Since coming back from Medjugorje something that has really touched me is the good friends that God has put around me here in London and their enormous generosity in both heart and with meals etc.

Sorry I have no photo of the ladies but you know who you are (N, E….).

Settling back to life in London and adjusting to Séamus now being in Medjugorje after such a wonderful pilgrimage hasn’t been the easiest but when friends come along it makes all the difference.

Good friends are those people with whom we can share the good and the bad, our joys and our worries and who love us, accept us and help us.

As I reflect on the truly good friends that God has put around me, I reflect also on another friend and what he shared with me last night, Jesus.

“Jesus 

My child, how I delght when souls spend time with me heart to heart.

When you open your hearts and share your burdens and worries with me, not only do I bless and pour graces on your troubled hearts, I also pour graces onto all those people dear to your hearts whom you love.

When you unite your heart with mine then all the troubles, worries and loves of your hearts become mine and similarly the troubles and worries of my divine heart become part of yours.

This is why you cannot love me with your hearts and be indifferent to the sin in the world and how much my heart is sad and troubled.

With your prayers, you can console my heart and draw from it the graces of conversion for souls.

Yet so many come to me only with their worries and concerns and do not think of me and my wounded heart.

This wounded love that burns for souls is at the heart of all true evangelisation and it is only in spending time with me that your hearts will open and you will find the evangelical zeal and energy for mission.“

And so we see that friendship with Jesus has many similarities with human friendships where we listen to eachother, console eachother, help eachother and love eachother!

Imagine a friendship where we never asked the other person how they are but just spoke all about our own troubles and then left….it wouldn’t last long. Or imagine if after sharing our hearts with a friend they just told us to be quiet and get over it and crushed us!

Sadly this is what we do to Jesus when we refuse to convert or to pray or to make him known and although he is God, he hurts and he weeps as he has no hands or no feet or no smartphone or no computer or Facebook or no Instagram only mine and yours!!

Our Lady, thank you for all the good friends in our lives, please help us to be a good friend to Jesus in everything we say and do so that others may come to know him too.

Michael