As a kid, I was taught to pray my Our Fathers and Hail Marys, just as Jesus taught his disciples the Our Father. What I did not learn is that my prayer is meant for me to relate to God. When I started to become alive in the faith in high school, I was just like this disciple, "Lord, teach me to pray." I was invited to a retreat called "Going Deeper" which taught high schoolers who were loving God to relate and love him in a deeper way. On that retreat, my faith was awakened to a personal relationship with God, and I could hear the voice of God and know what his love felt like in my heart. I kept on going to these retreats because I wanted to keep learning what God would do in prayer and my relationship with Him. It sparked a love for God and a desire to give my life away to Him leading me to discern the priesthood and religious life. As a college student now, those retreats and spiritual mentors helped me love God in high school so that I could learn to love him more deeply in college. They gave me faith and hope to keep being Catholic today. Those retreats taught me what every Catholic adult and youth need today: to learn how to pray.

These retreats helped me form a consistent and deep prayer life. I found that other retreats that I went to were more focused on producing an emotional experience and initially introducing us to a relationship with God. They challenged us to go home and start a prayer life, but they never explained how to do this. Although these retreats were important for me in early high school, I found that after attending a few of them I was ready for something deeper. The retreats that Eric put on were different because they assumed that those in attendance were already interested in a life of prayer and didn’t need to be convinced of its importance. These retreats were refreshing because the leaders took us and our desire to learn to pray seriously; they challenged us to take responsibility for our spiritual life despite being only 15 or 16 years old.