First let me say that Mass was awesome yesterday. We get a lot of special events at the cathedral, and we never know what we will find when we get there. Yesterday, anticipation grew as we sat waiting in our pew and saw that there were people in habits milling around in the sanctuary… that’s always a good sign!
It turned out that we were blessed to have the Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit serving on the altar, and their pastor, Fr. Antony, presiding and giving a most excellent homily.
Their ministry has been such a blessing in the west valley of Phoenix, despite surviving the trial of an arson fire that burned their church building. You can read the story here!
I strongly encourage you to check out their website, Becomfire.faith, as well as their youtube channel Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit.
I spent the afternoon resting up for our big outing in the evening. Around 4:45 we headed out to get to the Phoenix Zoo by 5:30 for a private event showing of ZooLights. There were several companies that had reserved the whole zoo for their employees and families, and we had an absolute blast.
As I said, we arrived at 5:30 as the sun was setting and the lights were just becoming visible in the twilight. We stopped by the lakeside Garmin pavilion and grabbed some lighted flower-crowns, glow sticks, hot cocoa and treats from the dessert bar, then took a quick photo with the kids all together before sending them off two-by-two, making sure each pair had a phone for communications. Paul and I stuck together, so I handed my phone off to Efrain, and he happily explored on his own. He took several terrific pics while wandering, including the very cool cover photo of this blog post!
I got a couple nice pics of Paul, and he got one of me, and then a passing friend offered to take a pic of the two of us together with my camera, and one or two of them turned out well enough to include. My camera is tough to work with (especially in low light) if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m thankful to have these shots of us. The rest of the time my valiant hero pushed my chair around and stopped whenever I wanted to snap a photo, and he got a very good workout while I got about 400 photos. I even got to try a slow shutter and captured light trails of the carousel in motion! That was super fun.
Here’s my mega-gallery of ZooLights photos. Many thanks to Garmin for the tickets and great time!
