20 Aug 26 – Victory Over Tragedy with Our Lady

We tend to use our free will to think that I'm free to do whatever I want versus the idea of, hey, I'm free to worship God.

That's where my freedom comes in because regardless of what's going on around me, there was a time I didn't exist.

There was a time that I did not have the experience of life, that I didn't know what life was.

And that came from God himself, right? So once we exist, who do we thank for that? For the of our lives who do we thank for that are we grateful that we were given life and existence in our own individual humanity our own relationship with god it is important to consider um especially when there are tragedies i know that by now everybody's uh well aware of the devastating fires in maui uh in hawaii and really more than anything else how tragic that is you're on an island surrounded by water And you can't put these fires out.

And if you look at the pictures, it's just devastation after devastation.

There's no, it seems like everything was just burned down in the area that it affected.

Very popular area, very near and dear to my heart because that's actually the La Jaina area is where My wife and I went to honeymoon, a very common honeymoon destination in Maui.

You see this and you hear these stories of tragedy, people losing their homes, people surrounded by this burning fire.

One of the things that was most striking to me was you look at, if you've ever been to Maui, you've ever been to Hawaii, you realize the roads are pretty limited.

I mean, you got the main road going around the island and then, you know, the roads going into the house, but you got to move into the, or I should say the different complexes for homes or for hotels, but there's not a vast array of highway system there to get you necessarily across the island.

You're still pretty much living on the outskirts, on the shores.

Uh, and if you look at the pictures, you realize some of these people had to leave their cars.

There were just streets lined with cars that people were stuck, couldn't move, and they just had to leave their cars there.

And they just had to run away from their cars, watch their cars burn, uh, and actually run through the fire.

I mean, these are pretty, there's a pretty impressive, uh, fire because of the location of the way it is, the way it was, it contained, um, people in a way that they couldn't really get out.

Very ironic, surrounded by water, uh, But what do we do in the midst of this tragedy? We see that we're losing all of our goods.

We see that we're losing everything we think we own or have or is important to us.

The material goods, of course.

But then in the midst of it, the other thing that came out of this was that there was a church that survived.

a beautiful Maui church.

It's called Maria Manakila Church.

Again, near and dear to my heart because that's the first place when we went to honeymoon that my wife and I went to.

We found the first Catholic church and we went to mass there a few times.

I think we were going to daily mass or whatever times they offered.

From what I understand, they also offered the traditional Latin mass there.