Hello, I'm Father Joe Roche of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. Thank you for joining us as we continue with our year-long journey, reading the diary of St. Maria Faustina Kavalska from beginning to end. Today we take up from where we left off, beginning with diary entry number 619. At the beginning of Lent, I also asked to have the subject of my particular examin changed,

and I was told to do everything with the pure intention of reparation for poor sinners.

This keeps me in continual union with God, and this intention perfects my actions,

because everything I do is done for immortal souls. All hardships and fatigue are as nothing

when I think that they reconcile sinful souls with God. Mary is my instructress, who is ever teaching me how to live for God.

My spirit brightens up in your gentleness and your humility, O Mary.

On one occasion, when I dropped by the chapel for a five-minute adoration and was praying for a certain soul,

I came to understand that God does not always accept our petitions for the souls we have in mind,

but directs those these to other souls.

Hence, although we do not relieve the souls we intended to relieve in their

purgatorial sufferings, still our prayer is not lost. Intimate communion of a soul with God. God approaches

a soul in a special way known only to himself and to the soul.

No one perceives this mysterious union.

Love presides in this union and everything is achieved by love alone.

Jesus gives himself to the soul in a gentle and sweet manner and in his depths there is peace.

He grants the soul many graces and makes it capable of sharing his eternal thoughts,

and frequently he reveals to it his divine plans.

Father Andrash told me that it would be a good thing to have in God's church a group of souls who would beg for his mercy,

because in fact we are all in need of that mercy.

After these words, an extraordinary light filled my soul. Oh, how good is the Lord.

March 18, 1936. Once I asked the Lord Jesus to take the first step by bringing about some change

or some external event or by letting them expel me

...