On Wednesday I bought a new phone, I’m a creature of habit and so got a Samsung again, this time the A12 which cost £150 and that’s cheap for a phone nowadays!

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Anyway last night I went about the dreaded job of changing phones and transferring data etc from one to the other.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought because of the “Smart Switch” app which after about an hour had pretty much everything transferred bar a few little things and the new phone was good to go!

In a way I was surprised and almost worried at how all my data could be transferred and how easy it was to login to my various accounts and on the other hand I was relieved as I didn’t necessarily have all my passwords.

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As I began to pray I was inspired by the following idea:

“When we die is our old data simply migrated and upgraded to a newer model of ourselves?”

Well obviously the answer is no in the sense that God doesn’t migrate the data and throw away the old model, instead God upgrades the old model just like that American TV show “pimp my ride”

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And of course this idea does make sense because when we think of the saints gone before us they are essentially the same people as they were on earth but now jazzed up and supernaturalised in heaven they can now do all sorts of new things that they couldn’t do before just like how my new phone has fingerprint recognition 😉

Yet this is also a scary thought because when we die there is no factory reset on our souls and all the data goes with us!

Just like we must be careful about how we use our phones and what data is on them must we be careful of how we use our souls too!

On the plus side, when we die all the good data goes with us too! All our good deeds and actions get ‘transferred’ just like the photos and videos on our phones.

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And so you see, life is a gift and a responsibility at the same time which I’d why we must do our very best to use it wisely because there will be only one upgrade, one resurrection and after that we’ll be stuck with that for eternity.

Fortunately in his mercy God does allow us to press “factory reset” down here and to “erase search history”….

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He does this through prayer and the sacraments, especially through the sacrament of reconciliation!

And so today, the last day of the year, why not have a look through the recycle bin of your life and see which memories and data still need erasing.

Who knows there may even be a demon or two stuck in the memories like a virus but as you bring them to Jesus even these little fellows will have to go too!

Afterwards just like an upgraded phone you’ll find that you have more memory, quicker processing times and more energy to enjoy the fun things in life and on that day when you get the final upgrade you’ll be ready for the eternal joys of heaven as you bring all the virtues of a life well lived on earth with you!

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So any new years resolutions?!! Maybe not a new phone but why not a new start with Jesus?!

Michael

The love of the Father continued from yesterday by Our Lady….

“Yesterday my child I told you about the love of the Father that reaches down to your poor world and draws your souls towards him as he lifts you up beyond yourselves and your sinful hearts.

His love is like a burning fire that draws you like a magnet and yet wounds and purges the areas of your souls not yet Holy.

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This is the suffering of purification but it is also a joyful suffering because it has a purpose and an end and will lead you to true freedom in every way.

It is not however an easy suffering and this is why the father has put little parcels or specs of his love in the hearts of his people so that you may love and support one another.

It is not enough for God to love you because God is spirit. You must also love one another and help one another.

God made you for love and intimacy and the more that you love God, the more you will become human, sensitive and loving and the more you will not only desire to love God, you will desire to love eachother.

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This my children is how communities form and it’s how the holy spirit calls the people of God to community.

My dear children, allow the love of God to overflow in your hearts and to love your brothers and sisters with your hearts.

Be not afraid or ashamed to love and to be vulnerable with eachother just as jesus became vulnerable by coming to your world as a little baby.

Reach out in love and remember that even though your sins may be many, each act of love and charity will repair and atone for countless sins because God’s mercy is boundless in goodness and compassion and he cannot but leap for joy and pour abundant Graces on you when you too show mercy.”

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Again such a powerful message that it’s not about being perfect but it’s about allowing God’s perfect love to love through us as best we can and make it perfectly imperfect love because God sees the heart of things and especially every effort we make at loving others matter how much it falls short of perfection.

And so today may each one of us in our own way allow the love of God to well up in us and cause us to reach out in love to another human being in need and allow some of the Father’s love to flow from our heart to theirs

Have an awesome day!

Michael

This morning Our Lady shared with me a beautiful message about the love of God the father and his love for us:

“My dear children, today I desire to speak to you about the heavenly father.

God your father and my father too is total and absolute love and goodness.

He is perfect in every way like the whitest snow or the purest fresh water.

He is timeless and ageless and in your human language is ‘forever young’.

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He is as fresh and energetic and loving now as he was 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 2000 years ago and before.

He is!

He is full of life and energy and movement beyond your wildest dreams and the whole of creation and its moving is only a mere shadow in comparison to the love and light of the most Holy Trinity.

So many of you have had poor relationships with your human fathers and so many of your fathers were very broken men too.

This experience blocks your human minds from grasping and understanding the love and freedom of your heavenly father and also his healing power to transform your lives.

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The Father gave you Jesus and the Holy Spirit to draw you to His heart and to raise your human minds and hearts up and beyond the limits of your human nature and the pull from the things of your world and your passions.

He desires to refather you and for each one of you to know him personally.

He doesn’t just want you to know about him from books or from the bible. He wants you to know him in the same way as you know your human dads.

He desires to love you, heal you, teach you and mentor you and grow you into beautiful sons and daughters of God.

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He sends me to help him as his instrument which is why I call you again and again to praying with your hearts because it’s in this way and in the secret chamber of your own hearts that you will encounter and experience the supernatural love and power of God.

My children, draw closer to the father, learn how to pray with your hearts and allow him to transform and heal your lives in every way.”

What more is there to say only that God desperately desires to pour out His love and Spirit on us and to transform our lives and so pleads with us to pray with our hearts and to learn about spiritual things so that we’ll be able to follow him!

Come Holy Spirit, transform our lives and teach us to be true sons and daughters of God our magnificent father so that His supernatural healing love flows through our every action and onto others!

Have a blessed day,

Michael

P.S. I need to get a new phone. If anyone would like to help please get in touch. I use my phone for everything (blogs pictures etc.)

Hello everyone, Séamus is back in London from his week in Northern Ireland and to celebrate his return he took me out for a nice fry up yesterday!

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Other than that the mission goes on and today God put it on my heart to share an experience that happened the other evening in relation to priests and intercession.

As I was going to bed I felt a sudden heaviness in the room and so I tuned into the spiritual world to see if it was a demon or something else!

As it turned out it wasn’t a demon but it was a group of priests in purgatory asking me to pray for them….

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Now you might be wondering why I was feeling heavy but the answer is simple. If you hang around a smoker you’ll smell the smoke or if you’re beside an alcoholic you’ll smell the drink and so when souls in purgatory manifest, they bring their suffering and pain with them and sensitive souls like me feel it.

The only thing to do in this case is to pray for them and Jesus has taught me to pray in a special way, repairing for their specific sins.

So I first asked them why they were there and how to pray and what they said back to me was textbook so to speak.

They showed me all the times that they neglected prayer in their earthly lives, they showed me the lack of love and belief that they had in the real presence of Jesus in the eucharist and the casual way they administered many of the sacraments and finally they showed me their utter lack of love for Our Lady.

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And so I set a about praying as follows:

1. For their lack of prayer I was immediately brought in the spirit before Jesus in the blessed sacrament where I began praising him and adoring his eucharistic body.

As I was doing this I was immediately aware of the effects soothing the souls in purgatory as if somehow they had come back to life and that my prayers were their prayers which were compensating for their mistakes.

2. For their cavalier way of administering the sacraments I was inspired before God to ask for forgiveness on their behalf and again as this happened I saw the suffering of the souls becoming less and less.

3. And finally I was inspired to love Our Lady and make prayers and expressions of love and praise to repair for the lack of love and respect these souls showed her while on earth.

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After this I saw the group of priests being released and suddenly all the heaviness left me and I was able to sleep!

As I reflected on it afterwards I thought of both the privilege and responsibility of being a priest and felt Jesus’ pain and lonliness that so many priests for whatever reason are like these suffering souls.

Our Lady in Medjugorje is always asking us to pray for our priests because so very many of them are totally lost and are a million miles away from being enthusiastic and spirit-filled lovers of Jesus and the gospel.

And so with that in mind I encourage everyone to pray for priests and if there any priests reading, I pray that you will be inspired to love Jesus, prayer and Our Lady more and to repent and repair of any bad habits or ideas that block the flow of grace in your lives.

May the Holy souls in purgatory and all the angels and saints in heaven pray for us and pray for our priests.

Bless your day,

Michael

Good morning from a rainy London where I’m enjoying a nice coffee and thanking God for a fun night last night.

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As the rain pours down Our Lady began to speak to me, she doesn’t miss a beat and this message really made me smile because I find the way she describes things so simple and yet so profoundly wise.

“Our Lady 

Just as the rain is pouring outside my child, God’s grace is like falling rain on your souls.

Like the rain, it is life to the trees and the flowers which give you the oxygen that you breathe and yet to your daily lives, the rain is an inconvenience!!

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How much more similar to the spiritual life than you may first think!

The spiritual life is the life water to your souls and yet in your busy world so many run from it just like running from the rain.

Like avoiding to get wet, people avoid spiritual things at times. They build busy and waterproof lives of material things around them and avoid going out into the unknown territory of the spirit.

My children, how so very many people live their lives the wrong way around as they frantically avoid the deeper questions of life, of death and of the soul.

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In the eyes of eternity, your lives are nothing but a quick shower of rain here today and gone tomorrow.

Open your hearts my children and live for the Kingdom of heaven and let every day be an opportunity for more life giving grace to touch and transform your souls into the most beautiful heavenly flowers for the glory of God and as a witness to your world.“

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And so today Our Lady as always is encouraging us to keep on going, to keep on praying and to allow the rain of heaven to transform us into beautiful flowers of love for the whole world to see!

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Praise God for rain and Rayne. Have a wonderful day.

Michael

Happy feast of the Holy Family, St. Stephen’s day and boxing day!!

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Certainly a bit of a post Christmas day combo of feasts and prayers.

Of course for some today’s feast of the Holy Family may be bitter sweet after spending the entire day yesterday with family and realising that they are anything but Holy!!

Perhaps others were away from their families and today’s feast day might also be a bit painful and of course those others have the perfect loving ideal families….we all hate you🤣🤣

Yet whatever the case we can learn from the Holy Family. Firstly Mary and Joseph were away in Bethlehem and away from their friends and families when Jesus was born…

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Mary is said to have been about 14 or 16 when she had Jesus, in some ways only a child herself and there she was a young mother in a distant town.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Holy Family was that there were only 3 of them!!

The aunties and uncles and cousins and kids were absent…perhaps a lesson for us all for next Christmas 🤣🤣🤣

The Holy Family show us that we don’t have to have much or even be big in number to be happy, we just need to find peace and contentment in the simple things and not let our hearts be troubled for what we don’t have or by comparing what we have to others.

I’m sure that the Holy Family did not have Turkey for Christmas and that Santa never visited Jesus with a playstation 4 and yet little Jesus was happy!

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If today this little child could speak to you and I about our lives and families….what do you think he’d say?

Personally I think he’d tell me to stop moaning and to focus on all the blessings that I have here in London while other people in other corners of the world are starving.

What might he tell you about your life and family and how might he change your way of seeing things?

And so on this day of the Holy Family let us ask Jesus, Mary & Joseph to intercede for us that we may find peace and contentment in our lives regardless of whether we have big families or small families or even no family because in reality at the end of the day we are all part of one big family, God’s family!

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Blessings to all!

Michael

Good morning and sincerely wishing you all a very happy Christmas.

Last night I was at two Christmas masses, during the first I couldn’t help but notice the baby Jesus (a statue I mean) in front of the altar and asked myself a simple question:

“What on earth must we look like to non-Christians or atheists?”

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In this modern world of science how could a groups of adults get together and actually believe that God became a little baby over 2000 years ago and that today is his birthday….

Not to mention the whole rising from the dead and giving is his body to eat in the form of the eucharist at mass…

We must look like a group of brainwashed mentally unwell cannibals I thought as I joined in the apostles creed and said with all my heart “I believe”!

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Anyway as I always do I asked Jesus for who or for what my mass intention would be and he spoke to me very clearly “for those who don’t know me and who don’t believe in me”!

I could feel his mercy in my heart and it was Jesus himself who was inspiring my previous thoughts as he was showing me just how hard it is to believe nowadays without some sort of special grace or revelation. Common sense alone would certainly not bring someone to becoming a catholic.

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Of course I know this well because it wasn’t common sense that converted me but a direct experience.

So as I left the church I asked Jesus that somehow he’d use me more to bring non-believers to him by bridging the gap between the two worlds and he answered my prayer.

In our house at the moment there is a very nice guy who is a part of the Jesuit refugee program. His life hasn’t been easy and he is of the muslim faith.

We got talking about Jesus and he felt a desire to go down to the church (mass #2) for the midnight mass.

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I was very happy to take him down and to talk him through the mass and what was happening and again to explain to him what we believe in. It was also an opportunity to practice my french as he’s french speaking.

After mass he lit a candle in front of a statue and he had no idea about what the statue meant, the intercession of the saints….How could he?

So we went on a tour of the church visiting the sacred heart of Jesus, Our Lady of Fatima, the 14 stations of the cross, St. Therese of the child Jesus and finally the altar and the tabernacle.

I felt like one of those tour guides you see at cathedrals except that instead of talking about the art and dates and all all sorts of insignificant dribble, I was talking about Jesus and Mary and the angels and saints.

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The National History museum comes to mind again!!!

My friend was extremely interested and also extremely respectful of everything that I explained to him and the more he asked and the more I explained the more I thought “this is a lot to take in’.

To the outsider becoming a catholic is like learning a whole new language and in this hour or so we had only skimmed the surface.

And I figure that this is also why Jesus is so patient with unbelievers and also with believers because there is just so much to learn, to understand and then to assimilate and integrate into our lives.

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On the other hand it is also why we must pray and educate ourselves so that we have the wisdom and the strength to say with all our hearts:

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And to willingly suffer any backlash, mockery and rejection that believing in such things may bring in today’s very secularised world where God is ignored and the world of the spirit is ridiculed.

So on that note I wish you all a happy Christmas and may your faith grow as you witness through words, actions and deeds what it is to be a Christian in 2021/22.

Blessings of Jesus to all

Michael

We all have heard of the rhyme ‘it the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse’.

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Nowadays it might be more appropriate to say “it was the hype before Christmas and all through the town, not a creature was silent, not even a clown’.

Wherever you are all feel the tension between being still and having a peaceful Christmas and at the same time having to shop and prepare and meet and great people.

For the last 14 years I’ve spent Christmas in a wide variety of places and yet from Australia to England it’s always similar, looking for peace in the storm!!

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Yet if we pray and think of the first Christmas we find that Mary and Joseph would have lived the same thing.

They had no idea where they were going to sleep that first Christmas night not to mention the drama of giving birth and looking after a new child in a new environment….certainly not what we would call peaceful or stress free!

And yet on the middle of the drama were profound moments of peace, awe and ecstasy as heaven met earth with God becoming man.

And that is what I’ve learnt to be the secret to sanity over these periods, not in trying to control all around me because that’s impossible and not running away from it all and opting out because that would be equally impossible and unkind to others but instead, every day finding those little 10 minutes and half hours here and there where I sit with Jesus and breathe in His peace and calm.

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One holy lady was said to cover her heart every now and then with her apron and told her kids that when they saw her like this that she was praying and not to be disturbed!! Whatever works!

One thing is sure though, Jesus loves when we do this and He does listen and He does help us. We don’t have to be in a church because each one of us has a little prayer cell inside that we can visit when we still ourselves.

Personally I take these little time outs all the time! In stressful meetings I excuse myself to go to the toilet and I’ve found it a great place to pray over the years no matter where I am because everyone will always have a toilet!!

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So in that spirit, may we all find peace in the storm today, joy in the chaos and moments of stillness and prayer in the hype and may these moments recharge us so that we can be joyful and of good cheer to others that we meet!!

Have a lovely night before Christmas!

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Michael

During this Christmas Season many people give and receive gifts and in a way why not?! After all Christmas is the time when God Himself gave us all the biggest gift of all, Jesus.

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The trouble is that we can’t really see him or touch him or play with him as we would with a material gift and you know what they say; out of sight, out of mind.

Our Lady is always calling us back to the heart of things and reminding us of the greatest gifts that God wants to give us this Christmas, the gifts in our hearts.

‘Our Lady

Write!

My dear children, as Christmas draws nearer I once again call you to preparing your hearts in prayer for this wonderful celebration.

Jesus desires to pour so many graces on open hearts which is why I invite you to prepare in prayer.

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In the silence of prayer you will hear the cry of your hearts and you will understand your need for Jesus and his grace.

Bring him everything and especially bring him your hurts, wounds and faults in the sacrament of reconciliation.

The greatest gifts that you can receive this Christmas are not the material ones but the extraordinary graces that heaven wishes to pour on you.”

Many people who are rich with material things walk around depressed and full of fear. Others have maybe lost a loved one this year or for whatever reason are estranged from family and are finding it difficult or impossible to get over…

Others are ill or are afraid of getting ill and have no peace in their hearts while others are paralyzed with worry about the future.

Into all these troubled and wounded hearts, Jesus desires to bring the greatest gift of all, the gift of peace.

He needs our help though, through prayer and confession and vulnerability from our hearts we can invite Him and and we can allow Him to begin the healing process on our wounded hearts this Christmas.

And that my friends would not only be the best gift that you could receive this Christmas, it would also be the best gift that you could give Jesus!

I did and I’ve never regretted it.

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Ho, ho, ho….Holy Christmas everyone!!

Michael

Only a few days left now till Christmas and already on can feel the stress in the air.

Not all people feel happy at Christmas and especially not all LGBT people when Christmas can remind them of all the rejection and discrimination from the church and their families.

Recently in the USA a diocese in Michigan banned all LGBT people from participating in the sacraments. What will the words “happy Christmas” mean to the gay community over there?

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This morning Our Lady spoke to me about this area…

“Our Lady 

Christmas my child can be a particularly painful time for those on the margins of society and especially those in the LGBT community.

God made all for family and community and when these relationships break down it can be particularly painful.

Over this Christmas period things like drug use, sexual promiscuity and suicidal thoughts and attempts increase dramatically.

This of course is not just in the LGBT area but it is particularly serious for these people.

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Remember my children that Jesus too faced tremendous rejection on his first arrival into the world. He was not recognized, not accepted and even sought after to be killed.

Open your hearts my children this Christmas to those that are rejected by society and family for just cause and allow the love of Jesus to flow through your hearts to them “

Our Lady is of course our mother and as a mother she is a mother to each and every one of us regardless of orientation or colour or creed. She has a place in her heart for us and she knows that God does too even if our church in her brokenness is struggling to find that space.

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Let’s pray this Christmas for all families divided become of LGBT related issues and be sensitive to Our Lady’s call of love and generosity for all those who will be lonely and isolated this Christmas.

Michael