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Catholic sprouts

The daily podcast for Catholic kids

that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, sprouts. Today is Monday, December 4th, 2020. We have just started Advent. And so as part of Advent, we are going to be praying a family prayer for Advent together at the

beginning of each episode. So if you will join me in that today, in the name of the Father,

and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. God of love, your son, Jesus, is your greatest gift to us. He is a sign of your love.

Help us walk in that love during the weeks of Advent as we wait and prepare for his coming.

We pray this in the name of Jesus, our Savior. Amen.

So as the first week of Advent, we are going to talk about the virtue that has been

assigned to this first week, and that is the virtue of hope. We lit the very first candle in our

Advent wreath, and that candle is called the candle of prophecy.

Now, I didn't know that before, but I thought that was pretty interesting that this first

candle stands for all of the prophecies that happened in the Old Testament.

And that is very fitting to keep in mind when we talk about the virtue of hope.

So what is hope? Well, hope as we talk about it being a virtue is much bigger than just

optimism. Oftentimes when we use the word hope in our ordinary conversations, we'll say things

like, oh, I hope that we have

ice cream for dessert, or I hope that I did well on that test. What we're talking about here

is a supernatural trust in God that looks beyond this world. Hope, in fact, teaches us to desire heaven and the

eternal life and not things of this world. So hope is a virtue where we're living our lives,

we're full of demands and stress and all sorts of things happening around us.

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