Powerful places are being explored within me at the preparation of a big TEC weekend which will begin tonight for many in our family...
The wonder of an amazing family time outside with the little ones yesterday continue to be food for my thoughts today! A nice clean barn filled with corn stalk bedding after Pat had spent the day hauling it out made a beautiful place for the little ones to have their first up close encounter with a new calf and our ever present dogs... Grandpa on the tractor outside and the cows mooing over the fence made for a huge sensory smorgasbord of sound and sight!
It will be a huge weekend for our family at a Together Encounter Christ weekend! We have our newest son in law going to make his first retreat! He will have two of his brother in laws there to share the weekend with him! 
The emotions are very high as John returns to work this TEC as a table leader and also to give the first talk and share his cancer journey! He is filled with a deep calling to visit the amazing healing through prayer that he was given... a deep need to share with those that are present that new found faith he found!
Like this mother cow... I have such a wish to be there and to hear with my ears and my heart what he is going to share! I will be with him in prayer... writing letters of support that will be shared and praying with every thought of the days as they pass with each step that is taken in the journey called the Paschal Mystery - Christ's life, death and rising to Eternal life!
Wheat is huge at TEC - the service and prayer that we do for those present! My wheat this weekend will be caring for the grandkids so that their parents can be there to support Bill and each other! The family element will be very important but not outshining the FAITH! I will also be praying with a rosary in my pocket to remind me to them as I work at the nursing home! 
Today is the Gospel of Christ telling us without any glossing over what we must do to follow Him..."Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it...
"but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? What could one gain in exchange for his life?" ...Saving the world does not mean making it happy; it means showing the world the meaning of its suffering and giving it a joy that "nothing can take away." - Madeleine Delbrel
This is the power that John has discovered within the suffering called cancer/healing over the last year and a half - the joy that he can and does share with those around him, as the result of answered prayers, and miraculous healing... to face the world as a new and transformed John Patrick Verly!
Lord, I cry out to you as a weak and humble vessel and one that does not always accept and want to follow you carrying my cross... Give me the strength to see those difficulties as ways for me to become less and you more - for the selfishness that I struggle with to be thrown into the pit! I want to love and follow you whereever you lead me! Be with all those at TEC this weekend, may your cross become their tree of life! Jesus, I trust in you! Amen and Halleluia! 
Bless-bless, Barb"Christ does not provide his followers with a set of wings to flee into heaven, but with a weight to drag them into the deepest corners of the earth... This is what the love of the world means, a love that is not an identification with the world, but a gift to it." Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel (1964)
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