Tuesday, April 29, 2003 12:30 PM

A silence of Love

This testimony, written in 1999, is by a Lebanese person living in Canada.

I am writing to testify about the fruit of the TLIG messages and how I was converted to live more closely with God, through them.

I should say I had many chances because I was born in a country and family where religion is important and is somehow part of everyday life. Nevertheless I did not have a deep understanding of the Triune God and always had a distant relation with God. I had the fear of God but did not understand how close to me He was. Also I did not realize how some of the things I used to do were hurting Him.

But to be more specific I will give two main points that drove me to search for Him, and I will describe how I found him in the messages he gives to Vassula.

First, I was living during a period where my father was having enormous financial problems, he was on the verge of bankruptcy and there was the danger of us loosing almost everything we had. I was therefore very concerned with the daily evolution of my father’s problems and was living with great fears and passing my whole days thinking about how we were going to make it through. I was also hurt because I saw the sufferings my father was going through because of the way some old freinds or family members were acting during this period.

To cut a long story short I felt that nothing was in our hands anymore. During this time I started reading some books on Jesus and God and the process of conversion already started very slowly. Then I started praying the rosary because I heard that the Mother of God would answer anyone who prayed this prayer.

Nevertheless, I started my prayers for materialistic reasons, so that my father could be better off financially. However, with time, as the Holy Mother of God says at Medjugorje – prayer will teach you how to pray, my focus changed.

This was really happening and I slowly grew to pray so that the will of God be done on us and on our enemies, I grew to pray for mercy on us and our enemies, and then pray to glorify and thank God for everything that was happening whatever happened.

I used to blame God for his silence in front of our sufferings or those of others. But then through prayer I realized that His silence was a silence of Love. What can he say more than being on the Cross. We were not suffering, He was and for all eternity, for us and for our enemies, for the victims and those who made others suffer.

All this understanding was furhter deepened by the messages of Vassula.

I also would like to share a very special thing about these messages and how I discovered them.

Actually I am Orthodox, and my family is almost half Orthodox half Catholic. Living in an environment where religion is very socially present, and being a minority in this country I always had the feeling that I was a second category christian. I am not blaming anybody for this. Circumstances made me feel this way.

It was at such a point that during a period (I know it looks stupid) I thought God was more present in Catholic churches; I even did not go to Orthodox churches nor took the Holy sacraments there because of such feelings. I also did not understand why we Orthodox sign ourselves the way we do, with three fingers. Although I believed, in all Catholic apparitions, I did not know of similar ones in the Orthodox church. This was partly due to my ignorance. Nevertheless, this was one more reason that confirmed my thought.

Tortured by those feelings I started searching on the internet for sites of apparitions. I was looking in the Catholic Apparitions of Jesus and Mary site, and was scrolling to find some Greek or Russian name among the apparitions to reconvert myself (I know this drive for searching God is not very Holy, but God takes us from where we are). And there I clicked on Vassula name which looked to me Greek enough. >From this point on I realized how ignorant I was of the tenderness and love of God for all of us, and how united we are in his heart. We are ONE. I was so thrilled and so filled with joy and happiness that I was healed from my complexes, and all I want now is to work for the unity of the Church.

I know I a big sinner, and that sometimes I walk away from God’s love because of my weaknesses, but I pray for the mercy of God on me and on all of us that are so weak.