The Day I met the God I Never Knew

Perhaps it was a rip tide, but Sister Mei also had a vision of a malevolent hand pulling her out to sea.

While she enjoyed the beach in southern China for the first time in her life, she worried about hardships she faced and her prospects for the future. She was divorced — abandoned by her husband. And she was on vacation at Sanya Beach with her boyfriend, a married man.


“I had never seen the ocean before, For some reason, I felt that if I could see the ocean, a lot of my questions could be answered.”

“My husband left me after I gave birth. On the third day, he came to the hospital for the last time. He just disappeared. It really hurt me,” she said. “That’s how I started to take my life in the wrong direction.”

With “no future, no job, no money, no dignity and no identity,” she was approached by a married man and agreed to go to the beach with him. She left her daughter at home with her parents. As she brooded over her “totally hopeless” situation in the water, she lost track of the shore.

Without warning she was startled by what felt like a hand grabbing her ankle. Having grown on the Yangtze.

River, she was an able swimmer, but she was not prepared for rip tides.

“From the bottom of my heart, my mind, my soul, I cried out, Who can help me?’” she said.
Then she began to be hauled seaward.
“There was a hand holding my ankle dragging me down into the water. I was frightened,” Mei said. “I did everything I could to swim to the shore, but I couldn’t.”

 

She tried calling for help. That’s when she felt a hand around her throat choking back the words. Someone on her right turned his back to her, oblivious to her peril. Another on the left also turned his back to her.

“I could not make any noise,” Mei said. “My mouth was moving. I was asking for help, but no noise came out from my mouth. The hand was holding me tighter and tighter.”

Now in deeper water, her body began swirling in the torrent. A wave formed over her head. At the crest of the wave in her vision she saw a horrible face.
“The minute I saw that face, I knew it was the devil. I never was taught about the devil, but I knew it was the devil,” she said. “It was huge. It was coming on the top of the wave. It came to me and it said, ‘I’m going to kill you today.’ When I saw that, I knew I was finished. There was no hope. I was dying.”
When the wave crashed over her face, she choked on the salty brine. She was tossed by waves as she kicked and paddled, trying in vain to reach the shore. She thought of her parents and daughter, Weiwei.

“Mom, Dad, Weiwei, I’m sorry,” she said, beginning to resign herself to death. “They didn’t even know where I was. I never told them where I was, so if I died that day, they would be very disappointed.”
But if the devil seemingly had her in his grip, God’s strong hand was ready to move. Despondent, she cried out to One unknown to her. “My God…” she cried with all her strength. “I had no understanding of what I was saying,” she recounted.

Immediately, the heavens opened and a large dove descended on her. With no prior knowledge of the Bible, surprisingly, she recognized the dove as the Holy Spirit.

Then she saw a tall man in a robe with an aura of light. He motioned with one hand, through which a ray of light penetrated, drawing a semi circle. With that motion, her entire life was played before her eyes like a video, and the words “deadly sin” appeared next to the places in her life when she committed sins.

“I could not believe I was such a filthy sinful person,” she remembered. Her immediate reaction was she deserved death by drowning, but then she heard a voice of compassion.

“My child you have come back at last,” the voice said. “I have been waiting for you so long.”
Then she beheld a startling sight: Out of the man’s heart poured water and blood! She understood this was for her sin.

“I had broken His heart. All the sins had hurt Him and had been hurting Him always,” Mei said. “My depravity, debauchery, immorality, my ignorance, stubbornness, rebellion, stubbornness. Never for a moment had I stopped. Every sin I had committed was like a sharp knife that injured Him deeply.”
Then she saw a pure love pouring from his eyes. “Is that for me?” she asked.

“Yes, it is for you,” he replied. “I love you and never expect anything back from you.”

“I had never experienced such an unconditional love. I burst into tears. Why do you love me? I’m lonely and in pain.  Love kept coming to me like waves.”
Mei was still in danger of drowning. Then she heard a voice from Heaven again: “Go, help her!”

Suddenly a man appeared out of nowhere and dragged her to shore. Resting on the sand, she was trembling and exhausted. She lay down and slept, asking herself: Who was the man of the vision? How did he know her whole life? How did she get pulled ashore? What was the light?

“That night I met the God I never knew,” she said.
Though she had encountered God, still she didn’t know anything about Him. When she returned to her village, she found a church and asked for a Bible. At that time in China, Bibles were scarce, and so she had to wait some months.

When she finally obtained a Bible, she devoured it, beginning in Genesis. Everything seemed foreign, difficult for her to understand. She began attending an English class taught by “Doug,” who included messages of the gospel in his teaching.

After a year, the Bible resonated with her.  When she finally got to the Gospel of John when Jesus told Thomas to stick his thumb in his nail hole. She remembered the ray of light that shot through the hand of the robed man in the vision at the beach.

Wei finally received Jesus into her heart as her Lord and Savior and was born again, the beginning of a journey that would take her in directions she could never imagine.

 excerpted from http://blog.godreports.com/2016/02/raised-an-atheist-in-communist-china-she-came-to-christ-when-she-nearly-drowned/
 

Lessons From Padre Pio

Padre Pio seemed to know aspects of the lives of his penitents which they tried to hide from him or even from themselves. 

Albert Cardone first learned of Padre Pio in 1944, when he was eighteen, through the testimony of a neighbor, whose name he could not disclose because she may still have been alive at the time when he related the incident in March 1990:

 "She went to confession. Padre Pio, before giving her absolution, said, 'Try to remember the other sin.' The woman said, 'Padre, I think I gave you all the sins I know and I think this is it.' Padre Pio said, 'Then, for your penance, go to the cross to say fifteen Ave Marias and fifteen Our Fathers.' 

Now the cross was at the top of the mountain. The penance was not the Aves or the Our Fathers, it was the journey to get there, as it was a very bad road... So she did that and said the prayers and went back to Padre Pio for a second confession and Padre Pio asked, 'Do you remember all your sins?' She said, 'Padre Pio, I've confessed everything.' 

Padre Pio said. 'No, you still don't remember all. You've got to go to the cross at the top of the mountain again.'


She went for the second time and when she still did not remember he sent her for the third time to the cross on the mountaintop. When she returned for the third time for confession, Padre Pio asked, 'So, do you remember everything now?' She replied, 'No, Padre, I don't have anything more to confess.' Then Padre Pio said in a loud voice, 'What do you mean, you don't remember anything? 

Don't you know he could have been a good priest, a bishop, even a cardinal?' She started to think and then began to cry, 'Father,' she said, 'I never knew abortion was a sin.' 

'What do you mean,' he said, 'you didn't know that this was a sin...Abortion is Murder!'  

Then she said, Nobody knows about this, only me and my mother. How could you say the baby would have been a priest or a cardinal?'  Padre Pio responded by saying, 'It's a sin, a despicably evil sin.' 

Padre Pio On Abortion of Children
with Possible Disabilities

The following was told by Mary Pyle to author Dorothy Gaudiose: 

One morning, Mary met a distinguished-looking woman who asked Mary to pray for her. The woman was accompanied by two of her daughters, one fourteen years old and the other four. The older daughter was deaf and dumb, but the younger one was normal. The woman had left her other two children at home-a girl and a boy, both deaf and dumb. 


Between spells of sobbing, the woman told Mary why she was there. On her third pregnancy, when she already had two deaf and dumb daughters and was feeling the same symptoms she had experienced during her first two pregnancies, she feared that the third would also be born deaf and dumb. Both she and her husband felt that they would not be able to stand the suffering of seeing most of their children deaf and dumb. 


The struggle was great, but finally, with her husband’s consent, the woman made the decision to have an abortion. From that moment on, she had no peace. The woman went to confession. The priest who heard her confession, after sharply rebuking her, extracted a promise from her that she would do no such thing again, and absolved her. Still, she did not feel calm. 

As her uneasy continued, she decided to go to Padre Pio.  With trepidation she approached Padre Pio’s confessional. He had no sooner opened the shutter than he shouted at her: "Assassin! You have murdered your child!" And he closed the shutter of his confessional and left. 


Pierced by suffering, the woman returned home and told her husband everything that had occurred. They were both distraught and spent several days wondering what they had done and about what they had been told. 


The woman became pregnant again. This time a boy was born; and he too was deaf and dumb. The woman returned to San Giovanni Rotondo. In the confessional, Padre Pio said to her only these words:

 "Do God’s will." 

The woman had still another child. This one was a beautiful little girl. Padre Pio, after blessing the oldest of the woman’s daughters, placed his hand on the newborn girl’s head and, looking into the mother’s eyes, said: 

"You see what comes of doing God’s will? This little girl will always be good, beautiful, clever. She will always remain beside her mother." 

Jesus Christ is the Key to all locks

"Seek Me in the midst of the battle," the Lord spoke in an inspiration,  to a Christian woman named Sarah Young.

 "Sometimes events whirl around you so quickly that they become a blur. Whisper My Name in recognition that I am still with you. Without skipping a beat in the activities that occupy you, you find strength and peace through praying My Name. Later, when the happenings have run their course, you can talk with Me more fully. Accept each day as it comes to you. Do not waste your time and energy wishing for a different set of circumstances. Instead, trust Me enough to yield to My design and purposes," 

Sarah wrote in Jesus Calling. "Remember that nothing can separate you from My loving Presence; you are Mine. Nothing can separate us, that is, but hatred; but confusion."

Power comes quickly when we think of Him in that desert and repeat over and over in our minds in the midst of busyness or perplexity:  

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus..."  

The Eucharist Seen Through the Eyes of the Holy Church Fathers