Life just has a way of interrupting our plans, doesn’t it?
I wanted to get back to you yesterday with some of the details of the Women of Grace National Conference held in Sacramento, CA last weekend but as it turned out, the day seemed to have plans of its own and suddenly it was midnight and my task was left unaccomplished. Do you know what St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) had to say about just such occurrences in her life? She said:
“When night comes, and retrospect shows that everything was patchwork and much that one had planned left undone, when so many things rouse shame and regret, then take all as is, lay it in God’s hands, and offer it up to Him. In this way we will be able to rest in Him, actually to rest and to begin the new day like a new life.”
And so, beginning this “new day like a new life,” I now share with you about the Women of Grace National Conference.
Women Gather for Weekend of Grace
Nearly five hundred women gathered at Sacramento’s Hyatt Regency Hotel located across from the Capitol for the Women of Grace National Conference the weekend of September 19-21. The Conference was preceded by the Benedicta Leadership Institute for Women.
Presenters for the Conference weekend were Catholic journalist and UN watchdog, Mary Jo Anderson; Healing the Culture’s president, Camille Pauley; radio show host and Catholic journalist, Teresa Tomeo; founder and president of Real Love, Inc., Mary Beth Bonacci; Women of Grace founder and president, Johnnette Benkovic; and chaplain and theological advisor for Women of Grace and Living His Life Abundantly, Father Edmund Sylvia, C.S.C. EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo was the keynote speaker at the banquet dinner on Saturday evening. Read the rest…