You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Monday, October 15th, 2018. It is also the feast day of a doctor of the church, St. Teresa of Avila. Now, last week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we spent the entire week talking about Jesus Christ. And we talked about his character, his mission,

but this week we have to turn and look at ourselves and ask ourselves, what are we called to be

if we choose to be followers of Jesus Christ? Now, Jesus had a lot to say about this in the Gospels. In fact, at one point,

he said, if you wish to follow me, you must pick up your cross and follow me. But what does

this mean? Well, luckily, we have four tremendous saint feast days this week that help us really define what it means to be

a follower of Jesus Christ. The first saint that we will talk about is today's saint,

St. Teresa of Avala. And St. Teresa of Avala teaches us that in order to be a follower of Jesus,

we need to get down and do the work of Christ. Even when it's hard, even when it's jam-packed

with suffering, we need to persevere and do the work of Christ. Now let's talk a little bit about St. Teresa of Avala.

So St. Teresa lived in the 1500s.

She was a Spanish sister, means she lived in Spain, and she was a mystic, which means that she had mystical experiences where she witnessed Jesus Christ.

She was also a Carmelite nun.

Now, she was raised by a wealthy wool merchant and grew up with all the privileges.

When her mom died at 11, she grew closer to her spiritual mother, Mary Mary and remained close to Mary her whole life.

Shortly after that, she experienced a terrible illness. And during those illnesses, she experienced

ecstasies. An ecstasy is a mystical experience. It looks like someone's having a stroke, but in fact, they have

almost left their body and have had a moment or even longer a perfect union with God.

And through these mystical experiences that she had as a young girl, St. Teresa became aware of how horrible sin is,

how much it wounds our Lord and how it damages our relationship with him. And so for the rest of

her life, she strove very hard to never sin and to never offend God in that way.

She entered a Carmelite monastery to become a nun at 20 years old,

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