Hello everyone
I hope you are well and at peace.
I had an incredibly blessed time in New Zealand and God taught me many lessons. Whilst I was in Christchurch I had the privilege to meet with with Sister Dorothea, she has been an enclosed Carmelite nun for the past 25 years. She herself was converted during a Black sabbath Rock concert and has an amazing heart to pray for the young people of the world to experience the fire of Gods love. Over 20 years ago God inspired her to pray for one person in particular that would have a mission to spread that same fire. As we talked together I really saw that her prayers were instrumental in my conversion and sustained me in all the battles I've had as I've tried to follow Gods path for me. I thank God that we had a chance to meet up and see the perfection of his plans coming together.
I was asked to speak in a prison, on arrival I was told they expected me as an educational speaker. There was some pressure to not mention God in the talk. I went ahead and spoke about how it was God and him alone who had transformed my life. You could see that the prisoners were deeply moved and the woman who arranged the talk came up to me and said "If God isn't educational then I don't know who is!"
On my journey home I stopped off in Los Angeles for a couple of days and a mutual friend had arranged for me to meet up with Jim Caviezel (the actor who played Jesus in the passion of the Christ) I went to pray a rosary to ask God to bless this meeting and as I was praying I suddenly remembered how a few weeks previously I had been driving from Auckland to do a school three hours north, I was feeling very tired. The evening after I had spoken in the school I ran a reconciliation and healing service in a local church, after which a girl from the school came up to me with tears running down her face and explained how during my talk in the school God's love had touched her heart, so she had come along in the evening in the hope the same experience, When the Priest carried Jesus in the blessed sacrament to her God had brought massive healing into her heart and she was crying with pure joy. The same evening a 22 year old lad told me how he had been to confession for the first time in over 10 years. All this reminded me that the greatest thing we can ever do is to introduce someone to the God who loves us, and that is what is important to God. After all of this I didn't end up meeting with Jim Caviezel and it was the meeting with the mutual friend Paul which was important to the Lord because he said the conversation had changed his life.
On arriving back in Ireland I did a talk for a prayer group and I felt while I was talking that even though I had really prayed about the talk I was a bit all over the place, to my surprise the man who ran the prayer group came up and told me it was the best talk he had ever heard. This really taught me that we are not the best judges of how God is using us and that we should never analyse, just trust in him.
Finally I was down in Limerick for a fundraising evening for Mary's meals where I shared my story and met up with my old friend Magnus McFarlane Barrow who founded this fantastic charity which now feeds over 360,000 children in the poorest countries of the world every day.
You are in my prayers every day, please keep me in yours. I am off to New York to talk at a big Mens day of prayer among other things and I'm really looking forward to that.
God bless you in his dep love,
John Pridmore
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