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, October 18th, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Luke, the evangelist. Now, St. Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, and he also was a companion of St. Paul. From St. Luke's Gospel,

we have some of the most beautiful stories about our Blessed Mother Mary. And history tells us

that St. Luke, along with St. Paul, spend a lot of time with Mary, hearing her stories and even writing down songs that

she had written to praise God. This week on the Catholic Spouts podcast, we are talking about the

first gift of the Holy Spirit, which is fear of the Lord. We've talked about how this is the first

step on the ladder to holiness.

Also, how fear is really the avoidance of future evil. And we have a fear for God that is

similar to the fear we might feel for a teacher or a parent. This fear motivates us to follow

the rules and to do the work. Next, through the

example of Mary, we learned that having a fear of the Lord not only motivates us to obey God's

rules, but it frees us from fearing anything else. Because if we truly fear God and love him, we don't have anything

else to fear. Now, this beautiful concept of the idea that if I truly fear God, I am so brave and I

have nothing else to fear, is shown so perfectly through a saint we are going

to talk about today. This saint is a fun one. This is St. Lawrence. Now first, here's a little bit

about St. Lawrence. So St. Lawrence lived shortly a couple hundred years after Jesus, and he lived in the city of Rome.

At the time, Rome was a pagan city, meaning most of the people that lived there, including

the emperor, worshipped many gods, and there was great corruption in Rome at the time. However, Lawrence was

one of many deacons that served the church there. Legend tells us that Lawrence's job was to

hold the purse of the alms. That means they would take collections to give to the poor, and he was the one that managed this money.

Now, very regularly, Christians were rounded up to be killed. It was a terrible time of martyrdom

and persecution in Rome for the Christians. Lawrence had heard that he probably was going to be

...