Life Teen

Like I've been a wonder deficit.

And then I was at a summer camp for Life Teen.

We did a frontier camp.

And I played the dumb, silly games where you get shaving cream all over you.

And also, I really want to give a shout out to summer camps.

Like I was at different summer camps, Camp Watia.

I was at Life Teen doing Frontier.

And then I know our good friends at Damascus.

They do.

I was in Life Teen growing up.

As a, as a teenager, I had to be in the Life Teen youth group.

Mm-hmm.

And they would do stuff.

I've seen it done before.

It used to be done as a matter of course by Life Teen.

I don't know if you ever heard of Life Teen.

They were really big about 20 something years ago.

Remember them? So they had a bad habit of doing that, and it got started initially by the priest who started Lifeteen, who's no longer a priest anymore, he's out of ministry, he's out of the Catholic Church.

But they like that and they want that and they had that and they don't get it now, therefore they stop going to Mass.

And that was a real danger that really began to happen.

And I don't trace it solely to the issue of the Life Teen Mass issue, but you know what? They stopped doing that.

High school would have been a crazy time to come into the faith.

So what was the transition? I know you said, and I know that you ended up joining Life Teen.

Did you encounter Life Teen missionaries in your college time?

Yeah.

Yeah, so the church that I had originally gone to was – a Life Teen parish, so they had kind of been using the Life Teen resources in their ministry.

And then, actually, I think between the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, we went to Covecrest, the Life Teen summer camp.

So, I went as a camper, and that was the first time that I experienced, like, oh, you can go to Mass more than just on Sundays, because they had Mass every day at camp.

And I was kind of blown away by that.

The greatest thing that I can do is just go to adorations to just go receive him in the mass.

and so yeah ultimately this has led me or more recently this has led me to doing missions with life teen uh so i just got back from summer staff which was one of the greatest experiences of my life um because i had the opportunity to just be so free and to be authentically myself and love so much and Now that I'm back from that, I'm trying to figure out what what's next for me.

And so that's why I'm super grateful.

You were open to speaking with me today because it's another opportunity for me to do this and just like share the way that God has loved me because I like, you can't, you just can't, if you fully believe that God loves you, you can't keep that to yourself.

Okay, one more thing, then I'll let you go.

And I want you to talk to that person who, I think you have great expertise in this.

You've come back fresh from Life Teen.

I think you can handle this, Michael.

And so to the credit of my parents, especially my mom as well, like she was like, okay, through her own prayers, and this is what she would obviously tell us after the fact, like what could she do to keep us and keep myself as well, like going to the church and like trying to involve people.

And so there was this American movement called Life Teen.

I don't know if you're familiar with that, but this was specifically for teens to try to get them into the faith and like make it more of a, you know, like a more fun activity kind of a thing, you know, that, that approach.

And so because I had lived in the U S as a kid though, so at, from the ages from nine to 11, I lived in New Jersey and that's where I picked up the English.