I’m so excited about the book for Saint Mary’s Parish that it has given me the push to move ahead doing a book of inspirational stories that I have been thinking about for some time. Since I probably won’t start working for the sisters till January this gives me almost sixty days to get a good start on this one!
Don’t worry – I am not overdoing – I’m just in the “collecting” stage now. And in fact I have checked this out with Fran my therapist who can see the sense in collecting stories for this book while I continue to work on my own personal story. So for now, I will send out a few messages hither and yon to find stories for this new endeavor. I’m not totally sure of the title but I think it will be called something like, “Messages from Heaven.” That probably won’t be the title but something like it.
When I was working on the parish book a friend sent me a beautiful story for the book. She is in Australia and thought I was collecting stories from all over as with my previous books. Since I was only collecting from the parish for that book I couldn’t use it, but the minute I read her story I knew I wanted to do a book that would include her story and others like it.
In the story she shares how as a small, disabled child of six she spent twelve months in a hospital before she could learn to walk. During that time her mother was sick and could not visit her. One day she was taken outside on a metal cot to get some sunshine along with other children in similar condition. Looking up at the sky she saw a figure in the sky who told her that, “She would always be alright.”
She turned to the child next to her with great excitement and asked her if she had heard and seen the figure. Her little friend did not know what she was talking about. Then the nurses came to take her back inside. She was told she was going to have visitors! In the whole year that she had been in the hospital she had only had visitors twice. Once an aunt and another time an uncle.
This time there were many relatives who came to see her. Someone gave her a big white box and when she opened it there was a beautiful doll. Then they told her that her mummy had gone to heaven and she was going to go and live with relatives who would be her new mummy and daddy. She was told not to cry because she was a big girl and her mummy in heaven would not want her to do that.
There is more to the story but it is a very beautiful message of how God surrounded this small child with a loving message to carry her through this hard time in her life.
I think that God has done this for each of us in many different ways. At first you might not think so but I hope as you think of major life changing events in your life and how you came to be prepared for them – you might see messages from heaven came to you as well.
I know when I was preparing to go to Guest House and walking out in the garden praying my rosary for the Holy Spirit’s guidance, a beautiful white pigeon circled over my head and landed on the bedroom awning of my window in the monastery. Some might think, so what, but to me it was a message from heaven. Especially since at that time I was praying the third glorious mystery of the rosary which was the descent of the Holy Spirit.
I can think of other times as well, when I received a sign or confirmation that I was making a good decision or strengthened to face something I would have been crushed by otherwise. The stories do not have to be huge to be encouraging. Sometimes the smallest sign plays a major role in our life of faith.
To me such a book as this would be very comforting and inspirational. What do you think?
