Greetings from Brisbane

Hello Family and Friends!

We are now in Brisbane; we found out that some plans were altered before we all left for our experiments. One half of our group was scheduled to go to Melbourne for their service trip. Instead, they've joined us going to Brisbane. It was a beautiful and peaceful 13 hour drive. We said the Rosary in five different languages along the way. We arrived last night at Stuartholme school, and today, we viewed the city from Mount Coot-tha. When I get the chance, I'll upload some of our group's photos onto the site for your viewing pleasure.

Members of local parishes joined us for Mass and lunch today; it was a beautiful mass. Afterwards, we had lunch with everyone. Right now, there's some down time before we all meet and prepare for our experiments.

Our sense of unity is incredible; our group here includes members from the Visayas (spelling?) in the Philippines, India, Hungary, Taiwan, and Australia. We're bonding really well, and we've spent a lot of time talking, tossing the frisbee around, and more. The source of our unity? Of course, it is God. It made Mass and the ensuing lunch really glow with love and joy. It's a beautiful thing.

Throughout our blogging and reflecting, we'll be focusing on graces that we will receive from God along the way; for me thus far, it has been God in our community, but I know that this is but a taste of what God has in store. We've had many great talks, laughs, and moments thus far, and One thing that I'm really focusing on is the calling to be a witness; as you'll see below, the theme to WYD 2008 is based on Acts 1:8. As I've grown in my understanding of Christianity, and particularly my Catholic faith, I've found a real need for more and better witnesses. I think events like World Youth Day are great models for revitalizing young Catholics and transforming our worldview into one where we do everything with faith. It's like that song, "And they'll know we are Christians by our love..." This will be an opportunity for me to examine my own faith, my knowledge, my actions, and work towards improving them and grounding them in God.

In the meantime, I need to get back to the group and prepare for the next several days. I think there's an option in which you can subscribe to this blog and receive e-mail updates; if you can find that, I'd suggest going for that.

Steve will be added to our list of bloggers soon. For future blogging this week, Roxanne and Michael are working around Brisbane on a service project; Steve and I are headed into the Glass House Mountains for some camping.

God bless,
Dave

P.S., here's a link to WYD info, including a general schedule of events.
http://www.catholic.org/wyd08/

"You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses... in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." -Acts 1:8 (the theme for WYD08)