During the 26 September Living in Love Leader’s Gathering held outside Philadelphia, Ron and Kathy Feher presented the Living in Love Impact Award for 2015 to Dick and Stephanie Giba of Ann Arbor, MI. The wording of the award is as follows:
“For relentless courage, noble ambition, and tireless generosity empowering couples to live in love as authentic witnesses to the Theology of the Body”
Dick and Stephanie began the entire Living in Love program suite in Michigan on faith. They recruited the first Living in Love weekend West of the Allegheny Mountains single handedly without having experienced one themselves and immediately ran the Living in Love Every Day follow up course. The next year, they recruited 55 more couples for the second weekend and have given multiple weekends a year for the past 8 years in and around their parish. They have trained hundreds of mentors and presented more Living in Love retreats than any couple other than the Fehers.
Not content to stay at Chris the King in Ann Arbor, they spread Living in Love to neighboring parishes, the neighboring diocese of Detroit, and all the way up into the thumb and the Diocese of Saginaw. When appointed to the Diocesan Marriage Task Force, their presentation of the Living in Love suite won approval and gained access to parishes in the Lansing area. Dick and Stephanie have even reached across significant cultural barriers to the Chaldean Catholic Community and young Iraqi immigrants.
In spite multiple advanced degrees, Dick and Stephanie are disarmingly humble. They are irresistibly sincere, powerfully faith-filled, wise and generous. They epitomize the call of couples to be Sacrament in the Church. We praise and thank God for them today.
