Day: August 29, 2017

(c) Mateo Ivankovic 2017 J.M.J. August 30, 2017 Dear Family of Mary! “Dear children! Today I am calling you to be people of prayer. Pray until prayer becomes a joy for you and a meeting with the Most High. He will transform your hearts and you will become people of love and peace. Do not forget, little children, that Satan is strong and wants to draw you away from prayer. You, do not forget that prayer is the secret key of meeting with God. That is why I am with you to lead you. Do not give up on prayer. Thank you for having responded to my call.” (August 25, 2017) “He will transform your hearts and you will become people of love and peace.” Once we have meetings with God in prayer, Our Lady says something wonderful will happen. We will become people of love and peace! But for sure we will not become such people by our own power, or by the things we learn in prayer, or the ideas we discover in the encounter with God. No, not on our own power will we be changed. “He will transform your hearts…” We will be changed by God! He will transform us with His power, His creative love. No matter how hard we try, we cannot transform ourselves. It is impossible. Our only hope is to surrender ourselves to God in prayer, in that prayer that becomes joy for us, and then open our hearts to Him and let Him change us. Have you ever felt God changing you? Have you ever encountered the Lord in such a way that you allowed the Lord to be your Lord, to take over with His love and pour it into you like the sun pours its rays on the earth? This is when transformation occurs. It is in the trusting encounter of Creator and creature. This loving and trusting encounter is awesome! And Our Lady wants us to know that God is waiting for us, waiting to meet us and pour out His transforming love into our poor hearts so broken by sin and pain. “He will transform your hearts…” He WILL do it. Our Lady doesn’t say that He might do it, or probably He will do it. She says, “HE WILL TRANSFORM YOUR HEARTS…” All we have to do is pray “until…” St. Faustina recounts a moment when she had a meeting with the Most High. She shares about this meeting as a transformation during a retreat: I am coming out of this retreat thoroughly transformed by God’s love. My soul is beginning a new life, earnestly and courageously; although outwardly my life will not change, and no one will notice it, nevertheless, pure love is [now] the guide of my life and, externally, it is mercy which is its fruit. I feel that I have been totally imbued with God and, with this God, I am going back to my everyday life, so drab, tiresome and wearying, trusting that he whom I feel in my heart will change this drabness into my personal sanctity. In profound silence, close to Your merciful Heart, my soul is maturing during this retreat. In the clear rays of your love, my soul has lost its tartness and has become a sweet and ripe fruit. Now I can be wholly useful to the Church by my personal sanctity, which throbs with life in the whole Church, for we all make up one organism in Jesus. That is why I endeavor to make the soil of my heart bear good fruit. Although the human eye may perhaps never see it, there will nevertheless come a day when it will become apparent that many souls have been fed and will continue to be fed with this fruit. O Eternal Love, You who enkindle a new life within me, a life of love and of mercy. Support me with Your grace, so that I may worthily answer Your call, so that what You Yourself have intended to accomplish in souls through me, might indeed be accomplished. (Diary 1363-1365) God’s love transforms us. His love can heal our wounds, our broken hearts, our sorrows and disappointments, our discouragement and despondency. These are the things that block us, making us incapable of love. He can teach us to forgive, to ask forgiveness, to long for unity and blessing. He can transform our hearts into love! Then we can become love and peace for others, we can be useful for the Church, as St. Faustina said. Our Mother is with us to help us encounter the Lord in prayer, and to enter into His transforming love. Thank you, Mother, for coming to us to do this. We would not even know how to begin without you. In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan ©Mary TV 2017

(c) Mateo Ivankovic 2017 J.M.J. August 29, 2017 The Passion of St. John the Baptist Dear Family of Mary! August 25, 2017 “Dear children! Today I am calling you to be people of prayer. Pray until prayer becomes a joy for you and a meeting with the Most High. He will transform your hearts and you will become people of love and peace. Do not forget, little children, that Satan is strong and wants to draw you away from prayer. You, do not forget that prayer is the secret key of meeting with God. That is why I am with you to lead you. Do not give up on prayer. Thank you for having responded to my call.” “Pray until prayer becomes a joy for you and a meeting with the Most High.” It might be easy to pass over this sentence. But if we take a minute we can learn something here. Our Lady has always told us that we need to, “Pray until prayer becomes a joy for you.” But do we really take her seriously? The key of course is in the word “until”. She doesn’t say how long to pray. She doesn’t give us lists of prayers to say. She merely says to “Pray until…” We should not stop praying “until” we actually have a meeting with the Most High. We need to pray “until” we are filled with joy. And we probably won’t want to stop praying when the joy of the meeting with God happens! We will just continue! Mike Nolan took a pilgrimage group to Medjugorje during the middle of August this year. He had a number of young people with him. He shared that Dominic, a college student, was asked what his favorite part of Medjugorje was. He responded, “The Glorious Mysteries at the end of the evening program.” Dominic told Mike that after the first two Rosaries and Holy Mass, he could get deepest into prayer during the last Rosary. Mike added, “One night we didn’t do the last Rosary but decided to go out to dinner right after Mass. And Dominic and Austin (a fellow pilgrim) said, ‘We will catch up with you after the last Rosary.” Clearly these young men had learned the “pray until” principle!! They knew what it took to pray until prayer becomes a joy for you! I also heard from Tracy Veno that she struggled with “praying until…” She wrote me about the August 25 message: “I love this!!! One time I had to say 3 whole 15 decade rosaries before I could feel God’s Joy and Love…. but it is true, it will happen :)” Denis reminded me of some advice that Our Lady gave to Ivan Dragicevic: “If you want to pray better you have to pray more. To pray more is a personal decision. To pray better is a grace, a grace given to those who pray more!” So you see, we just can’t give up on prayer. (Our Lady said that, didn’t she! “Do not give up on prayer.”) The “pray until” principle tells us that we just have to give ourselves to prayer, to continue to pray, no matter what. I think it is actually an act of spiritual warfare when we don’t stop praying. We actively turn away from distractions and the enemy’s counterfeits, and we turn to God in prayer with conviction and strength. This will stop the enemy’s attacks. Denis also thinks that the “pray until” principle is really important. So important that Our Lady gave us the grace of having the wonderful new POV Camera at the Blue Cross (see the link at the top of our home page, www.marytv.tv . It is at the Blue Cross that many people come to “pray until”. We can now join them at that holy place. So, let’s take up the challenge! Let’s pray until prayer becomes a joy for us, and we have a meeting with the Most High!! In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan ©Mary TV 2017