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

Hello, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, August 16th.

It is also the feast day of St. Stephen of Hungary.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we have been talking about our blessed mother, Mary.

This week so far, we have talked about how Mary was born sinless in the immaculate conception.

We talked about how she said yes to becoming the mother of Jesus, even though that was

terribly hard and not what she had planned to do.

Yesterday was the great feast of Mary's assumption into heaven, body and soul. And we talked about how we

too need to be forgiven for our sins so that we might not be connected to this earth and instead

join Mary in heaven one day. Today we are going to talk about how Mary is the greatest disciple that Jesus had while he was on

this earth and how she shows us how to be great disciples of Jesus. The first thing that Mary

teaches us is that she trusted God. She trusted God. Can you imagine how crazy this

plan seemed to Mary? The Jewish people had been waiting for a Redeemer since the beginning of

time, since Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. They had been waiting for a Redeemer. They thought he would

probably be a warrior or someone great. But who was it? It was a baby. It was a baby that this little

girl from Nazareth that no one even knew was going to bring into the world. That's crazy. And yet Mary trusted. And what's more, this baby that grew up

into a man, well, he was crucified at the end. Well, that doesn't make very much sense. Why would God allow

himself to be crucified? It doesn't make any sense to us. And yet, Mary trusted. She didn't

abandon him at the end. All of his apostles ran away, but not Mary. She stayed there,

and she continued to love and believe. Another reason why Mary is the first disciple is because she was the first to believe that

Jesus truly was the son of God. At the wedding at Cana, where Jesus performed his first miracle

at the request of his mother, Mary, she believed before he had performed any miracles,

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