"My own personal, daily conversions happen in large part because of Blessed is She. I feel a great responsibility and honor to be given this ministry by the Lord. I feel a great responsibility to draw closer and closer to Him so that I can be the leader and woman He wants me to be," Guizar said.
Guizar recalls one of the first times she realized Blessed is She might become something bigger than she'd envisioned:
"It was getting close to Advent during our first year, and I thought I'd like to make a little prayer journal and offer it to our subscribers. I had no idea whether it would sell, I just created it in a computer program and self-printed them. But we ended up with more than 800 presales. That's probably the first time I started to realize this was going to be a lot bigger than me."
Both Guizar and Davis said that working for the ministry has deepened their spiritual lives.
"I get to come to work every day with someone who prays with me, asks me about my prayer life, who really lives an example of personal holiness," said Guizar of Davis, "it's so good for me."
She continued, "My spiritual life has changed dramatically through the discipline of prayer. I feel drawn to live a life of integrity. If I'm asking a woman to do something in her life, I better be doing it as well... like I have to be living this out in order to talk about it."
Guizar recounts growing up in a dynamic youth group in the Diocese of Phoenix: "After youth group there was nothing to fill that void of community in my life as an adult. We had good friends and we had a good parish, but we didn't feel like we were growing in our faith, and we didn't feel like our relationships were really rooted in Christ."
"I needed this community for my own conversion," Guizar said.
She recalls feeling a growing sense of isolation as a young mother, struggling to find her place in the Church.
"I wasn't homeschooling my kids or doing liturgical crafts. I was fascinated by that experience when I read about it, but it wasn't my life. I felt like I had more questions than answers. I didn't have any wisdom or experience to offer."
That's when Guizar conceived of a daily Bible devotional modeled after some of the Protestant women's ministries she admired. "I knew of all these Catholic bloggers, women with a deeper knowledge of Scripture and with more formation than me, so I reached out and invited them to contribute."
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That was back in the fall of 2014. The first Blessed is She devotion went out on September 1, 2014. By the end of the year, more than 200 women had signed up to receive the emails. By 2015, that number had increased to more than 2,000 women. And by early 2019, that number had risen to more than 60,000.
Fifty percent of Blessed is She participants are millennials - or younger - falling between the ages of 18 and 35. Women between 36 and 65 make up another 35% of the demographic.
Blessed is She brunches and retreats now make up a significant portion of the ministry's focus, with more than 400 member-hosted brunches logged in 2018. So far in 2019, more than 500 women have attended a Blessed is She retreat somewhere in the US or abroad. Still to come this calendar year: retreats in Nashville, Texas, and Ireland.
If you ask for stories of how Blessed is She is impacting women's lives, the answers come back to a common theme: community.
Oliva Spears, a Blessed is She writer who manages the site's blog content recounts "dozens of messages" from women who are coming back to the Church through their involvement with Blessed is She:
"Faithful Catholic women who are lacking community in real life and who've felt like they're the only Catholic left on the planet" are finding out they're not alone, and being encouraged by other women who are following Christ.