Parishioners share personal stories to spread hope during Jubilee Year
When Joanne Giovanni felt drawn toward the Catholic Church, Father Bill Kempf offered her hope.
Joanne, a Lutheran at the time, met Father Kempf at a talent show, and he invited her to Mass at his parish the following week. He noticed she didn’t receive Communion and asked if she was Catholic.
“His response to me was, would you like to be? I would love to talk to you about that,” she said. “…I truly believe God puts people in your life and on your path exactly at the right moment, exactly the right time to get you exactly where He wants you to be.”
Joanne entered the Church, strengthening her faith alongside her husband, Larry, a cradle Catholic. They welcomed their son, born seven and a half weeks early; the day they came home from the hospital, her husband was laid off from his job.
A few days later, “there was a knock on the door, and some people from our parish were there with boxes in their arms, and they came in with baby diapers, baby food, blankets, clothes, baby bottles, anything you could possibly think a newborn baby would need, they brought it to us,” she said. “Some of the people we hadn’t even met yet came in with boxes of food — so much food, I don’t think we had to shop for like, months. We just stood there with our mouths open and tears in our eyes, because once again, God put the right people in our lives at the right moment when we were probably at one of our lowest points.”
Joanne is among several parishioners at Our Lady Queen of Peace in House Springs who are sharing their personal “stories of hope” during the Jubilee Year of Hope 2025. Parishioners at Our Lady Queen of Peace and St. Anthony of Padua in High Ridge, which share a pastor, are invited to share how they’ve seen God’s hope in their lives, and the recorded testimonies are posted online as a sort of mini podcast series.
When we hear how God is working in someone’s life, it inspires us, said Terry Ostlund, director of religious education, who spearheads the project.
“(It’s) just being able to make hope tangible in people’s lives,” Ostlund said. “I know that stories stir my heart when I hear them.”
Larry Giovanni told the story of how a near-car accident helped bring him back to the faith after several years away after college. Friends and family kept telling him the same thing: “God was really looking out for you,” he said, and that message prompted him to return to Mass.
Several years later, he saw an ad in the parish bulletin for an eighth grade Parish School of Religion teacher.
“Me teaching religion? It might as well have been an ad for a brain surgeon,” he said. “But as the week went along, the ad kept haunting me — teaching PSR might be something I could do. My faith is strong now, and having been a longtime youth coach for basketball and baseball, I think I can relate to early teens.”
After a couple of weeks of working up the nerve, he called and took the position.
“There’s a special feeling of joy knowing that in some way, I have helped the next generation in their hope as well as their journey of faith,” he said.
Jen Stark, a nurse and mother of two, shared how God has changed her life through a series of “micro-conversion events.”
“I have always been the girl content with being at the back of the class, quiet with my head down, getting what I needed to get accomplished done, and just letting others worry about themselves,” she said. “People knew I believed in Jesus, that I was Catholic and that I went to church. I shared that much, but that was about all.”
This past fall, that changed. She was helping plan a women’s Advent tea at the parish, and the planning team was searching for a speaker. She felt a tug on her heart: You could do that. She ignored it at first but then spoke up as she recognized the tug as the Holy Spirit.
“Public speaking is actually really hard for me. I get really nervous. My face turns red, and my voice and my hands shake,” she said. “But I know that God uses the unqualified to glorify His name.”
She prayed for God to give her the words she needed, and the event went well. She expected to feel relieved that it was over. “Instead, I was left feeling like, what’s next? How else can I share God’s message with people?”
She discovered a devotion to Mary and the Miraculous Medal soon after and has started looking for ways to share it with others and simply being open to talking about God with others.
“The hope for me is that others will just be drawn to God and living closer to Him and more in relationship with Him,” she said. “If I can share God with them in any way, that God will then take that and multiply it and just really work in their lives to bring them closer to Him.”
These personal testimonies are “so important” in bringing the hope of Jesus to others, said Father Tom Miller, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Peace and St. Anthony of Padua parishes.
“Tell me about how you have actually experienced God active in your life,” he said. “Where do you see God opening the door for you, or calling you, or sustaining you through a difficult period?”
To mark the Jubilee Year, Father Miller is also leading pilgrimages to three of the archdiocese’s designated Jubilee Pilgrimage sites, where Catholics can receive a plenary indulgence, or remission of the temporal punishment due to sins. Our Lady Queen of Peace and St. Anthony also made Pilgrims of Hope T-shirts bearing the message “Hope does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5).
“The great news of the Gospel is the hope that God gives us,” Father Miller said. “There is a meaning, purpose, direction and fulfillment to our life, and that is called Jesus Christ, and our hope is to come to know Him and then to trust Him in everything.”
