My name is Ekaterina and my connection with God has been a lifelong battle. Attending a Catholic primary school and going to church twice a week as a little girl was a weekly routine for me. As I grew older, things changed for me as I experienced different kinds of sufferings, heartaches and pain and started blaming God for everything that was happening and the most common questions I use to ask myself was "Why me?" "What have I done to deserve this?" I developed depression, anxiety. Medication and therapy was only a short term release for me and the battle went on for about 8 years.

By Kate Freeman

Hi, my name is Kate Freeman, I'm 19 and live in Sydney and this year I am serving on the Melbourne based Youth Mission Team. Before I attended a Youth Pilgrimage in Easter of 2009, I was an unhappy sixteen year old who harbored a lot of resentment toward the Catholic Church and doubted that God even existed. I was convinced that even if God was real, He didn't love me, because too many things had happened in my life which made me feel unloved and unlovable.

This testimony has been provided by Hon Marie Ficarra MLC, Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier of New South Wales. It was written during Advent 2011.

At this time of year we bring out our Nativity Scene, a tradition started by St Francis, patron saint of my parents' homeland Italy. The expressions of the ox, ass and sheep seem to portray in a special way the love of this wonderful saint. All the figures were hand carved from olives of ancient Palestinian lineage by poor Christians who are doing it hard, like so many religious people in the region where Our Saviour lived his earthly life. We reflected on their suffering last Sunday at an ecumenical prayer service commemorating the martyrdom of Egyptian Coptic Christians. Jesus was also in grave danger as a child and the Holy Family fled into exile for over 3 years in Egypt.

My name is Roby Curtis. I live in sunny Brisbane. I am 28 years old. I am a proud husband and father of four. I made a personal choice to follow Jesus 9 years ago and devote my life the work of the Church. There are 3 things in life that I am passionate about apart from my faith; my family, music and the poor of our nation.

By Fr Richard Healey

Strange things have been known to happen on a Sunday afternoon. I never expected that a simple action of standing up in front of a classroom full of other teenagers on that late-autumn day would have made such a difference in my life. But that day it did; that day I answered an invitation from the parish priest that if we were prepared to live for Jesus Christ, then we needed to do something about it; we needed to make that commitment public. After waiting for some time to build up the courage to do something, I stood up in front of my school friends and others who only days before I had barely known – and declared that I wanted to follow Jesus. Fr Gerard had insisted that we didn’t just say something vague, but that we made our commitment to the Lord as concrete as possible; so I said that I would follow Jesus through daily prayer, reading scripture and through attending Mass during the week as well as Sunday.