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

Greetings young Squire Sprouts. Today is the 25th day in the sixth month in the year of our Lord

2022. My name is Sir Roland Paderlott, and you're listening to Saturdays with Sir Roland on Catholic Sprouts. Every Saturday we discuss the art of dragon slain.

Young Squire Sprouts, we've been going through the acronym of the word sports over the last few weeks,

S-P-O-R-T-S, the virtues in sports that makes us champions and makes us saints.

We talked about self-discipline.

We talked about perseverance and passion.

Today, I'd like to focus on the letter

O, which is obedience. And obedience is so important to becoming champions and saints and great

dragon slayers. In fact, Jesus said, if you love me, you will obey my commandments. And in the Old

Testament we read that obedience is better than sacrifice.

And today is the memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is the perfect opportunity

to talk about obedience because Mary modeled obedience perfectly. Remember what she said to the

angel Gabriel, let it be done to me according to thy word. And Mary's last recorded words in the scriptures,

and the greatest piece of advice she gives to all of us is to do whatever Jesus tells you.

So why is obedience so important? Well, in sports, I learned this because I had some great coaches

over the years that helped me become the best athlete I could be, especially in running.

I had to learn to trust my coaches. You know, every day my coaches would ask us to do some kind of running and I'm like,

man, we ran yesterday. And they're like, well, this is track. That's what we do in track. But in running

and training for track, some days we had to run really hard, and some days we had easy runs. And the coaches

would tell us what to do, and some days when we were doing our easy runs, I felt like running really

fast. And be like, no, no, no. Obedience is better than sacrifice. Slow down. Do what we ask you to do.

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