The Mouse Trap Story

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package..

What food might this contain? The mouse wondered - he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning : There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!

The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, ' Mr.Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me.' ' I cannot be bothered by it.'

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, 'There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!' The pig sympathized, but said, I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. 'Be assured you are in my prayers.'

The mouse turned to the cow and said 'There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!' The cow said, 'Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but it's no skin off my nose.'

So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house -- like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.

The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital , and she returned home with a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup's main
ingredient.

But his wife's sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.

The farmer's wife did not get well; she died. So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.

So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember -- when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one another.

Merry Christmas

CSS UCSI wishes you a...

Merry and Blessed Christmas 2008!!!

Apologies for the lack of posts, CSSUCSI.blogspot.com promises for an exciting New Year 09!

Always keep in mind...

Jesus is the REASON, for this SEASON!

Be prepared...

Hey everyone~!

CSS UCSI may have slowed down a little over the last month..but don't worry!

You wanna know why?

(ssssshhhh....)

Well, there's a surprise (your very own CSS Christmas present) coming your way!

What is it?

Well, if i tell you, it won't be a surprise anymore, right? :p

So just keep on checking the blog for more info within the next few days!!

The Greatest Story Never Told: Modern Christian Martyrdom

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (The Catholic Standard and Times) - Samuel Masih was a simple street cleaner. One day, while cleaning a garden in Lahore, the twenty-seven-year-old Pakistani Catholic was accused of deliberately piling garbage against the wall of a mosque. He was arrested and thrown in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured for his faith. While being treated for tuberculosis, which he contracted in prison, a police constable decided to earn a place in Janna’ (Paradise) by killing him with a brick-cutting hammer.

Thousands of miles away, on a beautiful mid-August day, thirty-two-year-old Fr. Jesus Adrian Sanchez was giving religious instruction at a school in the rural area of Chaparral (Tolima), Colombia. An armed man burst into the classroom, ordered him outside, and shot him dead.

Deep in the Brazilian rainforest, a seventy-three-year-old Sister of Notre Dame, Dorothy Stang, was used to living among people who wanted her dead. She had long been trying to protect peasant laborers from exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. One day, while walking to a meeting of poor farmers near the town of Anapu in the western Brazilian state of Parà, two armed men intercepted her on the path. She knew what they were there to do. Taking out her Bible, she began reading to them and, for a precious few minutes, they listened before opening fire. Sr. Stang was shot six times in the head, throat, and body.

These are only three of the more than 100 Catholics who bear the unique distinction of being the first martyrs of the twenty-first century. According to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the official martyrology contains the names of 132 Catholics who have died for the faith since 2001. But this is not a complete list. Its 2005 report acknowledges that there are “many more possible ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet whose deaths may never be reported.”

Dying for Christ seems almost surreal to most Westerners. We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. “Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.” The Bloodiest Century The secular West has been looking the other way for a very long time. Even the average church-going Christian is not likely to know that 45.5 million of the estimated 70 million Christians who have died for Christ did so in the last century.

For this reason, scholars such as Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, refer to the past century as one of the darkest periods of martyrdom since the birth of Christianity. These appalling numbers are what prompted Pope John Paul II to urge the faithful to do everything possible to recover the names and stories of these martyrs. “At the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become a Church of martyrs,” he wrote in his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente. “This witness must not be forgotten.”

He established a special Jubilee Year Commission on New Martyrs to collect these stories, which resulted in the publication of the names of more than thirteen thousand Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant martyrs of the faith.

...for full story, visit http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=30882&page=1