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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, February 21st, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Peter Damien.

Now, St. Peter Damien was a Benedictine monk. He became a cardinal and was then named a doctor of the church.

He lived in Europe in the 10 and 1100s and wrote some beautiful

teachings that we still have today. This week on the Catholic Sprouds podcast, we are talking

about repentance in an effort to prepare ourselves to have a good and holy lent. First, we talked

about why we sin and the fact that God gave us free will.

We can choose to follow him or we can choose to sin and not follow him. We also talked about

how sin drives a wedge between us and God. And the more sin that we have piled up, the less

connected we will be to God.

Yesterday we started talking about the first two steps in repentance.

The first step is to identify our sins and acknowledge them.

And the second step is to go before God and ask for his loving forgiveness.

Today we are going to talk about the third step, which is

oftentimes the hardest step, and that is to accept God's loving forgiveness. Now, hopefully,

this sounds a little bit silly to you. You would think it would be much harder to finally drudge up all of our sins from the

past and to make time to go into the confessional and tell the priest to all of our sins that those

things would be hard. And we're not going to say they're easy. They are hard. But where most people

get hung up, especially with the big sins, the things that are hard. But where most people get hung up, especially with the big sins, the things that we really

hate that we did, that we still are ashamed about doing, is that we have a harder time

accepting God's forgiveness and therefore forgiving ourselves than we do of actually asking for the

forgiveness. It is very hard for us sometimes to forgive ourselves. Now here is a beautiful

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