Saturday, August 5, 2017
7:25 PM Alabama Time
Our Lady Appears Tonight During Ivan’s Prayer Group
Our Lady appeared to Ivan tonight on top of Apparition Mountain at 10:00 p.m. during his prayer group. Pilgrims began gathering around 6:00 p.m. Medjugorje has been experiencing extremely high temperatures for the past month, so the rocks on the mountain continued to radiate heat throughout the night, allowing the pilgrims to make an added sacrifice for Our Lady, absorbing the heat from the rocks as they sat and prayed in preparation for Our Lady’s apparition. The singing began around 8:30 p.m. and continued for over an hour. Then Ivan began the Rosary. Right before 10:00 p.m., Ivan announced for everyone to kneel down as it was time for the apparition. When Our Lady came, She stayed with Ivan for over 12 minutes. The following is Ivan’s description of the apparition.
I would like to briefly describe tonight’s meeting together with Our Lady. Also tonight Our Lady came to us very joyful and happy and She greeted all of us, at the beginning, with Her motherly greeting, ‘Praised be Jesus my dear children.’ Then, with great joy, with Her arms extended, She prayed over all of us. Then Our Lady said:
Then Our Lady blessed all of us with Her motherly blessing, and She also blessed everything you brought to be blessed. I recommended all of you, all of your needs, your intentions, your families and, all the youth who are at this festival and their families. After that Our Lady continued to pray, and She left in that prayer, in an illuminated Sign of the Cross, with a greeting, “Go in peace my dear children.”
Please continue to remember in prayer Our Lady’s intentions. Especially remember in prayer the important intention to raise all the funds for Mej v3.0 to be released soon. Thank you. In case you missed them, there are two major updates below, including a very powerful writing from a Friend of Medjugorje about Our Lady’s August 2, 2017 message through Mirjana. Read with prayer.
With Love,
Medjugorje.com
Caritas of Birmingham
Operated by the Community of Caritas
What you are about to read should not be read if you do not pause and pray to the Holy Spirit and open your heart to what is in it that Jesus wants purged out of you. Many do not understand the source of their problems or difficulties. What you are about to read will move you far more than you can imagine if you first pause, get on your knees and say a serious from the heart prayer and get ready for a real soul searching and a cry. Read slowly and allow no distractions.
Harboring Anger and Resentment
Will Eat You Up
By a Friend of Medjugorje
August 2, 2017
Many go through life being without life in their life. A t-shirt seen recently on someone at an airport said, “Not everyone has lived, but everyone will die.” Love emanates from love. Love never dies. It will live in those you leave behind when you die and therefore, a part of you will still live on earth. Leaving love is greater than what you leave in your Will after you die. Loved ones will flourish more in life by the love you leave, than any money from your Will you leave for their life. Life is only life through love. In the song, “It’s a Hard Life,” by Nanci Griffith, she writes of the “hard life” that comes from hatred:
It’s a hard life, it’s a hard life
It’s a very, very hard life
It’s a hard life wherever you go
And if we poison our children with hatred
Then the hard life is all that they’ll know
And there ain’t no place in this world for those kids to go
Our Lady said many things in Her message today, yet where She ended was “forgiveness.” To say that we love Jesus, and for our prayers to have worth, we must forgive. Our Lady says it plainly and very clearly why so many prayers of people are not answered: “…I am teaching you to…thank Him by loving Him and always anew forgiving your neighbors…” It will be shown that by Our Lady’s own words, if you don’t forgive, your prayers are of no use.
Malcolm Gladwell is a popular author who knows how to tell a good story. But one of the stories he tells changed his own life and brought him back to his faith. He was in attendance at a funeral in which a young girl had been kidnapped, bound disgracefully and left to die in the cold winter of Winnipeg, Canada, in 1984. When the girl’s parents were told, after several months, that her body had been found, they went into their bedroom and made the decision to try to love whoever killed her, and forgive. When the parents were finally able to lay their daughter to rest, who was still freshly preserved from the cold, the father stood up before everyone at the funeral, with the casket behind him, and said of the one who had perpetrated this evil against their daughter:
“We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these peoples’ lives. I don’t believe the person who did this had loving parents or a circle of friends who thought the world of him or he wouldn’t have done a deed like this.”
It wasn’t an easy choice to make, and there were many who criticized them for doing so, but they knew if they didn’t forgive, they would risk losing every other good in their lives, including their marriage and their family. The mother of the young girl said, “Anger is very natural. It comes out of fear, it comes out of dishonor, it’s a reaction to anything that threatens us and it’s addictive. To forgive and say, I’m going to let it go, give it to the higher power…and then find something good in it, it’s not an easy process.” Gladwell was so moved by the faith of this young girl’s parents that he felt the desire to return to the faith of his childhood.
On October 2, 2006, a gunman trapped 10 young Amish girls in their one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, tied them up and then opened fire. Five were killed. Five survived. And then he ended his own life. The attacker, 32-year-old Charlie Roberts, left a legacy of shame and horror for his wife, young children, parents and family. It was a heinous crime, made more so because it was perpetrated against a peace-loving people. It was news that shocked the nation and world. Chuck and Terri Roberts were the parents of the troubled man. The day of the shooting, Terri was at work and heard sirens, which was unusual in the small rural community. She wondered what they were for. Then the phone rang. It was her husband. He told her to come immediately to their son, Charlie, and his wife Marie’s house. Terri said:
“As I hurried down the stairway from my office, a sense of foreboding squeezed my stomach. The drive was only 10 minutes, but I heard on the radio that there had been a shooting at an Amish schoolhouse nearby. Children were among the dead and injured. Charlie drove a truck for his father-in-law’s business collecting milk from area dairy farms, and he often parked right near the school. Fear clutched my heart. Could he have intervened to help and been killed? As soon as I got to Charlie’s house and pushed through the crowd of police and reporters, I asked a trooper if my son was alive. ‘No, ma’am,’ he responded somberly. I turned to my husband. With pain in his eyes, he choked out, ‘It was Charlie. He killed those girls.’ All I recall is falling to the ground in a fetal position, wailing. Eventually, we were walked to the police cruiser and driven home. My husband is a retired police officer. I could not imagine his feelings as he was escorted out like a perpetrator after 30 years of being the one who did the escorting.”
Chuck and Terri were neighbors and friends to many Amish in the small farming community. After being escorted home, they broke down, sobbing.
“Chuck sat at our breakfast table, crying. I had not seen my strong, protective husband shed tears since his father passed away years before. Now he could not even lift his head. He’d covered his face with a dish towel to control the flow of tears, his eyes sunken and dull.”
Chuck said they were going to have to leave. They couldn’t live in this town where their son had done such evil to such good people. Recalling that moment ten years later, in October 2016, Terri wrote what she called, “The First Miracle,” that would lead them out of the hell they had just entered:
“As we sat and sobbed, I looked through our window and caught sight of a stalwart figure dressed in black. It was our neighbor, Henry Stoltzfoos, whom we’d known for years. He was an Amish man…Striding up to the front door, Henry knocked. Mind you, Henry had friends and relatives whose daughters had died in that schoolhouse, at the hands of our son. Like all the Amish, he had every reason to hate us. But as I opened the door, I saw that Henry didn’t look angry. Instead, compassion radiated from his face. Walking over to Chuck, he put one hand on his shoulder. The first words I heard him speak took my breath away: ‘Roberts, we love you. This was not your doing. You must not blame yourself.’”
Henry was the first miracle, but there were more to come.
The next day, the day after the shooting, a group of Amish leaders came to the home of the parent’s of Marie, the wife of the attacker who was now a widow. Every one of the Amish had a family member who had died in the schoolhouse. Marie’s father went out to meet them, and he immediately found himself in the midst of their embrace where they all wept and prayed together. The day of the shooting, Marie and her children had been brought food by other Amish families.
In the week that followed, the funerals of the five young girls were held. The last funeral was of Charlie Roberts. Though Chuck and Terri were deeply moved by the forgiveness being offered to them by the Community, they were struggling to forgive their son who was the cause of so much pain and destruction. A father of one of the girls who had been killed had visited Chuck and Terri in their home. Terri said:
“I shared how brokenhearted I was that our son Zach, (Charlie’s brother), would not attend Charlie’s funeral—he couldn’t forgive him. I asked him to pray that Zach would have a change of heart. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to call him?’”
A few days later, at the funeral of his brother, Zach was there. He said that the pleas of his parents softened his heart, but it was the phone call of the grieving father that had been the “turning point” that led him to the funeral.
At Charlie’s funeral, the media from all the major news outlets came with their cameras and reporters wanting to capture the site of the grieving Roberts family. But suddenly, at least 40 Amish men and women, started coming out from around the side of the graveyard and fanned out into a semi-circle between the grave site and the media making a solid wall to cut off the photographers and grant the family a moment of privacy. Again, Chuck and Terri Roberts were deeply touched by the compassion being shown to them by this devastated community. Terri remembers what she felt at that moment:
“Fresh anger shook me then. I could think only of the terrible wrong Charlie had done. At that moment I was not sure that I could ever forgive the unspeakable evil he’d perpetrated on these young parents, his own children, our family. Yet neither could I stop loving Charlie. He was my son.”
Terri continued:
“I held on to my composure as our Amish guests stepped forward to express their condolences. Among the first to approach us were Chris and Rachel Miller, whose two daughters, Lena and Mary Liz, had died in their arms. Murmuring a greeting to Chuck and me, they added softly, ‘We are sorry for your loss.’ Sorry for our loss. I could barely choke out a response. Our son had taken the lives of their daughters and they were comforting us! It was a moment of sudden, healing clarity for me. Forgiveness is a choice…forgiveness isn’t a feeling. These sweet parents were as grief-stricken as I was, their hearts broken like mine. I did not have to stop feeling anger, hurt and utter bewilderment at the horrific decisions Charlie had made. I only had to make a choice: to forgive. And I understood the other part of what the Amish had said: If we cannot forgive, how can we be forgiven? I am not a murderer, but I have committed wrongs as well. And I was forgiven! How can I, in turn, not offer the forgiveness I’ve received—even to my own son? Especially to my own son.”
The forgiveness offered to the Roberts family set them on a path of healing and forgiveness themselves. They did not move away, but accepted the friendship offered to them to remain and heal with their Amish neighbors. One of the young girls who survived the shooting, Rosanna, was injured badly, being shot in the head. Ten years after the shooting, she is still tube-fed and in a wheelchair. She has seizures and cannot talk. Terri asked the parents if she could help with Rosanna once a week. She reads to her, bathes her and dries her hair when she comes to visit. Terri says she doesn’t know if Rosanna knows who she is, but she has a sense that she does.
Aaron Esh was the father of one of the boys that was in the school that day. When asked about his own walk of forgiveness, he said that with Charlie dead, “there was nowhere for the anger to go. There had been no foreshadowing of his ghastly act. Charlie was known only as a loving husband and father, a good neighbor.” Esh knew that harboring anger and resentment “will eat you up.” Another father who lost a daughter in the tragedy said it has been a journey for him. “I still made that immediate choice in principle to forgive. But it took me a few years until I could feel that I really meant it inside me, to forgive Charlie….I felt a great weight falling off me.”
Terri doesn’t know what would have happened if she and her family were shown rejection and hatred instead of love and forgiveness through this tragedy. She said, “Over the last decade, the love our family was given has inspired me to spread the message of forgiveness wherever I can, often hand in hand with the Amish families my son had harmed…I think it’s a message the world needs.” In fact, when the school killings of Virginia Tech1 and Sandy Hook2 happened, Terri accompanied the Amish families whose children had been killed by Charlie Roberts in Nickel Mines, when they visited the communities who had freshly experienced the same horror. They joined “hand in hand” to bring the message of forgiveness.
So, what about you? Are you finding that your prayers aren’t being answered? Is it because you are harboring anger, bitterness, unforgiveness in your heart for someone, or even unforgiveness of yourself? Perhaps you may not even be aware that you have unforgiveness or resentment in your heart. Were you convicted when you read Our Lady’s message today? Was there a name that came to mind when you first read Her words? Have your prayers not been answered because you have not forgiven? Our Lady said on June 2, 2014:
Our Lady knows it is difficult to forgive sometimes. That is why She says that She is here to help us.
Our Lady knows that in order for us to forgive, we must have the experience of being loved and therefore, forgiven. This is what happened to Terri and Chuck. With Our Lady’s new efficacy, Our Lady will speak to you and you can feel Her Motherly love in your very being. She will lead you to the grace to enable you to:
Lastly, when Our Lady said: “…My Son has left you His footprints to make it easier for you to follow Him…,” it’s not possible that She would say that without referring to the beautiful and treasured poem about faith and trust in God, “Footprints in the Sand.” Our Lady said:
September 2, 2016
It is not by chance that Our Lady said, “Jesus’ footprints” without Her having in Her heart, knowledge of a writing known as, “Footprints in the Sand;” a widespread writing that is well known around the world. We include it that you may read it in light of Our Lady’s message today, knowing that She will “enlighten” you to a deeper understanding of these age-old words about faith, trust, perseverance and “…many are the acts of love which He has done for you. I am teaching you to see them, to comprehend them and to thank Him…”
This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life,
So I said to the Lord, “You promised me Lord
The Lord replied,
The Amish had to forgive others to be free. Terri and Chuck had to forgive themselves to be free. The Amish witness spurred them to not only forgive but to forgive themselves. Many people will never be right until they forgive others and/or forgive themselves. Life’s too short not to forgive and you will teach future generations to do the same. “And if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know.”
With Forgiveness,
Pray for a Friend of Medjugorje
Since Medjugorje.com is down, trying to raise the necessary budget to operate, we have missed the June 25th and July 25th Radio WAVE programs, and the July 2nd and August 2nd Radio WAVE programs and the accompanying writings, as well as the weekly Mejanomics programs. We believe every missed opportunity to write about a message is lost history, not only in the present, but for all who are the “people of the Cross” in the future.
Pray for a Friend of Medjugorje if you want more of what you’ve read above. He has five major books he has felt compelled to write for the last couple of years. These books are impressed in him; he does not have to plan them, he just starts writing. In the meantime, he will continue to write the short epistles for your life through his life and witness. Also, his time is often pulled in several necessary directions and raising money actually steals his time, as well as the Community’s. Please gift liberally to Medjugorje.com’s budget to end the goal. Thank you.
–The Community of Caritas
With Love,
Medjugorje.com
Caritas of Birmingham
Operated by the Community of Caritas
Footnotes:
1. Virginia Tech shooting took place on April 17, 2007. Seung-Hui Cho, killed 33 people, including himself, and injured 17 others.
2. Sandy Hook shooting took place on December 14, 2012. Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children between six and seven years old and seven adults, including his own mother before finally taking his own life.
7 thoughts on “Harboring Anger and Resentment Will Eat You Up”
Country: USA
For someone to write something as beautiful as the poem ”Footprints” and remain anonymous seems odd, doesn’t it?
City: 2440 Rte 125 Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci
State: Québec
Country: Canada. J0T 2A0
Good thing I prayed as you advised, because I did weep deeply as you predicted, but with more compassion than the guilt I would’ve had, if I hadn’t prayed, Thank you, thank you – thank You!
As I read this story, a couple of names came up for me. I immediately prayed for forgiveness for their attitudes and actions against me. I asked that they be blessed. I hope this was the key that was needed to open the door to future and better blessings. Thank you for the inspiring article. If the Amish could act out of love and forgiveness I could too. God bless you all.
A beautiful piece of writing which strikes hard at our inner self. Thankyou for this one and all the other writings and all what you all are doing for us. Love, faith, courage and strength to all of us. ..we so need it! Thankyou
The addiction of anger is dangerous. I am surrounded by anger. I work in a shop with 12 others technicians. It wasnt even a year ago when I was the guy punching tool boxes and kicking tires over stupid things I would do. It is a consistent daily choice to overcome my capabilities of being angry through prayer and fasting, penance and the gospel. I know when I start to get angry that it is a sign I have not took action and made a decision to be loving, I’ve not been vigilant, I’ve strayed from the path of prayer, penance, fasting and the gospel. Reflecting anger and resentment is death. I cry to die in such a way. I cry, maybe because I’m one of those snowflakes, but also when love is committed. When I read the part of, “the first miracle”. My heart ached. I laughed, sobbed and teared up. The amish, in this story, reflect Jesus’ love wonderfully. Inspirational, loving, and thoughtful. Thank you Caritas. Love from the upper end of the earth.
I just don’t know what to say Friend of Medjugorje. I hope your writing will stay in my memory till my last breath. Please pray for me if you have time. Thank you Jesus, thank you Mother Mary!
I think one of the best writings ever. It hit home immediately and helped me realize my own faults.