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Catholic sprouts

The Daily Podcasts for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, sprouts. Today is July 12th, and it is Wednesday of the 14th week in ordinary time. My name is Chris Carstens, and I'm glad to be your guest host for the week.

I work in the worship office for the Diocese of La Crosse in the State of Wisconsin,

and I'm also the editor of a prayer publication called the Otteramus Bulletin.

And in both of these jobs, what I do is to help people to pray,

especially to pray the Mass.

And I even help my own kids to help them to pray the Mass too.

Praying the Mass is, in fact, our topic for the week.

Today we're going to consider how we might listen to the readings of the Mass in a way that can help us to pray better.

If you were able to listen a few days ago, we talked about Jesus as the door, because the door is a sign of Jesus.

Yesterday, we talked about the sign of the cross, because through signs, those things that we can see and taste and touch and smell in here, God becomes present to us and gives grace to our souls.

Today we want to talk about words, especially the words in the liturgy of the word, that are proclaimed to us from the Bible.

At the beginning of the Gospel of John, he says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What does it mean that Jesus, the Son of the Father, is said to be a word?

Let's think about words for a moment.

Imagine you were speaking to someone, one of your siblings, a teacher, a parent, a grandparent, or a friend from your heart. You're not just talking

about, say, silly things or something like that, although there's nothing wrong to talk that way, too.

But if you really wanted to convey and

reveal something about someone, you would speak from the very depths of your heart. And the

words that you would say would reveal to the person you were talking to your own self, your own

...