Reflection on the Message of July 25, 2003

ONLY IN THIS WAY EACH OF YOU WILL DISCOVER PEACE

"Dear children! Also today I call you to prayer. Little children, pray until prayer becomes a joy for you. Only in this way each of you will discover peace in the heart and your soul will be content. You will feel the need to witness to others the love that you feel in your heart and life. I am with you and intercede before God for all of you. Thank you for having responded to my call." Message of July 25, 2003

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Gospa, Queen of Peace and Mother of all men, is perseverant as all the mothers who want that their children walk on the right path into life. Mary, our Mother, does not want to remove from us the weight of the responsibility, of a personal and free choice of God, as she was never deprived from the free decision when she said to the angel: “Let it be done to me according to your word”. Mary, just like Jesus, treats us with much patience. While addressing herself to us, she never offends our freedom. In the Gospel, Jesus speaks in the form of parables, so that each one may freely and without any pressure decide for the Kingdom of God. Our Lady could appear without problem to all, but she wants to leave intact our freedom and our choice of God, who comes so close to us here through her. Today - as much as in the Gospels - we can despise this grace, leave it unused. God gives Himself to us completely freely and so simply. The messages of Our Lady, given during these 22 years of grace, speak precisely in favour of this simplicity.

Mary calls us also today, putting between our hands the same means: prayer. The means is always the same, but God is never the same. He never repeats himself. With Him, one is never bored. Only when we follow Him, we discover how little we know Him, how little we know ourselves. Prayer always leads to joy, more precisely to God who is the source of joy.

“Only in this way each of you will discover peace”, tells us Mary. There is no other way or other means to approach God. This is precisely the means, which appears most difficult today, and which one escapes mostly, finding thousand reasons and excuses. In front of oneself and of God, we can always recognize to oneself and to God how little we pray. We pray much less then our soul needs. As for our body, we can easily feel when it needs food. Our soul is hidden within us, and it is thus easier for us to neglect it. It arrives thus that it cries and shouts, and we forget and neglect it. Our body needs hygiene and bathing, and it is the same way with our soul. Only the One Who created it and Who knows it best can bathe it. We do not know ourselves enough, the others know us even less; God alone is the One who knows and who scrutinises the secrets of our hearts. If we neglect ourselves, we discover consequences: nervousness, dissatisfaction, restlessness, tension, incapacity to forgive and to live in joy. We ask then ourselves from where all can that may come? The reason is in the malnutrition and the negligence of our soul. Our Lady does not talk about possible negative consequences, but her words show us the way to God, all the positive, good and holy for which human heart yearns.

“You will feel the need to witness to others the love that you feel in your heart”, tells us Mary. The meaning of our seeking of God and of our coming closer to God is not to remain next to Him, which would be a spiritual selfishness. The meaning and the goal of our life is to carry God to others, to testify that He is a living God, and not a remote and hidden god. This is what Mary, our Mother, does during all these years. This is what she did after the encounter with the angel Gabriel: she carried Jesus to her cousin Elisabeth and was thus the first missionary of the love of God and of His Kingdom.

We are neither alone nor abandoned, ensures us Mary, our Mother. She is our intercessor and our advocate. No one who sought her intercession was ever forsaken. Let us entrust ourselves to her, let us entrust to her our families, in order to remain on the path of life.

Fr. Ljubo Kurtovic
Medjugorje, July 26, 2003