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

Hey there, sprouts. Today is Friday, February 1st, 2019. It is also the feast day of a wonderful Irish saint, St. Bridget. This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we have been talking about the theological virtue of love. We talked about how faith, hope, and love, all three virtues are

really united and define how we should be striving to live. We also talked about how the crucifix

is the ultimate symbol of what loving means and how it is giving, not getting. We also talked about how Jesus commanded us to love

in two ways. We are called to love God with our whole mind, heart, and soul. And we are also,

like St. John Bosco, called to love our neighbor as ourself. Today we are going to conclude talking about

this amazing virtue by talking about how the virtue of love bears fruit. Before we get there,

however, I want to remind you of a beautiful passage that St. Paul, the apostle,

wrote. In his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul goes through all of the virtues, lots of him.

But he concludes by saying that the most important of all virtues is love. And without love, we basically don't have anything at all.

Love is everything. If we don't love God, we won't have faith. If we don't love God, then why would we be hopeful that we can go to heaven with him?

Love is the ultimate, the universal, the all-uniting virtue.

And the amazing thing about love is the more we really strive to love God, to give him more of

ourselves, the more that we strive to love the people in our lives and love them simply because

they too are creations of God. The more that we do that, the more we will see beautiful things grow in our lives.

Now, the term, when we say that something bears fruit, that means simply that it grows and other

good things come along with it. We take this term from, for example, an apple tree, right? You plant an apple

tree. It grows. And sure, there's lots of good things you get from an apple tree just because it's a

tree. You get shade. Maybe it changes colors of the leaves in the fall and it's beautiful. But there's

not just that. It produces apples.

And from those apples, you can have a snack, you can make an apple pie, you can make

applesauce. So there are amazing things that come out of this simple tree. The same is true with

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