Shawn

I heard about Medjugorje in 1983 while in college from a priest friend. It turns out he was the same priest who married us and baptized all three of our kids. But I never really had a burning desire to come here.

The Blessed Mother didn’t really play a significant role to me until Erin [my wife] came to Medjugorje. She always wanted me to come and I was really resistant to go at the time. Primarily because I was working and I had other priorities and if I was going to make a trip to Europe it was going to be somewhere fun but I agreed to come for her 50th birthday. Part of the reason I resisted to come, I think, is if you do something like this, and I knew the profound effect it had on [my wife], that our lives probably would change. And you get pretty comfortable living the way you are living. It’s true, it has changed our lives, but it’s definitely been for the positive.

I had heard about Fatima and Lourdes and we finally got a chance to go to those places and they are wonderful. But those apparitions happened many many years ago in the past but what we are experiencing in Medjugorje is happening right now.

Not just with the visionaries, which is super special, but this whole community; they are living their faith. As we found out when you come here more often you get to meet some of the locals, and find out that they have real world problems. They have the same issues that everybody else has that would be in a small town.

They are witnesses of what the true Christian community is like and are an example for what we can bring back to our own communities. This is what we are trying to do, bring back a piece of Medjugorje to our own community. You can change the world. There’s no question about that.