My name is Sarah Leppard. I'm one of the practice managers in the academy. So that's where all of our newly qualified workers come in for their first year of practice. I've worked in West Sussex for 16 years. I joined West Sussex County Council as an unqualified worker. West Sussex then sponsored my training and I have them work for West Sussex ever since. As a newly qualified worker, as a senior worker, as a senior social worker practitioner a hissef yng Nghymru. Ac ydy'r mwyaf'n meddwl y dywed llawer yn fan ni gefnogi, y gallwn iechyd ynerddo yn Western Six, ac fan i fyddwn i'r cwreir ymddych chi iaith o'r programau yn distressu felly i'r West Sussex County Council, ond fyddwn i'r meddyl am hynny yw hynny'n coll biologyd, ac mae gennym rhai ymdyn nhw'n dweud ymdeithasol ar y ymdyn nhw'n ymdyn nhw'n ymdyn nhw'n fyddeithasol ar West Sussex. Ac rwy'n wedi bod yn meddwl wedi'r ei ei gŷ iawn, AM, a rhai tynnod oedaf, byddiwch gan y cael That we worked very closely with. I think we've always had a very very good working relationship with our partner agencies, which I think is a very integral part of being able to safeguard children. I definitely think this is the A&I team that you want to come and join. I think the practice managers offer the workers a lot of support. I think we have group managers who equally offer the practice managers lots of support. There is quite an extensive training programme. We offer different pathways now in terms of progressing, so a pathway where you can choose to move up into different grades that involves having a student and not having a student because I think historically in order to move up the ladder if you like, you have to have a student as part of your pathway for developing Ie, ac mae ei wneud, rhan a oedd yn gweithio, gan unrhyw beth y gweld. Wrth gandd, mae hwn yn gweithio sydd y llif stimuliadol yn ymgyrch. Ond rydyn ni'n gallu sgiliau ymddangos, â oherwydd mor beth sy'n gweithio'r cyddfer y tryn. Rydych chi'n bod yr exoedd y Cymru yn ei bod yn siaradol? Mae ffilm eich fi'n dangos ymddangos a'r mwylo'r sgiliau, a'r byd ymgyrch a'r pwねぇ a'r pryd eich hŷn. Felly fel yw, mae hyn yn gallu i llwyddo, yn ddysgu'r ystod, yw yw'r ystod, yn ddysgu'r ystod, mae'n gobeithio y flaseth.


using a church and turning it into apartment buildings, for example, you know, they're not knocking it down. So it's just a question on a, if we fix a part of a giant building that they couldn't afford to do, what else is going on? Those are my two projects. And I, the set was terrific. And Sam, if we're more than glad to have you respond to those now if you wanted to wait until the finance committee takes that up, you could also do that. Okay, please go ahead. I'll say what I have to say here. Thank you all. Good to see you back. Welcome to returning. Welcome to returning and new members and to our liaisons and to Town Council for all the hard work. The presentation and report have already been submitted there in the packet. So anyone who wishes to look who's watching or looking at this after the fact can find the material on the Town Council packet as well as on the CPA website relating to FY25 proposals. Regarding the Simeon Strong House, they're looking, they did have a study and I was on the CPAC committee at that time. That was limited in scope. They're looking to do a thorough top to bottom analysis to cover three different areas. Structural integrity, the topography on the outside to identify ADA compliance opportunities and excuse me, outside structural integrity and there's one other one, stay with me. So in other words, it extends beyond what they asked for the last. Yeah, and the interior, all the systems, all the mechanical systems, it's comprehensive. They wanna get it done prior to work that's about or soon to commence with their neighbor at the Jones Library and they hope to utilize this study for the purposes of a basis for applying for a future grant work. They believe and they already have other organizations within the state and federally that they have in line in this study from Coon Riddle will provide them what they need to make those applications. So we heard them thoroughly and the committee was very much in support of their intent behind this. Regarding the North Church, it's a very historic building. It's 200 year anniversary is gonna be next two years from now, the roof is in significantly bad shape as we can all see when we go by it. They took some time the previous year and went through our process with CBA but did not have the where with all to focus and the committee asked them to return this year with a more focused proposal, which they did. It's specific to the roof because the church members and the committee realized that that's the singular area of maintenance importance and the historical commission is very much in favor of proceeding recommending the project out of concern with demolition by neglect. In fact, I received a call or excuse me, an email from the representative of the church this past month that indicated that the roof started leeching in the middle of their service. So it's in need and the other items painting and otherwise in terms of their where with all to accomplish that, the committee is uncertain of that capacity, it hasn't been demonstrated but the committee and the historical commission also recognize that if nothing occurs with the building that it's in significant jeopardy. And I can say that from my own personal perspective having used to have been a contractor. So, which is part of the reason we asked for them to have a much more focused, prioritized project. They do indicate that they're willing to contribute church funds towards a contingency related to the roof aspect and that they had talked with a bank about getting a loan which they were led to believe would be able to be achieved if there was expenses beyond the estimate that was provided. And who's to say you're all familiar with the expenses in terms of the buildings staying a church or not, we did not delve into that. We are granting a recommendation to the council and finance committee to proceed with that project based upon the building itself, not regarding the nature of what is accomplished within the building. There are, there is something called historic preservation restrictions which I assume the council members are all familiar with. Audience members may not be, upon receipt of the funds, there is the requirement to enter into an HBR agreement with the town to prevent selling the property for profit. They would have to return the funds to the town. I don't know if interest is a factor or not, but we don't get into what can occur with the building into perpetuity. We do know that the town's interest would be protected by virtue of the HBR. And you may be familiar as a former liaison as well, but there is set aside for all historic preservation projects that are private were allocating as of this past year, certain amount added on to the requested total to accomplish the HBR expenses. Not sure if that answers your questions. Thank you. Bob Hagener? Yeah, I just want to point out that we will not be discussing CPA at tomorrow's meeting. Okay. Because it's not on the agenda. We'll put it on the agenda, I think for the 20th, is that correct? Okay. That's, that's the communication I received that it's about two weeks from now or so. All right, so we've, the council's already voted to refer this so we can move on to the next item, Sam, again. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. And thanks to the full committee for all of your work. Yes. They deserve a lot of credit as do town staff. Holly has been fantastic. Dave Zomac has been very helpful. Thank you. The next item is with regard to the track and the motion that I'm putting on the floor is to refer the January 23, 2024 regional school committee borrowing authorization to the finance committee for report and recommendation to the council by March 18, 2024. Is there a second? Second.   Kathy does have her hand up. I do have my hand up, but if Bob had his hand up because that was, that was my third question. We have three pieces of money tied up in the track. One was the straight 1.5 million, which was a, if they didn't raise enough money by a certain date, all they were gonna do was the track. So I think that is the rescind and replace that the school committee just did. So my question is, are we looking at changing the wording in all three? Because the second one, when we had free cash and allocated, we said option two or three. So we left open that it didn't have to be artificial turf. It's, we said this is for the bigger project. And that one was left to, with it to be determined. The third is the CPA money, which cannot be used for artificial turf. But when they discussed it, they were talking about option three, which was the one with artificial turf. So they were clear that their money could go for track and reorientation and irrigation, but not the turf. So I think in the instance of the CPA, because they said option three, is the wording we're looking at two or three or just larger project? Because the way the wording of the new school one is, it's reorientation, it tracks, it doesn't mention what the field will be made of. They just sidestepped it all together, which is not, I'm not, have no problem. So with CPA, if we change the wording, do we as a council change the wording or does it have to go back to CPA? So those are my three pieces. It came up from them, we said yes to it. Can we just say it's the same amount of money but redo the wording? So I had three, those were quite, because each is somewhat different. One seems already in line with what we're being asked to consider. It seems to me it would be the courteous thing to go back to CPA if you're going to do something with money the original recommended to us, but I do point out the council is the one that votes to authorize CPA. When you read the first sentence says option three, but then they're very clear, not a dime of this can go, they didn't, and since option three had the turf and it was saying you can use it for everything but that. So that was my just question on what's the route. Yeah, it's also, it's not just Amherst CPA money. No. So we, there's other towns involved. Right. Councilor Hanakie. Yeah. So my understanding is the town council cannot vote CPA money without a recommendation from CPA and that CPA only recommended that money if the track was both rotated and an artificial turf field was put in. That's the limitation on that money. And so I don't think we can change it. And it says it would be rescinded. In fact, the order says it's rescinded if artificial turf is not done. Item three is not done. So I think it would, I think the school would have to go back to CPA and request. And that's why I'm asking then what finance really can't, other than say, go to CPA pretty quickly so it can come back to us with, if they're supporting that allocation. That's what I thought Mandy that I have to go. I had other questions though. Yeah. I think what Mandy Joe's saying is that, I think I'm just gonna look at you. This does have to go back to CPA.  It's just the council can approve or disapprove the borrowing authorization that the original school committee voted. That's all that is in front of the council right now. So any conversation about what is and isn't happening with the CPA funds is for a later conversation. Okay. Mandy Joe, you had another question. Yeah. I have a ton of questions about this, but I'm on finance.  I'm just curious. I wanted to ask the finance chair, who from the school will be at finance tomorrow? If anyone, okay. Is there a way, obviously maybe we can't get there tomorrow, but that we can somehow schedule a second whenever it comes up a second time at finance to make sure school personnel that can answer questions are there. Yeah. I think we could ask them maybe for the next meeting, but we haven't invited anyone to this meeting. Okay. We didn't know it was referred to. All right. And that's the case. Then the motion's been made and seconded. We're gonna move to a vote. Mandy Joe, you're okay holding your questions till tomorrow. Okay. Thank you. And we're going to start with Kathy Shane. Yes. This is just the referral to finance. Okay. Andy Steinberg. All right. Jennifer, Tob. Yes. Councillor Walker. Yes. Pat DeAngeles. Aye. Anna Devon-Gother. Aye. Councillor Ate. Aye. Lynn Griesmerson. Aye. Councillor Hannacky. Aye. Bob Hegner. Aye. Councillor Apsin. Pam Rooney. Yes. Councillor Ryan. Aye. It's unanimous with one absent. We have one other vote, and that is to approve the warrant for the March. Oh, that was on consent. Excellent. We don't have one other vote. Well, because we also did minutes. Thank you very much. We are now up to committee and liaison reports. Is there, I can just quickly go down those. As soon as I find my sheet. CRC. Pam Rooney or Jennifer Tob? Pam. Okay. Elementary school building. Kathy Shane or Councillor Walker. The next meeting is the 16th, but the school is at its second round of planning board tomorrow night. And the bids I believe all are due back in for the first phase of it. So we're, the team is busily trying to get all the permits in order that it needs to move forward. Pam Rooney, you have a question. No, I was actually going to speak to the library. Oh, okay. I'm getting there. Finance committee, Bob Hagnar or Kathy Shane? Yeah. Bob is now the chair. Kathy Shane is the vice chair. Yeah. Basically we just set focused on electing the chair and the vice chair, set the schedule for meetings and then we reviewed the carryover items from last council. And they were the AHRA financing options, the streetlight policy, rental bylaw and fee structure, the waste hauler bylaw and the policy regarding disposal of surplus property. And the only one we could take action on is a surplus property one. So we're going to start, we're going to review that start, start the review tomorrow on that. Okay. GOL Anna Devlin-Goth here is chair of that. Councillor Frick, Ete is vice chair. Eanna? Well, as we know, GOL is by far the best committee. We started in on when I'm making our plan for what we're going to do in the coming year of reviewing our carryover memo. We looked at the resolution that we had regarding higher education access and started to think through, sorry, I pulled up the wrong thing. Right, right, there we go. Started to think about what we've got ahead including the appointments to the charter review committee and finance committee and we will be moving forward with those as well as recommendations regarding liaisons shortly. One quick thing out of GOL, one of the, we will not be proposing any blanket GOL changes to the rules until later on in the year as we have just completed that first round. So if councillors have individual rule changes they would like to make, please submit them in their final form, the language that you would like GOL to discuss to the council for referral, that's the word, to GOL. We will not be going through the rules again until enough time has passed since the last time that we've done that. Thank you. Jones Library Committee, Pam Rooney is our representative, Paul Bachman is also on that committee, Pam. Thank you. I was able to meet with the director, library director, and they are moving along looking for hoping to get settled on interim space. She did mention the $300,000 that was recently passed over to the town from, as she called it, miscellaneous pieces. I did not, I neglected to ask her about the timing of the first round of the $2 million that the finance schedule called for. So I was gonna ask Paul if he has knowledge of that, the timing of that $2 million payment and what is the impact to the borrow if we don't see that $2 million in the time frame that was being projected for our amount. And then thirdly, the very happy fact that the North Amherst Library was open to the public today. And there were lots of people there. Got that. Anything else to add, Mr. Bachman? Okay. Town Services and Outreach Committee, Andy Steinberg as chair, Councilor George Ryan as vice chair, Andy. Yes, the meeting, the one meeting that we've held so far was election of officers and review of the carryover in Ramo and then a little bit more extensive discussion of one item from the carryover, which was the waste hauler to get an understanding of where we were with the timetable on getting the RFI proposed review back because there had been responses to request for information and that was an essential backfinding piece that would benefit the committee in moving forward with that item. And I think the other thing that I'll just mention is that there was an excellent presentation made as a MMA conference session on waste hauler that actually was addressing the same issues that were the issues that were brought before the TSO and the TSO was considering. And I think Athena that we added that to the packet of the last TSO meeting. I, the slides from that are excellent. And so I would encourage anybody who has an interest in doing so to look at the packet for the meeting and pick that up. Thank you. And very quickly regarding liaisons. This is a matter that's now before TSO as I believe Councillor, Vice President, Devlin-Gothier suggested. I have now reached out to every committee and tried to include their staff liaison and I'm getting responses back. They're due back by the 15th and that will then go to TSO. They'll come back to the council with the recommendation and hope GOL, it'll go to, I'm sorry, it will go to GOL. Come back to the council with a recommendation as to which committees and at that point, councillors hopefully will sign up. We've done the minutes, town managers report. So you have a written town manager report. There's three things I want to mention. One thrilled that Sandy Pooler is back on the staff. I announced that last time. A little more detail in the report. We do work around his travel schedule, but he's available. He's very, has a lot of value to add. Second is just congratulations to our DEI department. They are having a ton of activities sort of started before Christmas and continues through February. So if you can see the, if you take time to look at the exhibit in town hall, it's just really educational. And the third is a congrats to our recreation department for a week long efforts of Winterfest that concluded on Saturday. And included also just want to mention there was a huge turnout at Amherst College that was organized by the college and also the recreation department and especially Angela Mills and our office to put on, it's a getting girls and student athletes at Amherst College to be connected to and they probably had 200 people there, girls and young women who are scholar athletes and trying every sport imaginable that they had just turned over the entire athletic facility to the program. So it was a huge turnout and really good event for them. So a lot of work went into the development. Are there any questions of the town manager, Anna? Paul, I don't know if you're gonna be able to answer this. So in your town manager, so I'm giving you an out if you don't know the answer. In your town manager report, you talked about under economic development and license suspension. When a bar or a restaurant has their license revoked, do they pick the date that they will be serving the sentence because to pick a Monday night feels not very impactful. And I know I'm not saying it needs to be impactful, but I'm curious how the date is picked. So they work with ABCC issued that suspension. So they work with the ABCC and choosing the date and usually if they have an attorney, they work it through what days, they know not to choose a day, they're not open. But they often will choose a less onerous date. Okay, thank you. Alicia. I'm sorry, Councillor Walker. Thank you. I'm not sure if this question should be for Paul or for Lynn, but I'm just wondering if we might expect ARPA funds to return for our next council meeting. Because I think we said we might address this sometime in February. So our goal is to get it on the agenda for the February 26th meeting. Okay, thank you. Are there any other questions? Just very quickly, we've already done the minutes and I'm sorry. At our next meeting on the 26th, both I and the vice president will have reports and we are polling. We've selected some additional dates and we'll be polling for retreat dates. Are there any other questions or comments for future agenda items or councilor comments? Seeing none, the meeting's adjourned at 11-11.


One of the questions I always get from students and people when they first find out that Father Dave and I were roommates in college is, what was he like in college? What was he like? And I would say that he was the same person he is now. He's probably a lot holier than he was now, you know, because God has been working in him. And he had more hair. Other than that, you guys, I still recall being convicted. Like we lived on the second floor of St. Francis dorm and like almost kiddie quarter from our dorm room was the chapel on the second floor. And I knew if I came back to the room and I was wondering, Dave was just here. Where is he? Inevitably, I would find him in the chapel praying. And it convicted me. It kept me honest to say, look, am I really living out this faith? And so he, Dave has been a Father Dave has been a blessing in my life for so many years. And it's good to be able to be here and minister under his leadership here at Franciscan. It's such a tremendous blessing. It should have happened 10 years ago, but we were patient and it happened. And I'm just glad he's here. And I'm glad to be able to minister alongside of him. This morning, I want to talk about hope. The name of my talk is witness to hope, because right now we need people who can witness to the hope and glory that God brings to our lives. Amen. My story of hope. Many of you might have heard some of this story before. I'm going to share it again, only because it really encapsulates for me what God has been doing in my life really for the last seven years. And three years ago, it'll be three years this July, I was in Rochester, Minnesota, running one of our youth conferences. 2000 teenagers all fired up for Jesus. We had a great Friday night, a great Saturday morning. We sat down for our team lunch on Saturday. And as I sat down to eat, my phone rang. And I got one of the most chilling calls I'd ever received in my life. At first, I didn't recognize the number, but I answered it, because normally I'm the kind of guy like, if I don't recognize the number that pops up on my cell phone, I don't answer it. I'm going to introvert any introverts in this room. Guys who are extroverts, look at all these introverts, adopt them and bring them into conversations, because sometimes we just don't know how to do that. Help us. But this number popped up and I felt compelled to answer it and I answered it. It was my son, Andrew's girlfriend, Christa, letting me know that they had just been in a car accident. That she wasn't sure exactly what was going on with Andrew, because he was unconscious. He was just airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. She didn't even know the name of the hospital that he had been taken to. But she said it was very serious. And my heart just sank. I'm like, here I am sitting in a convention center in Rochester, Minnesota. I hung up. I called my wife. I said, honey, I don't know what's going on. You need to get to Pittsburgh as quickly as possible. And I don't even know which hospital it'll send you to. So just start calling and find out, you know, who has Andrew. So he gathered up. Our daughters got in the car and drove to Pittsburgh to find out what was going on with our son. Meanwhile, I'm scrambling. I'm on my phone trying to book a flight back to Pittsburgh as soon as I can.  And it was the first flight that I could get out, didn't leave until five o'clock in the evening. It was flying out of St. Paul, Minnesota. It was going to take me through Atlanta because there was no direct flights left. And I wasn't going to get into about until about 11 o'clock at night. And I just stopped in my room and I got down on my knees and I just said, okay, Lord, I don't know what's going on, but I surrender this all to you. And I just got a sense of peace that came over me. I was still kind of days trying to absorb and trying to process everything I, you know, that was going on in my heart. When my son was three years old, it was a Christmas day. And we were at my in-laws celebrating with my wife's family. And my son running out the back door completely misjudged the staff, tripped on the door, you know, the door, the lip and fell head first into a planter and split open his forehead. I had to take him to the emergency room and he had to get stitches on Christmas Day. He was only three years old at the time.  And they had to wrap him in one of these little mummy suits to keep him still. And I just remember standing over him watching the doctors, you know, stitch up his forehead and his eyes just locked on mine. You know, locked on mine like, Daddy, he's going to be okay. I'm so scared. I'm like, it's going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine.  And I felt in my heart, the Lord saying, I've got this. Trust in me. And so I said, okay, Lord, I trust in you. I know that you're going to take care of this. And as I was getting ready, I started just texting some people that were important to me, letting them know, start praying. You know, and this is one of these moments when you realize how blessed you are to be Catholic and how God lines up things in your life. Long before you're aware that he's preparing and making things going to happen in a beautiful, miraculous way, we had six youth conferences going on that weekend across the United States and Canada. And so I was able to send out six text messages to all the hosts of the conference saying, tonight, when all the youth are before the blessed sacrament, please pray for my son. His life is hanging in the balance. In the night of my son's accident, there were over 12,000 high school students across the United States and Canada praying for my son before the blessed sacrament. I got on my plane. I was delayed getting out of St. Paul. So now at 6.30, almost 7 o'clock, I finally get on in the air. I fly to Atlanta. I get to Atlanta. Another flight delay. I don't get back to Pittsburgh until 1.30 in the morning. And as I'm in Atlanta saying, honey, I'm not going to get back to late. Just go home, get a good night's sleep. When I land in Pittsburgh, I'll drive home. In the morning, we can go into Pittsburgh and take care of Andrew. Meanwhile, another good friend of ours, who's a TOR, went to the hospital and gave my son the anointing of the sick. They had to do an emergency craniotomy because my son, he didn't have any broken bones. He did not have any internal injuries like, you know, bruised liver or anything like that. What happened was he was driving down, his girlfriend was driving down the road and a car coming the other way, the driver fell asleep, crossed the center line and just veered into them, hit them head on doing about 55 miles an hour. My son was not wearing a seatbelt.  He was lying in the back seat asleep and took the full brunt of the accident in the upper left side of his skull. He had 19 fractures across his forehead, into his eye socket and into his cheek. He had severe brain trauma. They operated on him. They reconstructed the bone.  And then they had to do an emergency craniotomy. They took the upper one-third of his skull out completely. And in case you're ever wondering what they do in situations like that, they actually just put it in a jar of solution and put it in the refrigerator somewhere. Kept it on ice until it was time to put it back in. But in that moment, he was hanging on to life. They had him on heavy anti-seizure medicine. He hadn't regained consciousness. They had him on a breathing tube. And he was in the intensive care unit at UPMC hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. So I got home, went to bed, got about three hours of sleep, woke up at 5.30, got up, took a shower, and drove with my wife into Pittsburgh. I was not prepared in any way, shape, or form for what I was going to see when I walked into the intensive care unit. My son was there. His face was swollen. His eye was swollen shut. There was blood oozing from his eye. He had blood on his neck from the injury. They had done the surgery. They had got him as much as they could. He had a drainage tube coming out of his skull to keep the fluid from building up because the biggest threat was the pressure on the brain. It could damage his brain even more than it already was. And I walked into the room, saw him lying there, and I just fell to my knees at the side of his bed and put my hands on him and just started praying, come Holy Spirit, Lord Jesus Christ, heal my son, restore him. Be there, help him. All the prayers that a father would pray are like, oh my God, I love this boy, Lord Jesus, just keep him here. Whatever it takes, Lord, I'll do whatever it takes. Don't take my son from me. I'm not ready for that. The doctors came in a couple hours later and sat my wife and I down and basically laid this out in front of us and said, we want to be completely honest with you. In our experience, the level of brain trauma that your son has experienced, it may be weeks before he wakes up. And when he does, he might not remember who he is, he might not remember who you are. He might not even remember how to talk. We may have to reteach him how to tie his shoes to feed himself, everything. We're not sure the extent. We'll begin to learn over the next few days the extent of his brain trauma, but we want you to be prepared for months, if not years of rehabilitation and therapy for your son. And they came with some literature, like here's some, you know, this is where you can find rehab. This is, you know, like they were the nursing staff, the doctors were wonderful.   She wanted him to clean him up because he really hadn't been cleaned up since his accident. The swelling in his face had gone down significantly. They had taken him off of his breathing tube because they had balanced out his medication. They were sure he wasn't going to see easy. He wasn't going to die, but they wanted to make sure that, you know, like that everything was going to be all right before they took out the breathing tube. So they took out the breathing tube.   Like he's being bothered by this. We're all looking at this like, what? My daughter Madeline keeps doing it. And she's a nurse. So she's talking to him, like, Andrew, it's going to be okay. I'm just cleaning you up. Just let me do what I'm doing here. And about a minute later, after she's continuing to wipe him up and clean up his neck and his face, he just turns to her and says, will you please stop that? And we're all like, what? Did he just talk? Because he hadn't said a word, hadn't said, and no signs of consciousness. And I realize in the moment, in that moment, there's two things that are more powerful than anything in the world. Number one, of course, the power of prayer and the power of God to heal and to restore. The second is the power of sibling to annoy another sibling. Because my daughter Madeline literally annoyed him out of a coma.  I'm Andrew. Do you know your siblings? Madeline, Catherine, John Paul, and Therese? Do you know where you are? I'm at work. You know, like he started, after they started asking questions like, do you know where you are and what's going on? He had no idea. He was speaking some really wild stuff. It was crazy, but he remembered who he was. He remembered where he lived. He remembered his siblings. And they told me, he said, look, you know, his, his recovery is going to go a lot better if he sits up and gets out of bed a little bit. So I helped him up with the help of a nurse. And I'm on one side, the nurse is the other, and we're going to take him to the bathroom to use the bathroom. He can bear, he can't see out of this. I can barely, you know, he can barely get his balance. So we're just holding him. He looks past the bathroom and he points to the door of the, of his room in the ICU. And he just wants to walk. I walk a hundred feet down to the end of the hall and back with him and get him back into his chair. The next day they bring him his breakfast. He sits up in bed and starts eating his breakfast on his own. Now my son will tell you, he doesn't remember anything from the first two and a half weeks after his accident. And it was really dicey. They would, they were coming in and they started doing the therapy right away. And they would say, okay, Andrew, I'm going to give you three words, apple, pear, umbrella. Can you repeat those three words? Apple, pear, um, umbrella. Great. Then they'd ask him some more questions and they'd come back and say, Andrew, I gave you three words just a couple of minutes ago. Can you tell me what they were? And he would go apple, pear, I don't know. You know, they, they would show him pictures of, here's some orange juice and here's a frying pan and here's some eggs and here's some milk, you know, in the kitchen. What are you, what are you trying to do? And he, he couldn't even say, well, that's for making breakfast. Like there were, he was totally disconnected. He couldn't, couldn't put things together at all. And so I was just grateful. Like my son is alive. So about a week later that he got out of ICU, five days after that, we transferred him from UPMC to a rehabilitation center in Harmerville, which is right outside of Pittsburgh. He was there for another, I would say, week and a half. And after four days of being there, it was like God flipped another switch. Boom. And all of a sudden, everything that he was struggling with was gone. He was going, just ripping through his occupational therapy, ripping through his physical therapy, ripping through his speech therapy and just nailing everything. And I was absolutely amazed and overwhelmed and so grateful. There were so many tears of joy during those days. And when they turned to me and said, we think he's ready to go home. And I'm looking at my watch and it's like, okay, it's August 10th. Are you sure he's ready to go home? It's not even been a month since his accident. They're like, yeah, there's nothing more that he needs from us. He's fine. We are going to prescribe that you do some outpatient therapy to keep him growing and moving forward. So we took him back over to a place that's local where he could continue his therapy. After four days of therapy, they said to us, we don't want to waste your time or your insurance company's money. He does not need any more physical, occupational, or speech therapy. He's fine. Two months later, he was back taking classes here at Franciscan towards his MBA. He completed his MBA with almost a 4.0 grade point average and now is finishing up a nursing degree.  And I share all this with you because I remember the prayer surrender that I said to God, whatever it takes, whatever you want, whatever it takes, I will do whatever it takes to get my son well. And I think this is what hope is like. And people used to come up to my wife and I during this whole thing and say, your family's so strong. It's so beautiful to see your faith. It's so beautiful to see what God is doing. And I was so humbled by the whole experience. I said, I'm not strong. I'm not strong at all. Actually, I'm very weak. But I've put all my faith and all my hope. And even when my faith felt like a mustard seed or even smaller, I put all of that in my God who is very, very strong. And I truly believe in that moment God had revealed to me what hope is really all about. And I want to share it because we need hope right now. Hope not as a concept, but as a living reality in our souls. If we don't have a living hope, then we do not have hope. For there is no other hope other than a living hope. It says in the Catechism 1870, it says, hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promise and rely not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.  The problem is that we put our hope in a desired outcome. We see hope portrayed in movies and on television as this is like we've tried everything else. I guess all we can do now is hope. Like it's this depressing little last ditch effort that hopefully what we want to happen will come true. And if we put our hope in a desired outcome, that's not hope. That's a wish. I told Father Dave, if I win the lottery, I'll give you $10 million. I haven't won the lottery yet, and I realize you have to buy tickets to win the lottery. And I would say, if I say, oh man, I hope I win the lottery, that's not hope. That's a wish. Lord, I want this. But that's not where my hope lies. My hope lies in heaven and God and His promise to be there with me no matter what. My dad is Charles Borromeo Bolio III. That's a pretty cool name. I wish I was Charles Borromeo IV sometimes, but he just decided that it was, he wanted me to be John. My brother is Michael. My other brother is Christopher. What's St. Charles Borromeo says is God wishes us not to rest upon anything but His infinite goodness. Do not let us expect anything, hope anything, or desire anything but from Him. And let us put our trust and confidence in Him alone.  What a powerful challenge for us that we would not expect anything. That's the problem. I think we've become very entitled, and we expect things to work out for us.  Because I've placed hope in something that isn't worthy of my hope. And hope is both a movement of grace. It is God's initiative drawing us into this confidence in Him, but it's also a decisive response on our part, because every movement of grace requires, demands, a decisive response on our part. Grace is not magic. God cannot wave a magic wand over you and give you hope. We need to yield who we are and what we desire to God and let Him transform our desires until they're in Him and Him alone. And right now, the world is dying because it's lost hope. The suicide rate, the United States has gone up every year for the last 13 years. It's up 30% since the year 2000. For our young people, 10 to 18, suicide is a second leading cause of death. The number of 25 to 33-year-olds dying from alcohol-related liver disease has tripled since 1999. The United States, which has 5% of the world's population, consumes 80% of the world's opioids. Do you see what we're dealing with? In 2019, 70,000 Americans died of a drug overdose. In 1999, that number was under 20,000. We are literally killing ourselves, medicating ourselves into death. It's not enough. People cannot see that there's something greater that they can place their faith in, their hope in, their trust in. Meanwhile, in our church, we see regular mass tendons on the decline. In some diocese, that number is now well below 20% of baptized Catholics are regular church attendees. We've all heard the statistic that only 30% of Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. And we have countless former Catholics who've lost all faith in the institutional church because of the scandals. So where do we, as men who love the church and who desire to see the church renewed, where are we going to turn to find the strength and courage to persevere? We have to once again recommit ourselves to put our hope in heaven and a hope in the Lord. And the perfect example for us to look at is the Blessed Mother. Mary's hope was absolute and unshakable in the promise of God. Even in the most mysterious, dark, and difficult moments in her life, she never lost hope. At the Annunciation, she desired no other explanation after revealing her humility before the message of the angel.  Her response is, how can this be since I'm a virgin? And that's not a response of questioning or doubt. That's a response of understanding her limitedness, that she was looking to God like you are the hope for this. So I will wait upon you to show me how this is going to be. And the angel says to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child will be born, will be holy and be called the Son of God. And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God. Then Mary said, here I am, the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word. Then the angel departed from her. When she says, how can this be? She's like, I know myself. I'm just the humble servant of the Lord. I cannot make this happen on my own. What you're saying is not about me.  For me, I would have about 300 follow-up questions.  How's that going to work? Am I going to be aware? When is it going to happen? How can I prepare? What do I need to do? I need to start planning. Is this going to happen soon? Because I've got to figure out like, okay, I've got to get a stroller. I've got to get a baby crib. I've got to be like, okay, I'm going to have a baby. Okay. All these things that like, okay, angel, tell me like, how, how's this going to work?  This is, this is crazy. Like, I would have had all these follow-up statements and questions, but hers was like, simply let it be done to me. I trust. I believe and I hope. As we look around, we, you know, we were on a, okay, we got a plan. What is the plan? How are we going to fix the church? How are we going to restore the church and renew the church? The first thing that we need to do is like Mary's just fall silent before the Holy Spirit, let the Holy Spirit come upon us. Renewal of the church starts with us and our personal renewal, our personal yes, so that we can be witnesses to hope, so that we can, with quiet patience, wait upon the Lord to reveal and lead us to these things that are going to allow us to be renewed personally and to be agents of renewal in a church that so desperately needs it. You know, when Joseph became aware of her pregnancy, he resolved to send her away quietly. He didn't want to cause scandal, but he just knew that whatever is going on, I'm not a part of it. And Mary must have detected the anguish, the emotional turmoil that maybe Joseph was going through as he was thinking about these things. And she did not run to Joseph and try to justify herself. Joseph just chill. An angel came to me and said, this is all from God. She didn't want to stand up and defend herself and make herself something other than she was, other than the handmade. She knew that God was going to justify and reveal and lead Joseph through this as well. And we know that God fulfilled the hope of Mary by letting Joseph understand that he had an intimate part, an intimate role in bringing salvation into the world, to protect the Blessed Mother, to provide for the incarnation, to be the stepfather of the Son of God. Mary often pondered things in her heart, which is such a great kind of posture, a disposition for us to have. It's just to meditate upon what God is doing. She must have pondered the words of Isaiah from chapter 30 verse 15 when it says, In quietness and in trust shall be your strength. That's where Mary drew her strength, by just waiting upon the Lord and continually placing her hope in the Lord. And Mary, it didn't end with that with Mary.  He in many ways looked like everyone else's children, but she never lost hope in the promise that this was the Savior promised by God. And when Jesus was betrayed and arrested and scourged and beaten and spat upon and crowned with thorns and mocked and led away carrying a cross and crucified, when all seemed lost, Mary's hope was unaltered. And it didn't just diminish in any way and rather it grew, it became the courage that allowed her to walk with Jesus. And where do we find Mary in the midst of this tragedy at the foot of the cross? She had the courage. She had a quiet confidence, a courage to go where even most of the apostles were afraid to go. When they ran and hid in their houses, she walked with her son to the very end because her quiet hope grew into courage and confidence. It became something that we need to look at and say, okay, if this is the pattern of how we grow to be courageous, to follow Christ all the way to the cross, then what do I need to change about the way I approach God and see God and give my heart to God and surrender to God? What do I need to change? How do I need to be stripped the way Jesus was stripped? You know, this invitation to hope is the call to go with Christ to the cross. As he's tied to the pillar and the whips are coming down and the flesh is being torn from his body, the Lord is inviting us to join him there, to be vulnerable, to be stripped of these things of our flesh that we cling to, that we put our confidence in, our talents, our gifts, to be stripped of those things that we use as our comforts that protect us from being naked in the world and having to rely completely on God for our stability and our peace. Like all these false little things that we cling to, God wants to strip us of them so that we can be worthy of the cross. By Christ's stripes, we are healed by us being stripped by God of all our unhealthy attachments and false comforts that we cling to. We will become more like Christ, more confident, more full of courage and boldness, more given this grace to go forward and to proclaim the love of Jesus Christ. And as I was going through this whole thing with my son, and I kept hearing people say, man, it's amazing that the witness of your family and the faith and this miracle that God has done because my son is a miracle. The doctors, if I had a dollar for every time the doctor used the word remarkable with me in discussing my son's recovery, it's remarkable. I'm like, ah, it's miraculous. No, it's remarkable. It's miraculous. I'm like, and I actually said this to the surgeon. He was, you know, a great guy. I mean, like I said, God blesses this guy with some tremendous gifts, but he would not acknowledge that they came from God. I said, wouldn't you like to put on your resume that you assisted God in a miracle? Is that not a cool thing to be able to put on your resume? I assisted God in a miracle, but he didn't want to be looked as the assistant.  You assisted God in a miracle, and I wasn't trying to be rude about it. I was just trying to like help him understand like, God, how does that work in this situation? And I realized, you know, like I did not receive a special grace in that moment when my son was in his accident. I didn't receive a gift of hope, but rather God had been forming in me over the last three years leading up to that the grace that I needed in that moment. Let me explain.  She suffered with cancer for seven years before she died. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, she had been kind of nominally Catholic. She converted when she got married. She was Methodist, converted when she married my dad. And while she made sure that we had a Catholic home where all of us went to Mass together on Sunday, that we all received our sacraments and went to faith formation, there was not, I would say, an explicit devotional kind of experience of prayer within our house. My mom didn't really have any interest in saints and the rosary and things like that. I had my conversion at 18. I started talking about these things with her and her response always was, well, I have a relationship with Jesus. Why would I want to talk to his mother when I can just talk to him? And she had very simple, beautiful faith in Christ. She really did. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, she wanted to up her game, so to speak. And she called me and she said, I want to do a novena. I have a friend of mine who said I should do a novena in preparation for my surgery because she was overwhelmed. Cancer is a scary thing. And God used this sort of, this poverty of her being, having to deal with something that she really couldn't deal with. She was overwhelmed by the idea of cancer and surrendered, it's okay, I need something more. So she asked me, what novena should I do? And I suggested to St. Therese of LaSue, novena, you know, pray to her. And she liked that because it came with the promise that at some point you're going to get a rose. And she wanted a sign from God that God was going to hear her prayers. So they scheduled her surgery. She had colon cancer, they were going to remove the tumor. I drive up from Michigan, she starts her novena nine days before her surgery. We get up there for a couple of days to be with her, to come for her, to pray with her. And then we go to the hospital, she checks in. And the night before her surgery, I'm alone with her in a room. And I'm talking with her and praying with her. And I wrap up praying with her and I said, Mom, it's going to be all right, God has got this, you've got to believe. Just trust.  And she goes, well, I've been praying this novena, John, and I did not get my rose. You know, and what do you say in those moments? Like, my mom is just, this is her first toe in the water of Catholic devotion. And I don't want to crush her. And I don't want to dissuade her from believing that God is going to, you know, fulfill his promise that he's heard her prayers. It's going to be all right. So I just say something. I'm, I'm scrambling here. Like, so I'm like, well, Mom, the signs are to affirm our faith, but our faith comes from Jesus. You know, all this is coming from the Lord and His grace. And you believe that He heard your prayer and you believe. So even if you don't get the rose, you can put your faith in Jesus that He's heard your prayer. And let me tell you, brothers, she was not satisfied with that answer. Not a bit. She just, okay. So I kissed her good night. They were going to wake her up at five in the morning, prep her for surgery, go in for surgery around six. Surgery was going to take a couple of hours, a couple hours of recovery, around one, one 30 in the afternoon. They said she should be out of the effects of her anesthesia. You can go in and talk with her. So they do the surgery. Everything goes smoothly. Early afternoon, we walk into her room to be with her. And she's sitting there in bed kind of groggy. And on the train in front of her is her glass of water and another glass with a rose in it. And I'm like, mom, you got a rose. She goes, yes, yes. So this is what she said that night before her surgery, the Lord, you know, she was praying and she gets wake, she, they wake up at five in the morning. This nurse comes in to put an IV in her arm. And it was a younger nurse and the nurse could not find a vein in my mom's arms. Like she tried five times to find the vein and missed every time. And on the fifth attempt ended up sticking my mom in the tendon with a needle. And my mom was in tears. And the woman's very apologetic. She goes, let me get another nurse. I'm sorry. I don't know why I can't do this this morning. The other nurse comes in and my mom's like, please, you know, just, I feel awful. My arm is killing me. Please do a good job. Just find the vein. And the nurse is like, don't worry about it. I find the vein first time every time. No problem.  And the nurse is like, it's not a trick. When I go to do a procedure, especially where I have to poke a patient or any kind of instrument on them, I always pray to my guardian angel to guide my hand. And the guardian angel always helps me.  And the one was like, you don't. And my mom was like, I don't even know. I didn't even know I had a guardian angel. She's like, everyone has a guardian angel. God gives you a special angel to watch over and guide you no matter where you go, to strengthen you, to pray for you, to give you assistance. And my mom's like, really? She goes, yeah, I've been praying to my guardian angel for years. In fact, I was praying one time, I asked God to show me, to tell me what was the name of my guardian angel so I could talk to my guardian angel with its name. And my mom's like, really? She goes, yeah. Well, what's your guardian angel's name? And the nurse goes, it's Rose. And my mom's like, and the nurse is like, what? You know, and she's like, well, I've been waiting for this sign. I think your guardian angel being named Rose is the Rose I've been waiting for because I've been praying this Navina to St. Therese Lissue. And the woman is wrapped up. She's got the IVM, first time, went in smoothly. My mom's all ready. And she goes, I'll be right back. She leaves for a few minutes, comes back and gives my mom this Rose. And my mom's like, it's like 5.30 in the morning. Where did you get a Rose at 5.30 in the morning? And the nurse explains, she goes, well, at seven o'clock I get off my shift. I'm going to go pick up my daughter and take her to the airport. She's flying to Florida, but she hates to fly. So every time she flies, I give her two roses. One for her guardian angel and one for mine. But today, when I was at the florist shop, the Lord just told me to buy a third Rose. And I didn't know why, but now I do. Here you go. And my mom, that moment of God intervening and working at such power just broke open my mom's heart. This sign, this wonder, this miracle, broke open my mom's heart. All of a sudden, she was hungry to know everything she could about Mary and the saints. And she wanted more of this. And as it were, I was right across the street at the hotel I was staying at from a Catholic bookstore. So I went and got a statue, you know, a medal, a couple of books. I gave her the St. Therese LaSue starter pack. I said, here you go, mom. Dive in. So she started to learn everything she can about St. Therese LaSue and her faith just takes off. And then the cancer went to her lungs. And she had surgery to remove one of the lobes in her lungs. And it went to her spine. And there was nothing they could do about the cancer there. Then it showed up in her liver, then her other lung, and then her kidneys, and then her ribs. And after seven years and four rounds of chemotherapy, there was nothing more that she could do that they could do. And but because of what God had done with my mom, I too doubled down on my devotion to Mary. I made it a vow like because of what St. Therese LaSue had done for my mom and awakening her faith and being her strength throughout these seven years.  She was all in in a way that I had hoped she would have been all her life, but I seemed so impotent to be able to lead her to. And the night before she died, I was with her again.  And I'm like, Mom, that's beautiful. She goes, how does that work? I'm like, well, Christ has through his suffering has made suffering a beautiful thing that has the power to transform that when we unite our suffering with his, it brings about real grace in the lives of those we pray for. She goes, oh, that's awesome. Then she asked me like, because I told you, will it still work? And I'm like, Mom, it's not a birthday wish. Okay, it's you've been offering up your suffering. It works. Believe me, it works. And my mom passed away on Christmas Eve in just a very beautiful, peaceful way. A month and a half after my mom passed away, I went up to go be with my dad, drove up from Ohio to Michigan. And while I was there, my brother Chris calls me up. John, I'm struggling. I was not prepared, you know, because my dad was a funeral director and he sold his business to my brother Chris. So my brother Chris was actually the one that had to do all the preparations for my mom's funeral. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. And he was just an emotional wreck. And he calls me up and he says, can I just talk with you? So he comes up to my dad's house and we start talking. And all of a sudden this door opens up and I'm starting to share who Jesus is to me. The confidence I have in God and the grace that gives me peace and strength. And he says, I need that. I said, let's pray. I ended up praying over him for 20 minutes. Come Holy Spirit, praying in tongues. I mean, I went for it. I didn't just like, okay, God, bless my brother. I'm like, we're going for it. God, just show your love, reveal your love. Come Holy Spirit. I'm praying in tongues and just pray. He had this massive conversion.  He's taken them all to a Steubenville conference.  He's been teaching confirmation, teaching these young people about the Holy Spirit. He became a Eucharistic minister. Like all these great things are happening in his life. My brother might came back to the church. My sister, who was twice divorced and felt like she had lost all hope in God, came back to the church, went to confession for the first time in like 15 years. Like all the things that my mom said she wanted to see happen, started to happen. And I realized that when I saw this, I got more invested in, in, in following the, the example of our blessed mother and praying into that. And when my son was in the hospital and after, after everything had happened, he was miraculously raised from the dead and completely healed. I remember going to the Lord and saying, Lord, why are you blessing me like this? I don't deserve this. You're so wonderful. And he said to me, John, do you know all those times you got out of bed and prayed? Yeah. And you didn't feel anything? Yeah. I was preparing you. Remember all those times when you were praying and, and, and just, you know, you didn't think I was listening or you didn't sense that I was doing something? Yeah. I was preparing you. And what the Lord let me know is that there's never been a time in my life when I've wasted any prayer, every prayer that I ever prayed, God was using that to bring about his good in my life, unawares to me. And I think that sometimes that's the way the world works because if we start to say, okay, God is praying or I'm praying and God is doing this, we put more stock in our own ability to pray. And we grab onto it and like, this is what I've done. I've given myself hope through my prayer. And all I can do is say, I surrendered over and over again and stayed faithful to prayer. And God gave me something that I could never get there on my own. He did this miracle inside of me. When I prayed for my mom, I wanted my mom to live. If I would have said, God, I'm only going to pray for my mom to be healed of cancer, she would not have gone through the radical transformation that she went through. And God used that to bring about the conversion of my siblings. But this is how God does it. Our virtues are formed in the fire of trial and in the practice of godly habits, where we ask the fire of the Holy Spirit to conform our wills to the will of the father. Listen to what St. Paul writes in Romans chapter five. Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So first we put our faith in Jesus Christ.  I put my faith in you and you alone. It goes on to say, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. Peter, Sister Mary, I'm all talk about the grace, this need to stand in grace. Even if that's all we can do as K, Lord, I stand where I receive grace. I will put myself in a place where I can receive grace because grace is enough. And we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings. Knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Like this is the process. We put our faith in Jesus. We endure our sufferings. We place our confidence in God. This produces the character and the virtue of hoping us. And it goes on to say, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. This is how God works. The trials and tribulations of this last year, God has been using it to prepare you for what's coming next to rise up with confidence in boldness. Romans chapter 8, verse 28, is the most audacious piece of scripture. It says, we know that all things work together for good for those who love God who are called according to His purpose. So if I love God and I'm called and doing His will, all things will work for my good. That's hard to believe. But if this isn't true, then none of it's true. We need to stake our lives on that singular idea that no matter what, if we love God and stake and feel called to His purpose and stay in that, that all the things that happen in our lives will work for good. I stand before you as a witness of that singular reality. If I have nothing else to say, I've endured with God, and He's made so many things in my life that seemed hopeless work for my good and the good of those I love. And He's still doing it. He's still producing the fruit of all the things that I've had to endure. Because what I didn't share is in between my mom, my mom dying of cancer, my son's accident, I had to walk with a year with my own wife with cancer, which brought its own share of struggles and challenges. But through it all, the one anchor that I've had in my life is prayer. If Jesus Christ is the anchor of our hope, if that's where we place our hope, and He is the anchor of our lives, then prayer is that chain that keeps us connected to the anchor. What good is it to throw your anchor overboard in the storm if you don't have a solid chain connecting you to that anchor? It won't do you any good. You need to be connected to Christ. We need to be praying. Being rooted in Christ is the source of all hope. This is why Jesus Christ in John chapter 15, Jesus uses the words abide nine times in that one chapter. We need to remain in Christ, abide in Him, live in Him. If we're not abiding in Christ, if we're not rooted in Christ, then we will not have the living hope that St. Peter talked about in his first epistle when he says, bless be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By His great mercy, He has given us a new birth into a living hope, not a conceptual idea that, hey, there's a God that might make it all work out in the end, but a living presence in our soul. Hope is alive in me because Jesus Christ is alive in me, and He is my living hope. And it happens through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. The strength of the church as witness in the world may be fading, and it may be defiled by the sins of men, but our hope in Jesus Christ is unblemished, imperishable, and unfading in the midst of that. As I was praying this morning, I thought of all my years of youth ministry, and I used to say to the young people, don't let anyone say that you're too young, as one of St. Paul's calls to Timothy.  God is not done yet. All that He's done in your life has gotten you to this point is preparing you for what's next, and it's not defeat. It's not being overcome because we overcome by what? The blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony that God is alive in us, and we need to proclaim that to everyone and to one another that Jesus Christ is alive, and we need to fight for and strengthen our prayer no matter what. Satan is convinced that if he can get you to stop praying, he can destroy every part of you, and so he will do whatever it takes to pull you from the arms of Jesus. The enemies in war know that the first thing that you need to do if you want to take out your enemies is disrupt their communication systems, tear down their towers, find out where their base of operations are and how they're talking, or if they have one of these code machines, the enigma machine back in World War II that the Germans used, we need to crack that. We got to figure out how they're talking to one another. If we can crack, you know, and Satan knows us, if he can crack or disrupt our communication with the Lord, then the living hope that sustains us and strengthens us will be diminished, perhaps even lost, and this is why we got to cling to our relationship with Jesus, cling to Christ no matter what. He's living hope and understand that we're not going to put our heart on a desired outcome. And I'm not saying that we don't have goals and we don't have plans because God uses those as a mold, as a template, as a way of creating things. Our plans are important because we create like a form, you know, they ever try to pour cement. The first thing that they do is they build the form that the cement's going to be poured into because if you don't have that in place and the cement comes, it just goes everywhere. And you don't get anything good, you just get a big mess. So yes, you need to have a pastoral plan. You need to prepare. You need to be looking and listening to the Lord and saying, what dimensions, how deep, how wide, how big, show me, build it, and then let the Lord pour into it His grace because the strength of our ministry is not the frame work that God creates for us to build upon or to build within, but the living hope, the living grace, that's the cement that hardens into something lasting and enduring. But that frame means to be empty, to be filled. And in the same way, even as we plan and we prepare, we listen and we build for God, we need to be empty in ourselves so that when the grace, the real stuff that's going to make the church renewed is poured in, there's places for it to go. And it doesn't just run amuck, but it runs down the channels that God wants us to be using to channel His grace to where the church needs it. We need to be in prayer. We need to be listening to God. We need to be saying, how do you want to renew your church? Because I don't have anything within me to renew the church, to be unashamed and unafraid to admit our own poverty. To see ourselves as we truly are, hanging naked on the cross with Christ saying, Lord, I have nothing. Everything's exposed. Apart from You, I am nothing. Apart from You, I can do nothing. But Your grace is enough because I don't put my hope in anything that I can see, anything that I can smell and touch, anything that I can taste or hear. I put my faith, my hope in You, Christ, in the things unseen. I want to conclude with these words. David loved the Lord. He had such zeal for the Lord, such a powerful, loving zeal for the Lord. And he desired nothing more than to build God a temple, a temple worthy of God. And I think that's what we all want deep in our hearts, is we want the church to reflect the glory of God. We want to see God's glory restored on this earth. It breaks our heart the way people mock Jesus, diminish Jesus, and everything that we hold dear being dragged through the mud. But it wasn't for David to build the temple. David had complete confidence in the Lord, but the Lord said to him, look, you are not going to build my temple. You're going to have to pass that task on. So he passed that task on to his son Solomon. But David was very clear with his son. He's like, look, I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you with these words. And this is one of the first chronicles.  For the Lord searches every mind and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you. But if you forsake him, he will abandon you forever. Take heed now for the Lord has chosen you to build a house as the sanctuary. Be strong and act. David further said to his son Solomon, be strong and of good courage and act. Do not be afraid or dismayed for the Lord God. My God is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you until all the work for the service of the house of the Lord is finished. Brothers, I just want you to know the Lord is not done encouraging you and strengthening you, building you up. The sun is not setting on your life.  Do not be afraid. Serve him with a single mind and a willing heart. That's all we have. Let's fix our hearts upon the Lord. Love him above all things and be willing to do whatever it takes, whatever the Lord asks us. Not expecting anything, but to hear the words of the Lord say, well done, good, and faithful servant. To please him and not please ourselves and in all ways giving him the glory. Let's pray.


Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the Kube's ecosystem partners. Well everyone, welcome back to our exclusive coverage from theCUBE here in Austin, Texas. We're live on the floor at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, KubeCon, like KubernetesCon, not the KubeCon us, but KubeCon. We have Michelle Norelli, who's the senior software engineer at Microsoft, also the co-chair with Kelsey Hightower, great event, record-setting attendance. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Michelle, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. So people don't know, but they might've watched the stream. If you had a stream, you were on stage, keynoting and managing the whole program here. Congratulations. Thank you. More attendees here at this event than all the other KubeCon and CloudNativeCon combined. Chose the growth and interest in a new way to develop, new way to engage with other developers and create value. And Kubernetes has been the heart of it. Explain, CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, what's the difference? Because I love CloudNative, but what's this Kubernetes thing? I love that, too. How does it relate to the intertwined explain? Take a minute to explain. There's a really big Kubernetes audience and community and they need time to engage and just work with each other and learn from each other. And that's where KubeCon came from. So KubeCon was the original conference. And the first one was in November in Seattle in 2016. And I was actually at that one, there's a few hundred people. And it was just so small. People were actually asking like, what is the pod? What is Kubernetes? Which are fine questions asked today as well. But it was everyone was asking this question. Nobody was past that point. And then Kubernetes was donated to the CNCF and there were also these other CloudNative projects that came about in the space. And so we wanted a conference that encompasses both all of the CloudNative projects as well as serves the Kubernetes community as well. So that's where both of them came from. Some of the other CloudNative projects have their own conferences like Prometheus has PromCon. And that's been growing as well. I think the last one was 200 people up from 70 the last time. So I got to ask you because we've been covering us. We were there at the KubeCon. I was actually having drinks with Luke Tucker, J.J. We're like, hey, we should do this Kubernetes thing and bolt it on to the Linux foundation. So we've been present at creation with the whole team. It's been fun to watch. Wow, yeah. But it's the tale of two stories in the community in the industry. Companies that got funded and were building open source and our participants who were building projects out and a new onboarding of new developers coming into the community. A lot of first timers here. Seeing a visibility into the success of Cloud and they're regal and engaged. So you got a lot of folks who have invested into the community and new entrants, a migration into the community. What does that dynamic mean to the CNCF? How is that impacting how you structure the programming? And what are some of the insiders talking about? What's the reality? Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, this is a really positive community and there are just like so many people working together and collaborating, not just because they, I mean, it's nice to be in a positive community, right? But you kind of have to. Like these problems are really hard and it's good to learn from different organizations that have like come across these projects or problems in the space before and they'll come and collaborate. I think some of the things that we've been talking about inside the community is how to actually, how to onboard people. So the Kubernetes community is starting up a new mentorship program to help people that are new to the community start learning how to review code and then PR code and be a productive members in the community and whatever area they want to be in. Michelle, I want to hear about kind of some of the breadth and depth of the community here.  There's a bunch of brand new projects. I think what it was four projects a year ago and it's now 14, you know, right. How does somebody supposed to get their arms around it? Should they be thinking about that? You know, where should somebody start? You know, what do you recommend? Yeah, start with the, that's a great question by the way. I think that people should start with a solution to a problem they already have. So just know that people have run into these problems before and you should just go into the thing that you know about first. And then if that leads you to a different problem and there's a solution that the CNCF, you know, has already come across, then you can go into and dive into other problems for example. I am really interested in Kubernetes and have been in that space. But I think tracing is really interesting too and I want to start learning how to incorporate that into my workflow as well. So, yeah. So Michelle, you're also one of the diversity chairs for the event. Can you talk about kind of the diverse global nature of this community? Yeah, we're spread across all time zones. So I actually want to share an experience that I have as a sick lead in Kubernetes. So at first I really wanted to serve all of the time zones and so we have these weekly sick meetings at 9.30 a.m. Pacific. And I was like, no, maybe we should have like alternate meetings, like alternate weekly meetings for other time zones. But after talking to those, the people in the other time zones like, that are very far off actually like China, Asia Pacific, I realized that they're actually more interested in reading notes and watching videos, which is something I didn't actually know. You know, it's, you think like, oh, you have to serve every community in the same way. But what I've learned- Like face to face. Yeah, face to face, exactly. And that's not actually how, that's not how actually everybody wants to interact. And so that's been an interesting thing I've learned from the diverse nature in this space. What's the challenges? I mean, we've been talking, we were just at the re-invent last week at Amazon, obviously the number of services that they're rolling out is pretty strong, and they're the leader in the cloud. But as multi-cloud becomes the choice for most enterprises and businesses, the service requirements, the baseline, has got to be established. Seeing your community rolling out a lot of great new services. But storage, old storage is transferring to machine learning and AI. And you got IoT right around the corner. So you have new kinds of applications. Yeah. It's changing the game on the old guard. Storage and security, obviously two important areas. You got to store the data. Data is at the card of the value proposition. And then security, security. How are you guys dealing with those challenges? Those are political grounds that people have a lot of money in.  Those are being disrupted. Yeah. I think they'll continue to be disrupted. I think people are just going to bring in more new and new use cases. And then people will come and meet them, meet those customers where they are. And people just have to change, I guess. Get used to it. Shift or die. Yeah, I think that we are getting to that point, but I can't, only time will tell. We'll see. What are some of the exciting things that you see from the new developers? I've recognized some friends here that aren't one year in the community or new. And they're kind of like looking at their shops like, wow, what a lot of excitement. I could build value and I could have a distribution. I got a community and I can make money. And then Dan said, project, products, profits. He put the profit motive right on the table, but he's clear to say not pay to play. It's okay to have profits if you have a good product from a project. I buy that. But the new developers like that because it's an end scoreboard. What are you guys doing with that new community? What's the vibe there around those kinds of opportunities? You guys creating any programs for them or? Yeah. I think just to just, they can get involved. I think knowledge is power. Perspective is power also. So being involved helps give you a perspective to see where those gaps are and then come up with those services that are profitable or those tools that are profitable. And I think this space can be very lucrative based on the number of people here. It was a 20 sponsors, I think he said. Michelle, I was wondering if you can comment when you're building the schedule, how do you balance all those platinum sponsors versus some of the practitioner companies that are also getting involved? How do you look at that? Yeah, there are different levels of sponsorship, like you mentioned. The events team has a sponsorship section or a sponsorship team and they handle most of placing sponsors and all of that. And so they'll get whatever level they want. But actually Kelsey and I do a lot of research into what's happening in the community, what's interesting, what's new, and we'll find time to highlight that as well. Lots of research. What's your role at Microsoft? Share with the audience, what are you working on? What's your day-to-day job? Is it just foundation work? Are you doing coding? What are you coding? What's your favorite? The VIE, Max, what do you prefer? I mean, share some. That's awesome. Yeah, so my work is 30% community and 70% engineering. I really love engineering, but I also really love the community and just getting these opportunities to give back, you know, build skills as well, learning how to speak in front of people as well. These are valuable skills to learn and it gives me an opportunity to just give back what I've learned. So I appreciate those. But I mostly work on developer tools that are open source that help people use containers and Kubernetes a little more easily. So I work on projects like Helm, Drafts, and Brigade. And these are just like things that we've seen, the pain points that we've experienced and we want to kind of share our solutions with them. So Draft is the one I've been working on a lot. Have you heard of Draft? No. Okay. Let me give you the two second thing. Draft is a tool for application developers to build containerized apps without really understanding or having to understand all of what is Kubernetes and containers. So that's my favorite space to be in. You know, one of the things we look at coming in here is there's that balance between, there's complexity, but there's flexibility. You know, I've heard Kelsey talking about this a lot. When I talk to customers, they're like, oh, I love Kubernetes because I take Vault and I take Envoy and I take all these different things and put together and it does what I want. But a lot of people are daunted and they say, oh, I want to just go to Microsoft Azure and they'll take care of that. So how do you look at that? And what is the balance that we should be looking for as an industry? Yeah, we've been emphasizing in the community a lot on plugability across projects. It's like a theme that I think almost every project hits and a word that you'll hear a lot. I'm sure you already have heard a lot. And I think that's because you can't meet everyone's needs. So you build this modular component that does one thing very well and then you learn how to extend it and or you give people the ability to extend it. And so that's really great for scaling a project. I do really appreciate the clouds coming out, all of them, with their own managed services because it's hard to operate and understand all of these things. It takes a lot of depth and knowledge, context and just prior experience. And so I think that'll just make it a lot easier for people to onboard onto these technologies. I was going to ask you. I was going to ask you to write up plugability. So we saw Netflix on stage was this phenomenal, love the culture dynamic. I think that's a super important conversation. We've been talking about style change as a real part of what we're seeing tech being a part of. But the things that popped out at me in the keynote were service mesh and pluggable architecture. So I want to get your thoughts for the folks that aren't that in the trenches and inside the ropes. What is a pluggable architecture and what is a service mesh these days? Because you got Lyft and Uber and all these great companies who have built hyperscale and large scale systems in open source and now are big tech success stories donating these kinds of approaches. Plugable architectures and service mesh. Take a minute to explain. So pluggable architectures. This is when you have one layer of your, there's a piece of software that does something, does one thing very well.  And so you may have some workflow or need that is specific to your company. And so we shouldn't limit you to just what we think is the right solution to a problem. We should allow you to extend or extend these pieces of software with modular components or just extensible components that work for you. Does that make a little bit more sense, yeah? I work on Hellman. We also have a pluggable architecture because we were just getting so many requests from the community and it didn't make sense to put everything in the core code base. If we accepted one thing, it would really just interrupt somebody else's workflow. So that's helped us a lot. And in my personal experience, I really like pluggable architectures. So that means you can go build a really kick butt app, nail it down for your specifications, but decouple it from a core or avoiding kind of the old spaghetti code mindset, but kind of creating a model where it can be leveraged. That right, plug in, we all know what plugins are. So that someone else could take advantage of it. Exactly, yeah. Service mesh, that's evolved, we've heard a lot of that. What is that? Yeah, so developers, this is actually, the Lyft story is really interesting to me. So at Lyft, developers were really uneasy about moving from the monolith to the microservices architecture just because they didn't really understand the network component and where network reliability would not be so reliable, would fail. And so, service meshes have allowed engineers at Lyft to understand where their failures happen and in terms of a network standpoint. And so you're basically abstracting the network layer and allowing more transparency into it. This is very useful for when you have lots of microservices and you want this kind of reliability and stability. Awesome, so 1.9 is coming, it's going to support Windows. That's the key announcement, congratulations. Just going to the next level, I mean, growth. Talk about the growth because it's fun for us to watch kind of a small group core, young community, less than three years old, really two, Kubernetes kind of had some traction, but it really is going to be commoditized and that's not a bad thing. So what's your take on this and what's the vibe? What's the current feeling inside the community right now? Excited, pinching ourselves? Yeah, no, I think everybody is in awe. And we're just like, we want to make this the best experience possible in terms of an open source experience. We want to welcome people to the community, we want to serve people's needs and we just want to do a good job because this is really fun and I think the people working on these problems are having a lot of fun with seeing this kind of growth and support. It's been great, certainly for us, President and creation of this whole movement, it's been fun to watch a document. Final question, what should people expect this week, what is the show going to hopefully do, what's your prediction, what's your purpose here, what should people expect this week and the folks that didn't make it, what did they miss? Okay, there are so many things happening, it's insane, you're going to get a little bit of everything, there's lots of different tracks, lots of diverse content. I think when I go to conferences, in my personal experience, I really love technical salons. Those are really great because you can get your hands dirty and you can get questions answered by the people who created the project. That's an experience that is really powerful for me. I went to the first open tracing salon and that's where I kind of got my hands dirty with tracing and Ben Siegelman, who's doing the keynote today this afternoon, was the person who was teaching me how to do this stuff, so. How cool is that? Yeah, it was awesome. It's not like some marketing fluff pitch. No, it's not and it's just like, it's real experienced, very expert, like experts in the space teaching you these things. So that definitely can't be replicated, I think. The SIG sessions will be really cool. There's a big focus on not just learning stuff, but also collaborating and just talking about things before they get documented. So that's a really good experience here too. And it's an action-packed schedule. I tweeted that. It feels like when Burning Man had like 100 people and now it's this big thing. I think this is the beginning of an amazing industry. People are cool, they're helpful, they're getting involved, answering questions. Open book here at Cloud NativeCon. You've got thanks, Michelle. You're really becoming my co-chair, senior engineer at Microsoft. Great to have her on the Cube. Great keynote, great color, great fun. Exciting times here at Cloud NativeCon. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media with Stu Miniman, my co-host. More live coverage after this short break.


The University of Pikeville will be holding its third Bear the 99 5k run on March 5th. Tuesday we spoke with President of UPI alumni association Kay Hammond about the event. I'm so excited to announce about our race Bear the 99. It's the 5k race of course you can walk or you can run and it's going to be held here at UPI on March the 5th. Restoration will start at 8 a.m and of course we'll start the race then at 9 and you can register two different ways. I have it wrote down here but if you're going to register in person or before the race you would go to apttiming apttiming.com Bear the 99. At Pikeville Medical Center we believe that together we can make a difference in the fight against cancer. We are proud to have patients who have experienced successful outcomes over many years. As always we believe in the power of faith. Pikeville Medical Center where cancer can be defeated. Also included if runners choose they can run virtually as well. Hammond continues to say that funds from the 5k will go towards their many scholarship programs and afterward we spoke with students about what the scholarship program means to them. So these scholarships really do help for people that are farther away they allow us a chance to come here you know without UPI I wouldn't have a great job that I'm going to get when I graduate I wouldn't get to go to Washington DC and do the Washington Center seminar that Dr. Cade puts on here so these scholarships really do help allow us the opportunity to come to come farther away from home and you know just really get to meet meet good people meet good professors and continue playing you know the game we love which is baseball so these scholarships allowed me to come from Georgia all the way out here to UPI get a different environment from Atlanta which I'm used to so I'm very thankful that these scholarships have allowed me to come out here and pursue my dreams. To register you can visit UPI.edu keyword bear the 99 or call<PHONE_NUMBER>. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Horgell.


I'll be looking at the issue of remittance receipts by households in Ghana, and specifically looking at how they are distributed, and also the impact that these remittances have on these households investment in basic education. So by investment in basic education, well, in terms of the variable that we use, we construct a variable which is an aggregation of all spending on children who are in basic school. That is from primary one to junior secondary school three. So primary one to GHS three. By now, we are all familiar with the importance of remittances, its role in the development of developing countries. And this is attested to by the growth in various services relating to remittances, especially relating to international remittances. Now, we think that it's important for us to explain what you mean by remittances in our context. By remittances, we are referring to a cash or in-kind transfer from one household to another, and for which no direct or explicit repayment is required. So from the data set, we made sure that we were stricken ourselves to those transfers that meet these criteria. And those were the majority of transfers anyway from household to household. Clearly, it's important to know the impact of remittances. There's often the perception that remittances are often used for consumption purposes without much of it going into the investment decisions of the recipients. So this is an attempt to look at the impact of remittances on a component of human capital being education of children. These are our research questions. The first one simply looks at the distribution of remittance receipts.  And then the third one is basically a look at the implications of the first two, the responses of the answers to the first two questions on welfare distribution in Ghana. A lot of work has been done on remittances. And for the purpose of this paper, I think the relevant ones are those to do with the impact of remittances. Now, there have been various studies on the impact of remittances on various aspects of well-being, right? There are some that look at the impact of remittances on well-being as projected by consumption expenditure, pay adult equivalent. There are those that look at the impact of remittances on agricultural productivity, or also on education. Now, in terms of the impact of remittances on education, a lot of these have looked at the impact on schooling, right, in terms of schooling and remain to attendants. And for Ghana specifically, two papers, two papers of notes that I want to mention are those by DiMabrim Pona Seidu and also by Pigbone. Now, DiMabrim Pona Seidu used GLSS data. They used a number of the waves of the GLSS data sets and employed a pseudo-panel approach to look at the impact of remittances on investment in education. But they proxied investment in education by schooling and remain to attendants. Pigbone proxied investment in education by schooling, by expenditure on schooling, but they focused on this one region of Ghana, the northern region. I think they collected, I don't really remember the source of their data, but I don't think they used the GLSS, that the Ghana Living Standards Survey. For this paper, we employed data from the most recent wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, which is the 2012-2013 data set. And in terms of methodology, for the first research question, we'll simply employ descriptive statistics to look at the remittance receipts as well as remittance sizes. And we'll look at various categories of households and how these differ amongst these households. The second research question, which has to do with the analysis of the impact of remittances on investment in basic education, is carried out by employing counterfactual framework. And I'll just quickly describe it in a more generic sense, because we adapted this depending on the particular flavor of the impact of remittances that we looked at. I will explain that soon. So essentially, this begins with a specification of an education expenditure equation. And then we divide the sample into two, right? A sample of households who receive remittances and households who do not receive remittances. Then using these subsamples of households, we then estimate the education expenditure for these different households. So essentially, we estimate an education expenditure, sorry, an education expenditure regression for a remittance recipient scenario and also one for a non-recipient scenario. With this, we are then able to estimate for each household, right? What that household's education expenditure would have been in a situation where that household were to receive remittances and also in a scenario where that household does not receive remittances. And then using the treatment effects literature, we are then able to calculate the average treatment effects on those who actually receive remittances. That's the 8080 and also the average treatment effects for all households irrespective of their remittance received status. Now, we also employ the propensity score matching approach to do something very similar. Very briefly, this is the equation of the regression, the outline that we used for the expenditure on education regression. Essentially, a very simple regression. On the left-hand side, we have the mean average spending on basic education. So for each household, we calculated the amount of money that that household spent on all those, on all children of basic schooling each, who are actually in school. And so I think I've already explained what follows. So for each household, we are able to identify the, an estimate of its spending on basic schooling in a scenario where that household receives remittances and also in a scenario where that household does not receive remittances. Now, regarding the receipt of remittances and the expenditure on basic education, some random and descriptive statistics are shown on this slide. Now, there are various ways of categorizing households, right, in terms of their remittance received status. We find it useful to look at essentially four categories of households. Households that receive domestic remittances only. Then households that receive international remittances only. And then households that receive both forms of remittances. And then finally, households who do not receive any remittance at all. And these are the percentages. I was a bit surprised by these. I thought that probably some of them will be higher than they actually are. But it turns out that about 32% of households in Ghana receive remittances. And of these, they by far the dominant group, right, is those households that receive domestic remittances only. And a very small percentage receive only foreign remittances. And even a much smaller percentage receives both domestic and foreign remittances. And the third column, we see the average expenditure of these households on basic education. Right. Now this particular table shows the mean amounts of remittances received. Now the means here calculated over those who actually receive the remittances, right? So, well, of course the fourth category of households those who do not receive remittances are even if I'm here, right? You're just interested in the mean remittances received. Now we see that the highest in terms of mean amount of remittances received, right? Is those who receive foreign remittances only, right? Followed by those who receive both foreign remittances and domestic remittances, right? I think it's quite clear from this table that, yes, even though the receipt of domestic remittances is by far the most common, in terms of magnitude, right? The receipt of international remittances is the most important. And for the whole country, the mean remittances received by all households that receive remittances is 848.4, basically 848.5 Ghana cities per year. Now, this chart throws further light on the percentages of households that receive remittances. And what we've done here is we look at the percentages of households that receive remittances across various income quintals. And we deducted from the various household incomes, the amount of remittances that these households receive because the income variable has also remittances as part of it. So we deducted the remittances received from the income, from the incomes of the various households and then we generated these quintals. And we can see that, well, between the receipt of domestic remittances and foreign and international remittances, clearly, as there's a confirmation that the receipt of domestic remittances is by far the more common one. And you see that very low percentages of households across the quintals receive international remittances. And this is a similar chart for the mean amount of remittances received across quintals. Now, these are exactly the two. Now, we can see that basically there's a reversal, right? When it comes to the mean amount of remittances received, is the receipt of international remittances that's most important, but when it comes to just the percentages is the receipt of domestic remittances. Since I'm running out of time, let me just look at the results of the impact evaluation of remittance receipts here. I've already described generically the approach. What I show here is the results from essentially two approaches. The going by status and module in status, the invest probably to weighted regression adjustment approach and also the propensity score matching approach. In a nutshell, for the impact of remittance receipt on households investment in basic education, there isn't evidence that there's an impact, right? And then for the impact of, so we look at that and we also look at the impact of the receipt of domestic remittances only on households investment in basic education. And we see that over here too, there isn't a favorable impact. Actually, the results suggest that there might be even a slight negative impact. But in terms of the impact of receipt of international remittances only on households investment in basic education, we see that the results are quite strong, suggesting that there is a considerable favorable impact of the receipt of international remittances only on investment in schooling in basic education. For some reason, well, we couldn't get any outdated generated and error message. So we couldn't get any results for the propensity score matching one. But I think that the main story doesn't change. To conclude, we note four main points that there appears to be very little effects on investment in basic education if we are looking at the receipt of remittances in general. However, once we take into account the receipt of international remittances, we get a slightly, we get a different picture. But we have to note that those who receive international remittances are very small percentage, but nevertheless, it's very important in influencing investments in basic education. This strongly suggests that there's an opportunity for enhancing Ghana's human capital right through migrant remittances, especially international remittances. Thank you.