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YOU'LL SPEND ETERNITY PRAISING GOD, SO START NOW AND SEE IT FORM AS A 'BRIDGE TO HEAVEN'

We'll be spending an eternity praising, adoring, and thanking God, and it’s good to get practice. He is worthy of all worship and in our times we forget how long His mercy has endured and how we must thank him all the more intensely.

Ungratefulness and pride build walls that separate us from God while humility is the bridge to Heaven.  

God illuminates with shafts of pure anointing and tapping into that brilliance is the key to the miraculous. That is an important message for our time: We live at a moment in history when science is trying to declaim anything that may be miraculous, and when even many in religious institutions have lost belief in such interventions (as if the Holy Spirit stopped shedding such grace 2,000 years ago), but actually Jesus told us upon His Ascension that He would be sending the Holy Spirit (not taking Him with Him), and it is the Holy Spirit Who works miracles. This is why it is important to constantly invoke the Spirit in the Name of Jesus.

I once spoke to an internationally known cancer surgeon named Dr. Michael H. Torosian  who prays before every operation and says the results are often “remarkable.”

Without prayer, he would be your standard surgeon.

Prayer affords the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to work within us -- and He does so in many ways that are without explanation. Time and again I have seen miracles spring from faith if that faith is unwavering.

"A lot of physicians have a hard time grasping this because they're taught as scientists to 'prove' things and you can't prove a lot that goes on in the spiritual realm,” noted Dr. Torosian. “But we see a lot of things that you can't explain with just physical data."

“Approximately one-third of the Gospel is taken up by the cures wrought by Jesus in the brief period of His public life,” notes Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the Pontifical Household in Rome. “It is impossible to eliminate these miracles, or to give them a natural explanation, without distorting the whole Gospel and making it incomprehensible.”

Some very good news: a new poll by Fox News this month week showed that 77 percent of Americans believe that prayer can help heal a person from injury or illness!

One of the most astonishing cures -- and I have mentioned this before -- happened to a doctor himself, Vinicio Arrieta, a Harvard-educated physician who was director of medicine at the University of Zulia in Venezuela. He experienced his healing at a holy spot near Caracas that stands as one of the few officially approved by the Catholic Church as a place where Mary has appeared in apparition. Originally owned by a Pentecostal and known as “Betania” (which means Bethany, where Jesus, as described in Luke 24, gave His famous blessing), it was later purchased by a Catholic mystic and that is how Dr. Arrieta, who was suffering from cancer of the prostate, heard of it.

He was in desperate need. The cancer had spread to the lumbar column of his spine. He had been given two years to live.

But Arrieta had not given up. Instead, he placed his faith in God and turned fear into the energy of action. He also cleared his conscience. He told the Lord – pleaded – that he wanted to live for his children, and renounced his pretentiousness.

After that confession, Dr. Arrieta spent all night praying, and at six in the morning, with others crowded there for a feast day, he sang a little song to the Blessed Mother. As he did, says Arrieta, the sun seemed to act strangely. The center became green and it also began to pulse, to spin on the inside, and to whirl closer, as during the famous apparitions at Fatima – which in fact was the feast day the pilgrims there were commemorating.

“I began to feel an infusion, a heat within my body,” recalled Dr. Arrieta. “I grabbed my wife, and I began to scream, 'I'm being cured! I'm being cured! I'm being cured!' They thought I was crazy. But I felt this infusion arrive at my spinal column and go to my prostate.”

At that point the doctor claims he himself saw an apparition of the Virgin, shedding grace as in classic portraits such as the Miraculous Medal.

“Five days later,” he adds, “the prostatic specific antigen indicating the cancer was not detectable."

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