Hello my name is Barb Prasad and I have recently taken on the role of women’s ministry coordinator for our diocese. I am excited to welcome you to our first newsletter and hope you find it informative and use it to stay up to date on what is happening in women’s ministry.

While writing this I was brought back to memories of myself as a small girl growing up in a medium sized parish in St Louis. My church, St Catherine of Alexandria, was like my second home. Every Sunday I felt this sense of belonging to a family much larger than my own. My school felt like an extension of this family and parish get togethers felt like family reunions. I wonder how many of our children are growing up feeling like that. Our world has gotten so busy. Moms are running frantic, children have schedules that make it near impossible to find time to just be bored. We are stressed out and always chasing after that elusive downtime. Even the retired women I know are shocked at how busy their life is.

With a world so busy how can we create a sense of a second home in our parish yet alone our diocese? It is hard enough to do it in our own homes. Perhaps we should think back to the story of Martha and Mary. While it was not bad that Martha was running around preparing things for the visit with Jesus, Our Lord is quick to point out that Mary made the better choice. Did this mean that work should not be done. I am quite sure that is not the message. Perhaps the message is to put first things first! Leave time to sit at the feet of Jesus. We schedule everything else, perhaps we need to remind each other to not forget to schedule God into our lives. We have a loving God. We know He is always there for us. Yes he will take our left overs and make the most of them but what if we challenged each other to give our faith and parish our best not what was left. How would our church, our family, and our community change. This is a hard call I know. One I know I struggle with every day. What if on this crazy journey we truly had other women to walk with. What if when things were going right, we had an avenue to share and uplift others and when they were getting rough a soft place to land for support. We all will have both. We will each be the giver and the receiver at some time in our life. My dream is that our diocese will be filled with women that are walking together, journeying to sainthood. I hope through this ministry we can help the women of our diocese on this journey by providing opportunities to gather, share resources and support women in the many roles we take on in this world and our parishes. What exactly this looks like is for you to tell me. I know it is happening already on the parish level in so many ways. I hope my office can help connect us all and by working together we can lighten the load for each of us. By the end of the year, we plan to have regional coalitions working to support the efforts and needs of the women in our diocese. These coalitions will help  determine what that looks like in their area. We will also offer opportunities to gather as a diocese and grow in our faith. I hope that if you are a woman reading this you will consider joining us in whatever way you can as we move forward. If you would like to be involved in planning and implementing programming please reach out to me at bprasad@diojeffcity.org and we will find a way to plug you in to help. If you want to be kept in the loop of things being offered, ways to participate or just get ideas on how to grow in your faith sign up for this newsletter by clicking here. I look forward to learning how I can best serve the needs of the women in our diocese.

We Are Better Together,

Barb