year with my own wife with cancer, which brought its own share of struggles and challenges. But through it all, the one anchor that I've had in my life is prayer. If Jesus Christ is the anchor of our hope, if that's where we place our hope, and He is the anchor of our lives, then prayer is that chain that keeps us connected to the anchor. What good is it to throw your anchor overboard in the storm if you don't have a solid chain connecting you to that anchor? It won't do you any good. You need to be connected to Christ. We need to be praying. Being rooted in Christ is the source of all hope. This is why Jesus Christ in John chapter 15, Jesus uses the words abide nine times in that one chapter. We need to remain in Christ, abide in Him, live in Him. If we're not abiding in Christ, if we're not rooted in Christ, then we will not have the living hope that St. Peter talked about in his first epistle when he says, bless be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By His great mercy, He has given us a new birth into a living hope, not a conceptual idea that, hey, there's a God that might make it all work out in the end, but a living presence in our soul. Hope is alive in me because Jesus Christ is alive in me, and He is my living hope. And it happens through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. The strength of the church as witness in the world may be fading, and it may be defiled by the sins of men, but our hope in Jesus Christ is unblemished, imperishable, and unfading in the midst of that. As I was praying this morning, I thought of all my years of youth ministry, and I used to say to the young people, don't let anyone say that you're too young, as one of St. Paul's calls to Timothy. I'm here to say, brothers, don't let anyone say that you're too old. God is not done yet. All that He's done in your life has gotten you to this point is preparing you for what's next, and it's not defeat. It's not being overcome because we overcome by what? The blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony that God is alive in us, and we need to proclaim that to everyone and to one another that Jesus Christ is alive, and we need to fight for and strengthen our prayer no matter what. Satan is convinced that if he can get you to stop praying, he can destroy every part of you, and so he will do whatever it takes to pull you from the arms of Jesus. The enemies in war know that the first thing that you need to do if you want to take out your enemies is disrupt their communication systems, tear down their towers, find out where their base of operations are and how they're talking, or if they have one of these code machines, the enigma machine back in World War II that the Germans used, we need to crack that. We got to figure out how they're talking to one another. If we can crack, you know, and Satan knows us, if he can crack or disrupt our communication with the Lord, then the living hope that sustains us and strengthens us will be diminished, perhaps even lost, and this is why we got to cling to our relationship with Jesus, cling to Christ no matter what. He's living hope and understand that we're not going to put our heart on a desired outcome. And I'm not saying that we don't have goals and we don't have plans because God uses those as a mold, as a template, as a way of creating things. Our plans are important because we create like a form, you know, they ever try to pour cement. The first thing that they do is they build the form that the cement's going to be poured into because if you don't have that in place and the cement comes, it just goes everywhere. And you don't get anything good, you just get a big mess. So yes, you need to have a pastoral plan. You need to prepare. You need to be looking and listening to the Lord and saying, what dimensions, how deep, how wide, how big, show me, build it, and then let the Lord pour into it His grace because the strength of our ministry is not the frame work that God creates for us to build upon or to build within, but the living hope, the living grace, that's the cement that hardens into something lasting and enduring. But that frame means to be empty, to be filled. And in the same way, even as we plan and we prepare, we listen and we build for God, we need to be empty in ourselves so that when the grace, the real stuff that's going to make the church renewed is poured in, there's places for it to go. And it doesn't just run amuck, but it runs down the channels that God wants us to be using to channel His grace to where the church needs it. We need to be in prayer. We need to be listening to God. We need to be saying, how do you want to renew your church? Because I don't have anything within me to renew the church, to be unashamed and unafraid to admit our own poverty. To see ourselves as we truly are, hanging naked on the cross with Christ saying, Lord, I have nothing. Everything's exposed. Apart from You, I am nothing. Apart from You, I can do nothing. But Your grace is enough because I don't put my hope in anything that I can see, anything that I can smell and touch, anything that I can taste or hear. I put my faith, my hope in You, Christ, in the things unseen. I want to conclude with these words. David loved the Lord. He had such zeal for the Lord, such a powerful, loving zeal for the Lord. And he desired nothing more than to build God a temple, a temple worthy of God. And I think that's what we all want deep in our hearts, is we want the church to reflect the glory of God. We want to see God's glory restored on this earth. It breaks our heart the way people mock Jesus, diminish Jesus, and everything that we hold dear being dragged through the mud. But it wasn't for David to build the temple. David had complete confidence in the Lord, but the Lord said to him, look, you are not going to build my temple. You're going to have to pass that task on. So he passed that task on to his son Solomon. But David was very clear with his son. He's like, look, I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you with these words. And this is one of the first chronicles. He says, and you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father and serve him with single mind and willing heart. For the Lord searches every mind and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you. But if you forsake him, he will abandon you forever. Take heed now for the Lord has chosen you to build a house as the sanctuary. Be strong and act. David further said to his son Solomon, be strong and of good courage and act. Do not be afraid or dismayed for the Lord God. My God is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you until all the work for the service of the house of the Lord is finished. Brothers, I just want you to know the Lord is not done encouraging you and strengthening you, building you up. The sun is not setting on your life. Jesus Christ, the living son is rising again upon you to shine his light upon you to strengthen you to be strong of good courage and act. Do not be afraid. Serve him with a single mind and a willing heart. That's all we have. Let's fix our hearts upon the Lord. Love him above all things and be willing to do whatever it takes, whatever the Lord asks us. Not expecting anything, but to hear the words of the Lord say, well done, good, and faithful servant. To please him and not please ourselves and in all ways giving him the glory. Let's pray.