Ave Maria

Greetings from Ave Maria, Florida! For those of you who don't know, I have been in Florida for the past 3 weeks for New Staff Training (NST). NST is a time for all the missionaries from all over the country to get together for a little over a month and learn as much as we can to take back to campus. So far we have learned about the Gospel of John, discernment of spirits, forming good habits, and so much more!

The first thing we do when we get to training, is get put into "colleges." each college has a saint they learn about (Mine is St. Mary Magdalene) as they live and work together. We spend time every week as a college growing in  virtue, learning about leading bible studies, working with others, and all sorts of things for campus! We also have a lot of fun!

This is my college this year after we got second place in the Women's volleyball tournament! 

The next big thing we do is meet your team! All the first years get to find out their placements and the second year and above staff get to plan a fun night of team bonding. So here I am to announce the NEW WAYNE STATE TEAM!! 

From Left to Right: Ben, Molly, Me! 

Alex my team director from last year will also be on our team, but sadly he was unable to be there for placements. Ah the challenges of having lots of awesome kids! Ben's wife Molly will also be joining us in Wayne, though she is not a missionary.  

Training has been a lot of hard work, but I am even more pumped for next year! I can't wait to share with all of you all the adventures that have yet to happen. 

Remember I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together! 

Elizabeth 

End of the Semester

Hello Everyone! The Semester is officially over, all the students are done with finals, the RAs are checking everyone out of the dorms and I am about to head to Omaha for a few weeks! I am excited to announce that I will be back in Wayne next year, and we have an exciting year planned! As it is the end of the year I thought giving you all a funny video to watch would be good! So here is a video I made around Valentines Day! This is how we represent St. Valentine in Wayne America! 

Stay Classy World, Stay Classy 

Elizabeth 

Vocations Fair

Well folks there is officially less then 2 weeks left in the semester!! Can you believe it? I sure can't! This year has been blessed with so many graces and so many beautiful things that I can't even began to talk about them all, but I am going to talk about my grace from yesterday. Yesterday was Wayne States very first VOCATIONS FAIR!!! WOOT!! 

We have several different orders come. Men, women, even a table for marriage and so much more! It was a lot of work, but the grace was huge!

Please pray for all of our students as they set out on this adventure of discernment! 

Remember I'm Praying for Ya! We're all in this together! 

Elizabeth 

San Diego!

I feel as if this blog is turning into a travel blog, first Chicago, now San Diego. This is not what I intended this blog to be, but alas it is my life. 

So some of you might be wondering, what in the world was I doing in San Diego. I was there for the West Regional Offsite Gathering. In FOCUS we have split the country up into different regions.  The West region goes from Nebraska all the way to California. So naturally if all of the missionaries of the west region are going to get together, we are going to go to California. 

It was a great weekend filled with talks from Steve Pries, John Zimmer, and the chaplain from L.A. It was also good talking other missionaries, seeing how other campus' are going, and what they are doing. It was a refreshing weekend full of learning, fun, and of corse the beach. 

   

This is a picture of my team on the Beach. Sadly our team director was not able to join us! 

I am really excited to be back and to bring back everything that I learned. This trip got me even more excited for New Staff Training this summer which will once again be in Ave Maria, FL. 

Tune in next week when I talk about Holy Week and Easter! 

Have a Blessed last week of Lent! 

Elizabeth 

Chicago 2.0

"A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again." - Margret Mead 

The City is most defiantly what we experienced while in Chicago, and after spending a whole week working we decided we needed some time to play.  Most of the students had never been to the big city before so to start we did all of the tourist activities, and when being a tourist in Chicago the best place to start is Navy Pier.

After Spending some time at the Pier we split into two groups. The first went to look and churches and the second...well we went shopping.  After that we all met up and went to the Bean, as no trip to Chicago is complete with out Bean Pictures.

While we were in Chicago we also got to experience Chicago Style Pizza, which I say is a must! The pizzeria we went to was called Uno's, and if you are ever in Chicago I highly recommend it!    

Well that's all for now! Happy Lent! I'm Praying for you, we're all in this together! 

The Windy City

Last Week was spring break, and what a great week it was! We spent the week with the Missionaries of Charity in Chicago working to fix up one of their house's for a women's shelter, feeding the homeless, working in a soup kitchen and so much more! But as pictures speak louder then words, why don't I just show you.

The trip started at 4:30am. on Saturday, when we all woke up to hit the road early. With this group even the traveling was fun! We stopped at the movie set for the Field of Dreams and got to run the bases in the snow! We also stopped at several churches, and even gas stations became fun as noted by the photo below.

We got to Chicago just in time for supper. I had to learn how to drive a 12 passenger van in Chicago Rush Hour very quickly. But It was all a good experience. That night we met some of the women who lived in the women's shelter and their children. Then we found our cots and settled in for the night. The next was Sunday so we got up went to mass, changed out of our mass clothes and headed to the Soup Kitchen. We worked at the Soup Kitchen almost everyday last week and by the end of the week the students knew most of everyone's name and stories. It was a beautiful experience  for them to learn how to connect with the people they were serving. For many of the students simply talking to people was their favorite part. However we did get to do a lot of cooking and a lot of dishes as well.

At the Soup Kitchen we worked both upstairs and down.  The pictures to the right and left are the students making salad and cleaning it, downstairs. The picture below is the students putting together lunches to pass out to people in the streets as we are driving around. We also go the chance to go out on the streets with the sisters and meet the people. We took these bags of food with us when we did this as well.  

Below is a picture of our entire group, with one of our new friends named Red Fox. We spent a lot of time talking with Red Fox and he told us a lot about his life and how he is really trying to save and get off the streets. Others that we met loved living on the streets and would not want to live life any other way. It was not what anyone expected to hear. 

                            

We also spent a lot of time painting. The students loved it and finished a whole floor of the house! It was great for the students to do this work and they were extremely joyful the whole time.

We also spent a whole day doing simple fun things in the city. However this post has already gotten extremely long, so I have decided to break the Chicago trip into two parts. Part two will have all of the fun stuff we did! Until next time, Stay Classy!

The Thirsting

I know that I have not been very good at posting for quite a while, but I am going to get better! The plan is to post something every other week or so. This way all of you will get updates from Wayne but they wont be very over the top.

This weeks update is about an exciting opportunity we have just had here in Wayne. The Newman Center has been awesome enough to bring in the band The Thirsting! The Thirsting is a Catholic band with a beautiful focus on Mary and the rosary. If you have not checked out their music I highly encourage it!

This is one of their older songs. 

The Show was an acoustic show with the lead singer of the band, Daniel Oberreuter, and took place in the Lower "Gag" or lower level of the Student Center. The Concert was a great success!  

The Students did a lot of work to get ready for the show. They put up posters, baked food for the bake sale, made campus wide advertisements, and told all of their friends. It was so great to see all of the hard work the students put into this project. 

Posters that the students put up on campus. 

We had around 40 people stay for the entire show, this does not count the dozens of people who showed up to get dinner and stopped to stay a while. 

Over all it was a great event and we hope to bring back the entire band net year! I will end with a short video from the concert! 

To Learn more about the Thirsting check out: 

Website: http://www.thethirstingcatholic.com/home.html

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheThirsting

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thethirsting

Adventures in a Coffee Shop

(This is a story that happened last semester. I started writing it then, but did not finish until now. Enjoy!)

Many things have happened since I have been here in Wayne, but nothing as comical as my adventure at Miss Molly's! But I have already gotten ahead of myself so let me start over and begin at the beginning!

Up until he end if last week my roommates and I have not had Internet in our apartment. We were forced to go and search out Internet elsewhere and my favorite place to find it is Miss Molly's coffee shop! 

It's a cute little coffee shop with frozen yogurt and loose leaf tea (two of my favorites!)  I would go there and order my tea and pastry and would go up this beautiful spiral staircase into a nice little living room area called the "Magnolia Suite" 

    This is quite the staircase is it not?!? 

It is up in this room where I sat for several hours working away, like the little humming bird I tend to be, when I noticed it got idly dark really fast. So I packed up my things and headed downstairs. I did not even get one spin around the staircase when I noticed something was not right. The lights where off, there were no people, and the doors were locked. 

Yep you guessed it! Miss Molly's was closed and I was stuck inside!  I went down the stairs and looked around. I quickly realized that that I could easily leave, but if I did that I would have to leave the door unlocked and when they opened in the morning the first thing they would think is break in! Now I could have none of that so I went and sat down to think. I thought, and thought, and thought, but could not come up with anything. So with that realization I called my roommate Kirsten. 

When I relayed all of this to my roommate and she had finished laughing hysterically, she suggested that I call Amy, our Campus Minister and a local business owner in town.  After I told her what was going on, (she never did stop laughing), Amy and I agreed that it would be best if she called the police. 

I did not find this out until later, but apparently when Amy called the police they passed the phone from person to person, that way everyone could here the story of how I Elizabeth Connealy, got locked in Miss Molly's. After that the Police called the owners and they came and let me out. Apparently the student who was working forgot I was upstairs and thinking no one was in closed up shop early. 

The next day I went back to Miss Molly's and they gave me a coffee for my trouble. Moral of the story is this - Always be open to adventure because you could just be looking for tea and internet but what you find is a fun story. 

P.S. Thanks to Miss Molly and her family for not leaving me inside for too long ;)