Godparents

Our now-college-age Godteens came over on Saturday for an afternoon of pizza and catching up. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Godparent program (is it unique to our diocese?), I'll elaborate.

Rather than have a classroom based high school CCD program, most parishes in our diocese have implemented the Godparent program. Teenagers of a parish can register regardless of whether they go to a public high school, Catholic high school, or homeschool although most registered students in our parish attend the Catholic high school. Each Wednesday evening, the students go to the home of a leader couple. The same leader couple has these students from the beginning of their freshmen year until the end of their senior year. There is a separate couple for each grade and in larger parishes, there are several couples per grade. At the beginning of the meeting, there is prayer, then a lesson, then social time and snacks. The meetings usually last an hour and a half.

Four years goes pretty quickly! We began with our group in the fall of 2002. They all graduated from high school in 2006. One young woman stayed back for an extra year of vocational training and then attended a community college. Two of our young women went to Creighton and another to Brandeis. One young man went to Notre Dame, another to UNL, and another joined the Marines and is currently in California awaiting his deployment to Afghanistan. After four years, we became attached to these people and began to think of these young men and women as our own. Even our own children--who were present for all meetings--ask for them regularly! We miss them and are glad when they are home and come to visit.

Cheers!