Y(our) Time to Shine

Experience the Historic North 24th Street Family of Parishes discernment process

Do you want to make the world a truly better place?

Do you believe Jesus of Nazareth is truly who he said he was?

If you answered yes to both questions, you're ready!

God wants a deepening relationship with each of us. Prayer is how we let that happen. As we pray, we grow more able to see, to discern, how God loves us and invites us toward greater fulfillment, individually and together. Without recognizing and following God’s invitation, without prayer, we fail. By recognizing and following God’s invitation, through prayer, we bring incredible fulfillment and peace to the world.

Engage with our Historic 24th Street Family of Parishes through personal, and then communal, prayer. True discernment will be your reward and a truly better world will be the result. The experience demands encounter and conversion, which are both hard and fun.

You have a unique and powerful opportunity to help all people in North Omaha become closer to each other and more successful in defining our future.

Your personal spiritual growth will enable--for all of us--a wider, deeper, richer vision of who we are together, both spiritually and communally, as the Historic North 24th Street Family of Parishes works to discover our identity and purpose in this place, at this time

Beginning

I will give them another heart and a new spirit I will put within them. From their bodies I will remove the hearts of stone, and give them hearts of flesh, so that they walk according to my statutes, taking care to keep my ordinances. Thus they will be my people, and I will be their God.

Ezekiel 11:19-20

Let us each offer to God a willingness for conversion—for the spiritual growth that will change the way we see ourselves in the community. Growing into this new family demands from each of us a change of heart, accepting co-responsibility for the mission by actively participating in the way each of us is able.

We have some amazing tools--Ignatian Spirituality, the Church’s move toward Synodality, our rich tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, and the remarkable and distinct qualities of each of the three parishes--to ensure your, and then our, success in seeking conversion.

We hope you will use this website to explore all these opportunities in great depth as together we grow into a deeper awareness of God and God’s hope for our Family.

This website is organized by the weeks the original discernment group used to grow personally and communally in Faith, Hope, and Love.

Ask for the Gift of Encountering God

Let us pray for an ever-deeper awareness of God’s love for us individually. An intriguing starting place is this Meditation on my Birth – an invitation to reflect on God’s overwhelming love for each of us.

Let us also begin by reflecting on our personal image of God. How we see God deeply affects how we will progress in this adventure to see how God sees us. Use this Exercise to get closer to what that is for you at this moment.

Here, too, are some thoughts on how to pray and on the importance of a journal (attachment – session 1 handout)

The First Principle and Foundation

The goal of our life is to live with God forever. God, who loves us, gave us life. Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into us without limit.

All the things in this world are gifts of God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily. As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God insofar as they help us develop as loving persons. But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives, they displace God and so hinder our growth toward our goal.

In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some obligation. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our life in God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life in me.

Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola