The Spirit of Medjugorje

"Dear children, At this time, when you are celebrating the day of All Saints, seek their intercession and prayers so that in union with them, you may find peace. May the Saints be your intercessors and example, that you imitate them and live holily. I am with you and intercede before God for each of you. Thank you for having responded to my call.“ (With Ecclesiastical approval)"

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How the Queen of Peace Prepared Us For A Serious Illness - And How She Can Help You Too

By Michelle Laque Johnson

     "How did you do it?"
     That's the question I'm often asked when people hear that my husband suffered through three bouts of cancer over eight years, had his leg amputated up to the hip, and became a quadriplegic. Until the last few months of his life, when I had to have help because I couldn't lift him, I was his sole caregiver even as I held down a full-time job.
     The answer to the above question is that I didn't do this by leaning on myself, and neither did my husband. Everything we did was simply a response to the grace that my husband and I received as a result of our call to conversion in Medjugorje. I share our story in my book, "Walking the Way of the Cross for Caregivers: How To Cope Practically, Emotionally, and Spiritually When a Loved One Has a Serious Illness," because our conversion was the key to our handling the suffering that came our way. To understand the enormity of that conversion, you have to know a little about who we were before Medjugorje and what happened while we were there. Below are a few excerpts from the book:
     For more than 16 years, I have been working as the Director of Communications for EWTN, so it may be hard for people who know me now to believe, but even though I had a wonderful Catholic upbringing, I ended up going to a very progressive "Catholic" college. My family had moved to Spain during my high school years, so when it came time to go to college, I opted to go to my mother's alma mater in Baltimore. I had family there. I knew if I needed help, I wouldn't be alone.

     Unfortunately, my mother's college had changed drastically since she had graduated. At the time I attended, we were given no real religious formation. The "religion" books they had us read were all about some amorphous being called God who was floating around "out there" in the cosmos. It's a miracle I kept my faith. There was no teaching about the immorality of abortion. In fact, I remember telling my mother that we didn't have to believe what the Pope said about contraception because he didn't deliver his pronouncement from the Chair of Peter. Where in the world did my 18-year-old self get that? During my time there, I was also taught about the women's movement with no Catholic filter. Equal Rights was all I heard - and that made all the sense in the world to me!

Michelle and Stu on Cross Mountain

     Fortunately, all of this didn't stop me from meeting and marrying the love of my life, Stuart "Stu" Johnson. He was not only smart, he was quite an athlete. But I could not have cared less about his athletic prowess! As I said to my mother before we married: "He makes me laugh; he can admit when he's wrong, and he's always willing to try new things." Those traits turned out to be the key to a happy marriage - at least for me!
     Stu, of course, went into the Navy upon graduation from the Naval Academy. After 10 years, he left the Service and went into specialty gas sales, a job that took him around the world. He stayed there until his conversion. My first job was as a Personnel Assistant for a large hotel chain. After 10 years of climbing the corporate ladder, I left to get a master's degree in Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago, and I worked at a regional newspaper, a national newspaper, and a trade journal.
     I loved being married to Stu. He called himself a "Northern Baptist," meaning there was none of that charismatic singing and shouting, but he didn't go to church. I decided that if I was going to call myself a Catholic, I should go weekly. But, except for Christmas and Easter, I went to church by myself. I prayed, but mostly when I wanted something. I prayed that God would bless my decisions, not that I would know His will for me. I didn't know any other way.
     The only time my husband ever got angry at me over my faith was after his mother died. His mother was cremated, and her ashes scattered. There was no service.
     I said to Stu, "You know, we really should pray for your Mom." He got indignant. "Look," he said, "I know you believe in that purgatory stuff, but I don't. My mother suffered from cancer for years. She's in heaven."
     I threw up my hands in mock surrender. "Okay, sorry."
     We went along like this for years, just enjoying life, working, traveling, and dreaming about the future, but our faith lives, such as they were, were separate.
     One day, a package arrived from my sister Marian. It was a stack of books about a place called Medjugorje. I had heard that Our Lady was appearing there to six children, but I didn't know much more about it.
     My sister knew I was a voracious reader, but at the time I was busy, so I put the books aside. One day, I picked one up out of curiosity - and, after that, nothing was ever the same. I believed what I was reading, probably because what I was reading reinforced all I had been taught growing up. It's just that now Our Lady was saying it! I felt like St. Paul when he was struck off his horse.
     Overnight, I started going to daily Mass, praying the Rosary, fasting, and going to confession weekly. I cried - a lot - but they were tears of joy because I knew - to use a Protestant expression - that I was being saved.
     My husband, meanwhile, was observing all of this and wondering what was happening with his wife. Fortunately, this man truly loved me. He listened, he learned, and one day he said: "Do you want to go to Medjugorje?" Did I? Of course, I did!
     "Then, we'll go," he said.
     "WE'LL go?"
     Years later, I asked Stu why he wanted to go with me on that fateful trip. He said it was because he knew something important was happening to me, and he wanted to be part of it. He didn't want me to change without him. Such a good man. Our Lady would honor that big time.
     The first night we were there, just before Mass at St. James Church, I showed Stu how to say a Rosary. The next night, I was saying my own prayers when I happened to glance over at my husband. He was crying. My husband was kind of a macho guy. He didn't cry.
     I looked away and kept praying. I looked back. Now, he was a complete mess. I looked over at him and mouthed, "Do you want to go outside?" He nodded.
     As we sat on a bench outside the church, I asked him what had happened. If I would have had to guess what he was about to say, we'd still be sitting there. This man, this Protestant, looked at me and said, "There is a purgatory," he paused and looked at me with great sorrow, "and my mother is there."
     To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. In my head, I was saying to the Blessed Mother, "What are you doing?" To him, I said: "How…how do you know?"
     He said while he was sitting in the church, he was holding photos of people our friends had asked us to pray for. He had his eyes closed. Suddenly, he said he felt as if someone had come up behind him and taken him by the shoulders and he felt something like electricity running up and down his arms. He opened his eyes to see who it was and what was happening, but no one was there.
     Instead, he suddenly had this crushing sense of - he didn't know how to describe it - not really despair? sadness? - in his chest - and he was just given to know that this was how his mother was feeling.
     "Okay," I said, desperately trying to make everything right. "It's okay. Your mother isn't in hell. She's in purgatory. That's where most of us go. We'll talk to a priest."
     A short time later, the priest we spoke to told us: "This is a great grace. Your mother needs prayers."
     As you can imagine, she got them! However, my husband made me promise I wouldn't tell anyone in our tour group - yes, we were on a tour - that this had happened to him. He didn't want them to think he was crazy.
     We were in Medjugorje several days when Stu walked up to me and said another thing I never expected to hear from him: "If I was wrong about purgatory, what else have I been wrong about? I want to become a Catholic." I was stunned, but I also realized Our Lady knew what she was doing, even if I didn't!
     Stu would indeed become a Catholic, and we would return to Medjugorje the following year so that he could receive Communion in St. James Church.
     As a result of our conversion, I left secular journalism for religious journalism and eventually Catholic communications. I would also become a fully professed secular Carmelite. Stu left the corporate world to become a high school physics teacher where he changed the lives of many of his students. Stu was making such a difference I thought the Lord would want him to continue with a job that my husband clearly saw as a vocation. But the Lord had other plans for us - "plans for welfare and not for evil" (Jeremiah 29:11) - just as He does for you.
     Those plans would result in a time of great spiritual growth, but they would not be easy. If we had not had our conversions, I don't know how we would have handled Stu's cancer, amputation, and resulting quadriplegia. Nor do I believe I would have been given the understanding, as I stood in a church praying the Stations of the Cross eight years after my husband's death, that during our eight year journey through cancer, my husband and I really were walking the Way of the Cross.
     I probably would have prayed during that time, but not the way I learned to pray in the face of Stu's illness. Like many, I came to realize that if we keep turning to God when we are suffering, deeper prayer is one of the fruits. And by that, I don't mean that we suddenly start spending hours on our knees. How would we even have the time? God doesn't expect that of us. What He does expect, what He does beg of us, is prayer from the heart and that can, and often does, happen on the fly.

Stu praying the Rosary

     Thanks to Jesus and Mary and Medjugorje, I was able to write a book for caregivers, which outlines both the practical and the spiritual things we did, things that worked and things that didn't, mistakes made and obstacles surmounted. I pray the book will help others who are going through a serious illness learn that they are not alone; that Jesus is never closer to us than when we are going through great suffering; that the good times are not over; and that suffering gives us an amazing opportunity to get closer to our loved ones in a way we probably never imagined possible.
     If you get only one lesson from this article or my book, I pray it is this: Whatever trouble you are facing, especially when there appears to be no way forward, take Our Lady's hand. Make the choice to walk with God. I promise you will never be sorry.
     Editor's note: I highly recommend Michelle's book. My only regret is that I should have bought it 6 months earlier when I first heard about it. It is available from Amazon (https://amzn.to/4efsG22), EWTN Religious Catalogue (https://bit.ly/ERC91400), and wherever books are sold.