Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Do you ever find yourself really distracted during mass, especially during those readings?

You know, you tell yourself, oh this is the Bible, it's really important this week.

I'm really going to pay attention to the readings and then in the first reading one of your kids has to go to the bathroom or in the second reading you're thinking about a problem at work or the game that afternoon or maybe those donuts they're going to serve after mass,

you know, really, really very important things.

And by the time you get to the gospel reading and you're sitting down and

the priest is giving the homily and he's expounding

on all the readings and you're lost and you didn't pay attention you're wondering what were those

readings about again well that happens to the best of us and I understand as Catholics you know we focus a lot on the

second half of Mass the Eucharist you know it is the source and summit of our

faith it is the sacrament of sacraments it's the most profound encounter we can have with our God here on earth, but we can't forget and we can't neglect the first half of the mass, the liturgy of the word. God wants to encounter us there. In fact, we'll have a more profound encounter

with God in the Eucharist if we really listen to him and we hear him speak to us in his word. That's what I want to talk about in today's episode. I want to really talk about this as a profound moment of encounter, how God really wants to speak to you. He wants to encourage you and wants to strengthen you, wants to guide you through

those readings if we can really enter in to the liturgy of the word. So welcome to this episode of all things Catholic. I'm your host

Edwards Three and I want to give a special welcome to any new listeners that are

joining us for the first time. Welcome to the show.

Check out my website, Edwards3.com.

I give a lot of free background information

on many of the topics we talk about in this podcast.

And one of the things we're going to talk about in this podcast and one of the things we're going to talk

about in this episode is a book I wrote called a biblical walk through the

Mass understanding what we say and do in the liturgy and I'm going to draw on a

couple of the chapters from that book I wrote.

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