In the August message, Our Lady speaks to us about praying with the heart, about lifting up the heart to Heaven in order to experience the God of love. Our Lady constantly emphasizes the need for prayer, without which we cannot grow and walk the path of conversion.

In this message, she invites us again to strong and powerful prayer and warns us of the danger of modernism. Modernist ideas come first into our thoughts. And an idea, a thought, is a spirit. We can tell whether ideas are inspired by God or Satan by the fruit they bear in our hearts. God’s thoughts always bring peace, joy, the power of forgiveness, faith, hope and love into our hearts. Thoughts from the evil one leave us with restlessness, fear, guilt, blaming others as well as ourselves, division and disorder within and around us.

It is not for nothing they say: Watch your thoughts, lest they become words. Watch your words, lest they become deeds. Watch your actions, lest they become habits. Watch your habits, lest they become destiny.

Everything begins with thoughts. Thought begins in our heart. Thoughts are not sin. They become sin when we willingly agree with them. When we agree with thoughts by our free will, it is a sin, even if we do not commit it on the outside. Therefore, it is important to fill our hearts with God’s thoughts of peace, goodness, optimism, faith in goodness, and trust that our life is in God’s hands and will end well.

One of the first messages of Our Lady in Medjugorje was, “Dear children, I have come to tell you that God exists.”

It may seem like a very simple and plain message. But we see that many people today live as if God does not exist. It is possible to live a lifetime and not think about God. It is possible to think that we can do without God. Just like we live and don’t think about the air we live from. We only think of air when we are short of it or when we cannot breathe in. Isn’t that the same with God?

St. Paul said to the Athenians, “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:28). Even so, man can be so blinded and his reason so “petrified” that he does not see this truth.

Today we painfully experience what happens to man when he separates himself from God. We see all of man’s delusions when he tries to be creator and master of himself. We see it in all areas of human life, especially in moral, sexual and family life. It seems that it is not enough for man to be male and female according to God’s plan, so he invents new sexes, and there seems to be no end to all the possible delusions into which man plunges. All these modern ideas undermine the very identity of human nature and the truth about man.

That is why Our Lady warns us of these dangers and invites us by giving us the means to fight against the forces of evil that want to destroy the joy of the encounter with Jesus.

Let us keep Our Lady’s motherly words in our hearts, the words by which she invites us to cling to God’s truth about ourselves.

Let us pray: Our Lady, you who are full of grace and God’s wisdom, take us by the hand, lead us along the paths of faith which you have also walked. You know our life and the paths we must walk. Strengthen us, Mother, especially when we are weak, when we are tired, when we want to give up. Thank you for never giving up on your children. Grant us the grace to resist all the thoughts that take us away from God, from the truth and the life of God within us. May your example of perseverance in faith, especially in the time of the crosses and difficulties of life, inspire us. May our hearts be directed to the Lord from whom our help and salvation comes. Amen.