Joy all around

First of all, we'd like to extend our thanks to all our supporters who came out to our fundraising dinner tonight.  In addition we'd like to thank all the kitchen staff, additional servers, performers and everyone else who helped to make this night a success.

Tonight was an opportunity to get to know you, our supporters, and for you to get to know us.  We had a pleasure serving everyone including our family, friends and all our supporters.

We will be bringing the prayer intentions that you have written in the envelopes to Poland with us and will be keeping you in our prayers throughout our preparation and journey to Kraków.  We hope that you will be praying for us through this time as well.

We also had a special guest at the dinner, Pope Francis!  Well actually just a cardboard cutout of him.

But we hope to see the Pope in person when we are at World Youth Day in Kraków, Poland.

A taste of Polish culture and preparations update

The World Youth Day coming up next year will be held in Kraków, Poland.  In order to experience some of the culture we would soon be immersed in, a few of us went out this afternoon to the Polish Cultural Festival in North Vancouver.  We had a taste of delicious perogies and sausages which are some of the common foods in Polish cuisine.  We also watched a number of dances and acts on the stage.  We are looking forward to journeying to Poland next year, and we hope to learn more about the history, language and other aspects of the culture before we arrive.

After the festival, we had our pilgrim meeting in order to talk about more of the logistics of our journey to Poland.  World Youth Day is less than one year away, so we are working to get everything organized soon.  For spiritual preparation, we are praying the Rosary together, along with others in the Young Adult Ministry, every month.  In addition, we are also having monthly faith formation sessions with other leaders of Youth Ministry, where we have been watching the Symbolon series.

In other news, we are working hard towards for our fundraising dinner at the end of the month.  We are all excited as the event nears.  We thank all our supporters who have already purchased tickets, and for everyone preparing behind the scenes to help us with this event.

As you can see, preparations in different aspects are underway, and we hope to be in Kraków, Poland in less than a year!