The following is excerpted from a testimony given by Angeline Wilkes on Fruit of Medjugorje (Episode #493, aired on 10/24/22)
Hi, my name is Angeline, I’m 48, and I live in Sydney, Australia. I first heard about Medjugorje because as a 17-year-old teenager, my parents went to this place of pilgrimage, and they came home changed. They started to pray three Rosaries every single day, they were fasting on bread and water on Wednesdays and Fridays, and they changed…they’re always joyful, always peaceful, which took me by surprise.… I was in a relationship at this time with somebody, a boyfriend who was not very good for me. He did drugs and slept around, and for some reason, I couldn’t leave him. He seemed to have a hold on me. And I was expecting my parents to be very judgmental and reproach me. However, the way that they addressed that situation with me was with understanding and love, and so I was curious about this place. What kind of place changes people in such a way that they can be so understanding?... I knew my parents were praying for me as well, and when I was probably at the lowest, my mother handed me a picture of Jesus, and I looked down at the picture and I noticed Jesus was crying. Now…when you think of a picture of Jesus crying, you might sort of think of a teardrop in His eye, but it was a very real picture and His eyes were swollen, His nostrils were swollen and He was looking at me with such love, but such sadness. I asked my mother, “Why are you giving me a picture of crying Jesus?” And she kind of just smiled and walked away. The next day, when I looked at the picture, I saw just normal smiling Jesus. So that created a shift within me, and I remember I started to go to church myself, and I started to pray myself, and I started to develop a relationship with Christ. And for the first time, I opened up my heart to Christ and He showed me who He really was and that His love is so deep, so beautiful, so tender for every one of us. So, I went from being very weak, where I was not able to leave this man, not able to have control of my life and of what I was doing – to becoming very strong in Jesus. I realized that there is no deeper love than the love of God. And I was able to leave this man. I was able to say, “I love you, I forgive you, but I can’t stay with you.” I wished him all the best. But I had to come to Medjugorje and check the place out, because my conversion had begun but I hadn’t been [to Medjugorje] yet. Sometime later, I went traveling…I had lots of fun, partied, and then I got to Medjugorje, and I joined a pilgrimage. I think I was the youngest. I was 20, and I think everyone else was like 60 or 70+, but by the end of the 10 days, age just melted away. We are all just souls that had gotten to know each other in such a deep and beautiful and meaningful way. And that’s the wonderful thing about coming on pilgrimage here in Medjugorje. The friendships you make are so much deeper, they last forever. The first day, everyone was praying the Rosary in the church, and for some reason, I felt unworthy to be there, and the reason for that is when I walked into the church, everyone was on their knees and it was clear that everyone’s heart was with God, I could feel it.… The holiness that I felt when I walked in was something I had not experienced before, such that I felt, “I have to kneel.” The problem was I had a knee injury and it was very painful to kneel. I tried to kneel, the pain came, and I thought to myself, “I need to leave.” But a prayer was almost imprinted on my mind, like it came from somewhere, and it was something along the lines of: “Lord, take this pain away, so I can kneel before You.” As soon as that thought, that prayer, crossed my mind, I started to feel tingles around my knees, and I felt I was kneeling on a cloud of softness. There was complete softness underneath me, just like a cloud. I had heard a lot of stories and testimonies from Medjugorje before coming, and I remember thinking, “Oh, here we go, number one miracle.” I’ve been [here] five times, and I haven’t had one miracle like this, where some kind of physical manifestation occurs outside the realms of possibility, since. So, I was able to kneel with no pain through all the Rosary and the Mass after the Rosary, for two hours.… That was beautiful.
Some time later after the pilgrimage, I prayed to the Lord, because of this bad relationship that I had and finding my faith was so special to me. I looked into my future, and thought, “What do I want to do?” Marriage and children, to me, were very important, and so I asked the Lord to “Please pick my husband.” I’m not good at that, obviously. I’ve had a bad run. So, I left it with the Lord, and I prayed many Rosaries for whoever this man was going to be to enter my life. Not long after, on visiting a friend in Perth, which is the opposite side of Australia from where I live in Sydney, I met somebody and I didn’t, at the time, know that he could be “the one”. He was agnostic. He was very warm, and we started a relationship, albeit long distance. We spent a lot of time on the phone together. We really got to know each other through long telephone calls, and then some visits on the east and west coasts. But coming to Medjugorje and traveling had such an impression on me, that I’d already been planning to come back to Medjugorje and to travel. Our relationship had reached a point where we were getting a little more serious, and he asked if I would mind if he joined me.… I said, “You can join me, but I’m going to this holy place…you don’t have to come with me, but you can, if you want to.” David didn’t really understand Catholicism. He would find it strange talking to me on the phone when I’d say, “Sorry, I have to go now as I’d like to pray the Rosary with my parents.” He’d be like, “Oh, ok, whatever that means.” He’d asked me questions here and there, but in the main, he didn’t know or understand Catholicism.…
He came with me on that trip and on the fourth day, he was sick of all the Catholicism. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe.… It just didn’t have a connection with him. By day four, that evening, he said he was going to go for a hike or a walk and told me not to worry about him being back to the pansion for dinner.… I’m going to share a little bit of his story. He walked to the top of a mountain that if you look at Cross Mountain here in Medjugorje and run your eyes maybe a kilometer to the left, you’ll see another mountain with a radio tower – he decided that he would climb that mountain. When he got to the top (it would’ve been a good two-hour climb), it was dark, and he said the sunset was beautiful. On the way up, he had a water bottle, and he left the water bottle on the ground on the way up. And he said to himself, “I’ll get that on my way back down.” But when he got to the top and it was getting dark, he thought to himself, “I need to make my way home,” and he thought he’d spied on the ridge of the mountain what looked like a shortcut, so he thought to himself, “I’m going to try to get down quickly.” But as it got darker, he got stuck between brambles and rocks, and he actually got lost, and it got very dark. It got to the point where he actually slipped on the edge of a rock or a cliff, and was holding on, and he got really scared. Just two days prior, he was helping to build a priest retreat…and he was told that there were large cavities and caves underneath the ground. They used dynamite to blast and put sewers in it. In his mind, being very scared, he thought if he let go, he might get stuck in a cave, and no one would find him. So, he called out, “Mary, if you can please get me out of here, I will thank you so much!”
What happened then was that he took a risk and threw his arms up and grabbed hold of a branch to get himself back up the rock’s edge. Then, somewhat counterintuitive, he was directed to go back up to the top again. Even though it seemed strange, because he already wasted a lot of energy heading down the mountain, sweating, tired, exhausted in the dark…however, he felt that he should go up to the top again. So, he did. When he got to the top, he was so grateful, because it was some kind of a familiarity to where he was. He was on all fours, and he held onto a stone around his neck, which was the closest thing to anything religious and something he picked up at Glendalough in Ireland, where St. Kevin came from. He bawled his eyes out and thanked God.… He felt tingles that started at the tip of his nose, that began to spread over his face. It was as though he put his face into somebody’s hands, and he knew those hands were our Blessed Mother Mary’s. She was consoling him. As he got up, he felt a great sense of peace. And he said to me later, “Angie, the Holy Trinity was with me – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” He knew that God exists. Then he had…a life review or illumination. He saw his life, like the flickering of an old movie, pass before him, and he mentioned that he could see things he had done in his life, jokes that he had taken too far and where he had hurt other people. He got a clear sense of wrong and right – one thing that he’d never had before. As he had dialogue with God and walked some metres across the top of the mountain, he said, “How am I going to get down?” He turned around and realized that he had walked some metres already, looking up at the sky without falling over. He was directed to continue looking up at the sky full of stars and follow a cross made by a group of stars. This was his guide home. When it was time to turn, that group of stars seemed to fade and another group of stars forming a cross became illuminated to him.
If anyone knows the terrain here at Medjugorje, it’s not nice and even. But the funny thing was, when he would look down, he would stumble. When he looked up – trusted and kept his eyes on the cross – things went smoothly for him. And that is the way he got down; and on the way down, he had questions, and he had a dialogue with God…questions that he had about “Is this real?” or who he could tell.… The answers that he was getting from questions seemed to come in the form of huge shooting stars. He saw 7 shooting stars in answer to his questions and 2 moving satellites. One was a question about a man we had met on pilgrimage, Jack Weiland, who had been to Medjugorje dozens of times. The question was, “Would Jack be ok?” And a satellite appeared and then faded away. It was only a few months later that Jack unexpectedly passed away. The water bottle that I mentioned – he stopped and said, “Oh, I promised I’d pick that up, but I don’t know where it is. I am in the dark.” So, he said, “Can you show me the water bottle?” A shooting star went across the sky and following its path, his head turned, and there it was on the ground…
He made it home to safety. When I met up with him at about 11:30 or so at night, I was about to do a midnight climb with a group of pilgrims and I was really happy to see him. I got a bit of courage in me, and I said, “David, we are just about to do a midnight climb up Mount Krizevac (which is the big Cross Mountain). Would you like to come?” And he said, “Yes.” And I was like, “Oh wow! OK, but you’re going to need your torch [flashlight].” And he said, “No, no, we don’t need a torch.” So that’s when I thought, “Something’s happened.” As we’re climbing Cross Mountain, I could see something had changed in David. And I said, “David, did something happen to you?” He said, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you when we get to the top.” So, we got to the top of Cross Mountain, and he shared the story with me, and during his sharing, a huge monstrous shooting star went across the sky, and I gasped and was tapping David. “Did you see that?” And David didn’t flinch. He just looked at me and said, “Ange, yes, this is what I’m trying to tell you. This is what I just experienced.” Two days later, on the feast of the Rosary, David said a prayer and asked Our Lady to teach him more about the faith. And he was shown many signs in the church, one of them being that he saw shimmering golden light come down on the altar during the Consecration. And he said to me afterwards, “Ange, do you know that Heaven comes down on the altar when there’s Mass?” This is something that’s integral to our Catholic faith that the bread and wine is changed into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. I never told David that, yet he told me! He saw it. A number of other things happened, but it’s a long story. Suffice it to say, he became a Catholic. Sometime later, we got engaged and got married. That was 25 years ago this week.… We actually are here in Medjugorje to give thanks.…
Comments