Thus in Medjugorje, the Blessed Mother had to remind humanity that on top of materialism and worldliness, “God exists.” Her very own words, “God exists.” The statement would seem superfluous because the fact of her apparitions in Medjugorje since 1981 would presuppose God’s existence. But the Mother of God can’t be short of wisdom. The way I see it, she had to stress that God exists, as do cellphones and tablets.
Relatedly, the Blessed Mother has also been telling us these days, also in Medjugorje, to mind eternity, that life on earth is temporary. Just like the latest IPhone or Samsung models which cease to be the latest models a year after. In various ways, she had relayed to us personal eternities in Medjugorje.
For example, when the mother of seer Jakov Colo died, the Blessed Mother comforted him by saying, “Your mother is with me.”
Also in the case of seer Ivanka Elez, whose mother had died two months before the start of the Medjugorje apparitions in 1981, the Blessed Mother granted her request to see her mother who thus appeared to Ivanka three times, at one time even embracing her and telling her daughter “I am proud of you.”
Marija Pavlovic, also a Medjugorje visionary, also gave insights of the afterlife in an interview. She said: “At the moment of death, God gives everyone the grace to see his whole life, to see what he has done, to recognize the results of his choices on earth. And each person, when he sees himself in the divine light of reality, chooses for himself where he belongs. Every individual chooses for himself what he personally deserves for all eternity.”
There is no shortage of accounts on the other side of eternity, a level that tells us of the importance of how life on earth should be lived. In the apparitions of the Blessed Mother in Fatima, Portugal in 1917, seer Lucia dos Santos recalled being given a vision of this other side called hell.
Lucia described the place as “a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.” One day while tending sheep at a place called Pedreira, little Francisco Marto saw “one of those huge beasts that we saw in Hell. He was right here breathing out flames!”
Again in Medjugorje, Marija described hell as “a large space with a big sea of fire in the middle. There are many people there. I particularly noticed a beautiful young girl. But when she came near the fi re, she was no longer beautiful. She came out of the fi re like an animal; she was no longer human.” Or take the following acccount of Holly MacClure, author of the book “23 Minutes in Hell.”
“On Sunday, Nov. 22, 1998, my wife, Annette, and I spent the evening at the home of one of our close friends. There was nothing unusual about that night. Annette and I headed home around 11 p.m., and we fell into bed shortly before midnight, unaware that my life was about to be changed forever by an event I still find hard to explain. Suddenly, at 3 a.m. on the 23rd, without any notice, I found myself being hurled through the air, and then was falling to the ground, completely out of control. I landed in what appeared to be a prison cell. The walls of the cell were made out of rough-hewn stone and had a door made of what appeared to be thick, metal bars. I was completely naked, which added to the vulnerability of a captive. This was not a dream—I was actually in this strange place. Fully awake and cognizant, I had no idea what had happened, how I had traveled, or why I was there until it was shown to me and explained later during my journey.
“The very first thing I noticed was the temperature. It was hot—far beyond any possibility of sustaining life. It was so hot that I wondered, ‘Why am I still alive?’ How could I survive such intense heat? My flesh should disintegrate from off my body at any moment. The reality was that it didn’t. This wasn’t a nightmare; it was real. The severity of this heat had the effect of taking every ounce of strength out of me,” he recalled.
