Day 3, Denver, March 13, 2024

Hello readers! Today we started off with the same routine of waking to blinding lights at 6am and walking down to the Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish to pray morning prayer. We stayed there afterwards to say mass, which featured a beautiful homily by Fr. Drew Hoffman about how the Lord will not forget us. After this we came back to do some personal prayer, while the cooking crew whipped up a delicious meal that included pancakes!, oatmeal, fruit, and ham and cheese sliders. We ended the morning with an amazing talk on poverty given by one of the CIC missionaries, Lidia. She talked about surrendering the material things we grasped as well as the spiritual things we grasped(like our sins, self-consciousness, anxieties, etc) in order to receive the gift of poverty. 

After this talk came the preparation for the famous lunch in the park

We loaded up about 150 chairs,10 tables, boxes of donations, and the food. We arrived at the park and went to work handing out donations and serving food. I grabbed a plate of shepherd’s pie and talked with a man named Vince for the whole time. Although most of our conversation was pretty surface level stuff, he was very grateful for our conversation, and I was honored to spend some time existing with him. After lunch we divided into “Marian groups” where we broke down some of the deeper thoughts of our hearts. These talks were vulnerable and beautiful and could have lasted way longer than they did. 

In the evening, we got some free time while the kitchen crew made us a splendid little burrito bar. This was shortly followed by night ministry, where half of the colleges were sent back out to the city to hang out with the poor, while the other half got free time. I went to a DoubleTree hotel that became a shelter, where I talked to a guy named Rick for the whole time. This man had crazy stories like opening for the band, Whitesnake, or hitting a bullseye from 150 yards away with a handgun. We drove back in a rain storm that was slowly becoming snow. There’s expected to be a few inches tomorrow, so praise God for the things we can’t control (even though it was 60 degrees yesterday). Overall, today was a little bit deeper and I can easily say this trip has changed my life. Thanks for reading!

Asher out