Testimonies 9 (Hiroshima peayer group)
22 August 1998 06:41
This wonderful testimony has been sent by Bernard Kuhn
<[email protected]> from Japan
True Life in God prayer Group of Hiroshima – Testimony
The beginning of the prayer group.
In Hiroshima, everyone prays: Buddhists, the shintoïsts, Christians and paradoxically also atheists! Residents, tourists, and pilgrims pray. They pray for peace, fraternity, disarmament etc
We are about fifteen friends, all Christians. Although we had wanted to begin a prayer group for a long time, we were almost always restrained by preoccupations to “reduce” the breath of the Christian prayer to political and purely social values. In addition, in the local church, a lot of activities make use of an internal, well nursed (rigorous) organization. In these conditions it was difficult to find a good and especially a holy spiritual guide.
Then Our Lord Jesus Christ has wanted Himself to help us: in the space of a couple of weeks, between the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998, He has taught us how to pray. With His Ways, The Lord has entered the life of each of us: He gives sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.
For example, to one priest of our prayer group, Jesus has restored Life, while he was seriously sick and discouraged. “I was a dead man”, he tells us, “but thanks to the Messages of True Life in God, I have found a new Life!” This priest has been able to resume the charge of a parish, where he often summons his parishioners, and it is to pray!
Another old priest, who is suffering from weak health, spoke of being a priest at Christmas only, when he was busy preparing the choir of liturgical chants. Thanks to the reading of the True Life in God Messages, he has re-found all his missionary zeal to the point where it exceeds that of new missionary vocations. With ardor he propagates books and video cassettes of True Life in God.
A young seminarian, discouraged because of the superficiality of his seminary, has resumed the discernment of his vocation with a new hope since he has met the prayer group.
A father and a mother, while their son was in great jeopardy while covering the Silk Road on bicycle all alone, have learnt to pray with more depth and ardor in the intimacy of the Holy Trinity thanks to meditations on the True Life in God Messages and regular encounters of the prayer group. The very same son, after returning from his trip, enriched by his experiences, prays now with the ardor and the generosity of “first love” and is currently testing his vocation at the Trappists.
Students and young workers alike come to the prayer group, carrying the Rosary and the Holy Bible in their back-pack, whereas the other youths waste their time in department stores and in Game Centres.
But what happened in Hiroshima? The Advent of Jesus Christ has presented us a “Unique Reply” to problems, to the sufferings that search each of us. It is pure Divine Providence that has made us meet the Word and the Spirit in the books of Vassula. In these books we all have met Jesus Who had awaited our prayers. He was Himself already the Living Answer that had waited impatiently for the cry of our hearts.
The guide to prayer in True Life in God is such as embankments are to a river, it leads right to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary! Let’s praise Our God for His Goodness who gives to the river of our prayers a sweet and consoling destination: the infinite sea of His Love!
On the eve of the evening of the Feast of the Pentecost, 30 May, our prayer group got a much deeper and greater awareness of communion with the Holy Father and with the Universal Church.
The experience of the prayer group of Hiroshima allows us to say that a prayer group does not necessarily begin with the “directions for use”. It is always necessary to begin by asking for the Grace that prepares the liberty of man to answer to the liberty of God, and to meet the demands of the Preexisting Reply.
