"If Our Lady wants you to go, you’ll go!"

Medjugorje... an interesting name for a pilgrimage site. My friend Stephanie has been telling me about this place for two years now. Anyway, it won’t happen: the deadline for registration is tonight... But Stephanie insists: "Go and send your check... if Our Lady wants you to go, you'll go!" Apparently, the Virgin is in on it because a few weeks later I find myself in a bus full of energetic young people!

I feel a bit out of place. Everybody seems on fire with the Holy Spirit. Unlike them, I’m full of doubts. And I don't believe in those daily apparitions...

As the miles go by, with the help of "little phrases that make you think," I feel that I am starting to "melt inside" and I begin to discover why I came: old wounds I thought were closed have left deep scars. And here I am sobbing... with silent and uncontrolled tears... I think I cried for 24 hours... but afterward I felt "cleansed" and peaceful...

Then we arrived in Medjugorje. My first purchase was a rosary. There, everyone wears a rosary around their wrists. Although I had never really understood what those little beads could do, I begin to recite Hail Marys and Our Fathers for hours! And in Croatian too! The Rosary brought me the inner peace I craved.

The Stations of the Cross, talks, testimonies, moving homilies… it was not a hurricane, or fire, or Our Lady that I saw in Medjugorje: like Elijah on the mountain who perceived God in a light breeze, I saw God at work in many small things, in a thousand details that spoke to me and touched me. I didn't come back transfigured, but something changed in my life: I acquired the certainty that I was not alone, that I had to be at peace about the future and that if one day I went back to my old doubts, I could go back to that place that is so bathed in divine light and my confidence would be restored.

Gladys

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