A young man from the United States, Michael, came to Medjugorje in March and he just sent me a letter. I share it with you because it may encourage and inspire each one of us in our personal call to prayer in the midst of our daily concerns.
"My last pilgrimage to Medjugorje was life changing for me, as the Gospa revealed to me early in the pilgrimage that I needed to pray for peace in my soul. I realized that, though I prayed and believed and had many miracles happen to me in the past, I still did not have much peace inside me. It was hard for me to pray with love, to mean what I was saying.
"So, for the remainder of the trip, I set aside every single one of my petitions and just prayed for peace in my soul. Consequently, I found praying to be much easier. I did not have to force myself to mean the words I was saying. The inward peace I had been given (as an answer to my prayer) enabled me to actually pray from the heart!
"When I returned home, I tried to retain what I had learned in Medjugorje. However, all of my daily worries found their way back into my prayer life. I found myself very distracted, praying for things other than peace, like 'what do I do about this and that' etc.. Over the next few weeks my prayer became more burdened. Again, I was trying to force myself to pray with the heart. I had lost my inner peace.
"About two months after my return from Medjugorje, Annie, my wife, received the sacrament of Confirmation. During the ceremony, we both prayed very hard for the Holy Spirit to come to us through the sacrament, and we experienced a tremendous outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The graces I received opened my heart to Jesus in a special way, and during Mass, He spoke to me very clearly. I felt His presence as if He was looking me straight in the face, so as to keep my attention and not let my cluttered prayer get in the way. He said, "Michael, your job is to pray for peace in your heart. I will take care of all the other things you are worried about, but you are called to pray only for peace in your heart. For as you do so, you will become an instrument through which I will bring peace to the world. I call you from this moment forward to pray only for peace in your heart, the way My mother taught you in Medjugorje. All other things I will provide for."
"I kept this incredible experience to myself until now.
"The next day I was praying the rosary with my parents, and my mom started talking about how we are sometimes called to pray for specific things. She recounted how Mother Nadine Brown had been instructed by Jesus to not pray for her family, but instead to pray for other intentions. Mother Nadine said that after a year or so of obediently praying as Jesus had instructed, she realized that her family was receiving incredible blessings because she had let go of her own petitions and prayed for what Jesus asked. Upon hearing this, I fully understood the seriousness of what Jesus had said to me. My prayer life has been changing incredibly. I find that though many things try to take my peace away, I am able to reclaim and maintain peace in my heart by praying for peace and only peace. Everything else important to me, that used to burden my prayer-life, is being blessed incredibly, as I pray only for peace in my heart.
"While in Medjugorje this peace I received effected more than my prayer life. I became very accepting of who I am, even to the point of being able to joke around and socialize freely, with my true personality showing through. Toward the end of the trip I was thinking that I was becoming somewhat of a distraction to my pilgrim group, because I was so outwardly joyful and light-hearted. But when we returned home, a member of our trip explained to me how she had suffered for several years. When in social situations, she would lose all confidence and not be able to say a single word. Her suffering was effecting all areas of her life. She explained that God did something very deep inside of her while on Mount Krizevac, and then through the rest of the trip, she became released from her burden. She explained that just by staying up and joking around with me and some of the others, God began to open her up and heal her. She actually thanked me for being a means of grace through which God was able to heal her! This blew my mind, I had no idea of this, even thinking that I was distraction! She returned from the trip healed of her inhibition, and to this day she is a completely different person."
"God showed me how important it is to have peace in our hearts".