left us in the battle.
I feel as if I am drowning in my circumstances 
- to find faith in the midst of the chaos.
I'm chosen, holy and dearly loved.
The pastor couldn't figure out what the man was talking about. Then the man said, 'It rang and rang, but I didn't answer.' 
The reason why it showed on the man's caller ID that the call came from 'Almighty God' is because the church that the pastor attends is called Almighty God Tabernacle!! 
I always used to ask God to show me how to live faith ..... 
It's already a few years since I had a very significant dream, which is vividly imprinted in my mind and in my heart forevermore.
No doubt it was an answer to my prayers and it made me feel so deeply cared for and loved!
The dream:
"I climb up a rather high mountain together with many other people.
We walk in silence on a narrow path, in a row.
I understand that we are pilgrims, when I see a church far away high up on the mountain, beautifully “set” on the horizon.
I am full of expectancy. I love the mountains and I enjoy the view and the peaceful climbing. When we reach the church and when everybody is inside, I immediately notice a man who shuts all the doors in what seems to me a definitive manner.
He blocks the doors nailing pieces of wood on them. Instantly I feel claustrophobic and ask the man to please open the doors again.
I don’t like to be closed in, I feel uneasy, I want to go outside again, but there is no reply.
I look around and there I see a staircase.
I run up the stairs and indeed I find a little door which opens to a balcony and I step out: What I see in that moment is so immensely moving! I see a beautiful green valley stretched before my eyes (it does not seem the same valley we have come from).
At the end of this valley there is a golden city.
Everything is so extremely brilliant and beautiful that my heart fills with a longing so strong that I can hardly bear it.
I'm overwhelmed and stand there in utter awe for quite a while. Then I do not resist anymore.
I cry out, I want to go there, I feel within my heart that the Place is like Paradise.
It's as if from the shining town a voice called me, “come, come, here is beauty, here is love, here is peace “. ..... 
Then I hurry downstairs shouting “How can I reach the place I've seen from the balcony? There is a golden city! Please open the doors ...” Nobody answers and I feel deeply frustrated for being closed in.
Then I find myself standing right in front of the Altar with a little golden Tabernacle. The Tabernacle is beautifully decorated.
While gazing at the Tabernacle I suddenly become silent and I feel at peace. In that moment I hear a beautiful voice saying "You know the way, I am the way, there is no other way to reach the place you've seen ..... come through the Tabernacle, this is the only way".
The Voice vibrated softly in my heart. My reaction to the “invitation” was strange. I thought “the Tabernacle is too small to get through, I'll never manage ........”.
The dream ended and I woke up just in that moment when I was doubting to make it “through” the Tabernacle.
I remembered vividly everything and finally, my heart strongly pounding, I understood.
JESUS had told me that HE WAS THE WAY! HE IS THE WAY to perfect joy “perfecta laetitia”! And I remembered the words He said to His disciples during the Last Supper “Do this in memory of Me…..”.
The Holy Eucharisty! …. The Tabernacle! Since I had this wonderful dream I approach the Holy Eucharisty in the Tabernacle.....
Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge.
He was a kind, decent, mostly good man, generous to his family and upright in his dealings with other men.
But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time.
It just didn’t make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise.
He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story, about God coming to earth as a man.
“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.”
He said he’d feel like a hypocrite and that he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed, and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall.
He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper.
Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another.
Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window.
But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow.
They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony.
That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.
Quickly he put on a coat and galoshes and tramped through the deepening snow to the barn.
He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in.
So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs and sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted, wide-open doorway of the stable.
But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow.
He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms.
Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.
And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him.
To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. 
If only I could think of someway to let them know that they can trust me – that I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them.
But how, because any move he made tended to frighten and confuse them.
They just would not follow.
They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.
“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid.
Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm . . . . . . . . . to the safe, warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”
At that moment, the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind.
And he stood there listening to the bells – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas.
And he sank to his knees in the snow.
I asked this question, of my Father above, 
"Why do bad things happen to the people I love?"
The answer has long been misunderstood,
Why tragedy occurs to the just and the good.
The Lord whispered softly, in a voice sweet and low, "You'll find the answer in the Book I left you, centuries ago."
He allows the rain to fall on His sheep, To keep us humble, forgiving, and meek.
A little rain must fall on every life.
This world is full of sorrow and strife.
He makes the rain fall on the lost and unjust, In order to gain their repentance and trust.
He hopes to increase our virtues And to get our priorities straight, So, when the death angel comes, to carry us home, He'll be waiting for us at the gate.
Author Unknown
who arranged a running competition. 
Then when the day is ended,
May I resolve anew
To guide tomorrow by the motto:
What Would Jesus Do?
Author Unknown
Father Tomas Del Valle-Reyes
Discovering 21 Century
P. O. BOX 1170New York, NY 10018
212-244-4778
Radiosigloxxi@aol.com
A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. 
Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.
That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Dana Lu Blessing.
At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.
Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he could.
"There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one."
Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Dana would likely face if she survived.
She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.
No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four.
Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away. Through the dark hours of morning as Dana held onto life by the thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and more determined that their tiny daughter would live -and live to be a healthy, happy young girl. But David, fully awake and listening to additional dire details of their daughter's chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.
David walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral arrangements.
Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he was doing everything trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen.
I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way! I don't care what the doctors say; Dana is not going to die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!"
As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Dana clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could endure. But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana.
Because Dana's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love.
All they could do, as Dana struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.
There was never a moment when Dana suddenly grew stronger.
But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there. At last, when Dana turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. 
And two months later -though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero.Dana went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted. Today, five years later, Dana is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering grey eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs, what so ever, of any mental or physical impairment.
Simply, she is everything a little girl can be and more- but that happy ending is far from the end of her story. One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Dana was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's base- ball team was practicing.
As always, Dana was chattering non-stop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, Dana asked, "Do you smell that?" Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."
Dana closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?" Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain". Still caught in the moment, Dana shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest." 
Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Dana then happily hopped down to play with the other children.
Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.
During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Dana on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.
You now have 1 of 2 choices... You can either pass this on and let other people catch the Jesus bumps like you did, or .. You can close this page and act like it didn't touch your heart like it did mine.
I can do all things in Him who strengthens me. (Phil 4:13)
Father Tomas Del Valle-Reyes
Discovering 21 Century
P. O. BOX 1170New York,
NY 10018
212-244-4778
Radiosigloxxi@aol.com
