Pastor's Corner - Fr. Bac-Hai Viet Tran
Greeting you with love and blessings from God.
How was your week? I am sure everybody had agreat time with the beautiful weather we have had for the last few days. Comparing to other places, we in New Orleans are still so blessed. Just two weeks ago right here in our city we suffered with flooding due to a lot of rain at one time and many places could not handle the drainage. Right around our St. Agnes area in Elmwood on Clearview water was so high I could not go to the gym to do my daily exercise. I had a good excuse for not doing what I was supposed to do that day. It took a while for the water to go down, but by the following day everything was clear again. In Slidell and Pearl River that was another story, they had a tornado and a lot of lightening. Pearl River had a lot of branches everywhere and Slidell had a lot of structural damage. A friend of mine who just finished his dream house in Slidell after two years of building and recently moved in had major damage to his new home. I and a few other friends were invited to have an open house with a blessing on that Sunday, and of course we had to cancel it because the lightening hit the electrical panel and caused his house to catch fire. He sent me pictures showing what happened after the lightening hit and it was a mess. Of course we had to cancel everything and we surely miss that big supper along with the house blessing. Well, now they have to deal with the insurance and I know what that is all about. At least they have insurance.
Well since we are talking about insurance, as you come into the church you can see for yourself on the left side of the church the scaffolding is up and on the parking lot side there is a beautiful trailer that is fenced off which will be the headquarters for the construction company to operate. This time they look very serious to me and that the job will be finished. As you can see in the picture they even included two bathrooms for their workers to use. The good news is they will not interfere with our worship. They said if they have to work overnight, they will do that also. The Construction Coordinator spoke to me and said they will try to finish before May 26th. So please pray for good weather to cooperate with them. And we will have a beautiful church roof again.
As we are dictating this Pastor Comment Cisco is working on installing our second A/C unit. Things are moving right along and our prayers are being answered. When these two jobs are finished then we will talk about how to repair the interior of the church later on. I will be very happy when they finish everything before my retirement. This is my dream come true. Alleluia!
Did you have a chance to see the total eclipse of this century? It was cloudy and rainy that day so I watched it on TV. The weatherman and scientists predict that something big will happen after this total eclipse, but I haven’t seen anything yet. They even predicted large earthquakes and tsunamis will happen on the West Coast.
Can you believe that we are already in the fourth week of Easter and the third week of April? And yes, we are definitely already in the Spring season, flowers blooming, even my lemon tree is bearing fruit now after 17 years laboring. Seeing is believing from the picture. We have about a dozen lemons that are growing. Please look very carefully, otherwise you will miss it.
While Spring season looks very beautiful many of us will suffer with that kind of beauty, sneezing, coughing, itchy eyes, itchy nose, itchy throat, etc., you name it, one way or the other we will catch it. Thank God I didn’t have the itchy throat this year, but my eyes were so itchy. The best way is praying to God that we have at least one rain shower to wash away all of the pollen in the air so that everyone can breath easily. But on the other hand we don’t want the kind of rain that will interfere with the process of our construction. So it is in God’s hands, there is nothing I can do.
Back to our parish, there will be many things happening in the next few weeks. We recently had First Confession last Wednesday, and we will have First Communion on May 5th. We also had a few CCD students who received their Confirmation last Tuesday with St. Rita Church. Since we had a small number of students we had to combine with another church. Congratulations to those who received this sacrament. Well, that’s all for this week. Take care of yourselves and others, always remember to be kind and nice to one another. Remember to be happy, healthy and keep smiling and don’t ever take life for granted. Remember chose to live a life that matters in God’s eyes. May God bless you and your family and as always, I love you. God Bless!
Fr. Bac-Hai
