A Medjugorje Story From Steve

The following story about a visit to Medjugorje was recently submitted by a participant of the scriptural rosary website. If you don't know about Medjugorje you could start here. You will also find much information if you google "Medjugorje".

Here is Steve's story:

I went to Medjugorje for the first time in 1989 during Easter week. I went with two Catholic friends, Neil and Kevin. I was there mainly out of curiosity. Although I was a practicing Catholic, my faith was fairly superficial and I was there hoping to see the phenomena of the spinning sun that I had heard about and that echoed the miracle at Fatima.

I was disappointed, I was surrounded by people seeing various phenomena but I saw nothing and neither did Kevin, though Neil seemed to spend all day, every day, staring at the sky in which he saw the sun gyrating and changing color. Nevertheless I loved the place and was spending a great deal of time praying, going to the Church and talking to other pilgrims. It was spring and it was a lovely place to be, I loved the mountain air and the crystal clear drinking water and climbing Mt Krizevac, which we did several times.

It was announced that on Good Friday night, some of the visionaries would receive an apparition on the top of Mt Krizevac. The three of us, naturally, went up the mountain that night.

There were perhaps a thousand people on Krizevac. We sang hymns and recited the Rosary until the apparition began when total silence prevailed.

Our group was close to the back of the cross, the visionaries were in front of it. As the silence fell, I looked up and saw a ‘neon sign’ on the cross, it appeared to have no religious significance. I thought that it was odd that this should be displayed on the cross and wondered why it was shown, I thought that it might be some sort of symbol of local importance. No one around me appeared to look at it or react to it.

The ‘neon sign’ was bright red in color (like the red of the digits on a bedside digital alarm clock), and was formed of numerous wavy lines which were moving alternately from left to right and right to left. It appeared just below the horizontal bar of the cross and was, perhaps, three feet high and extended over the whole width of the cross.

As we walked down the mountain at the end of the night, I asked a number of people about the ‘neon sign’ but no one had seen it. I kept saying to people, “you must have seen it, it was big and red and unmissable”, but no, not one had seen it. I met up with Kevin, one of the two people I had travelled with and he said that he had seen it and thought it very strange that there were no cables leading to the cross as these would be needed to carry the necessary power for such a display.

We could find no-one else who had ever seen this sign and no-one who could explain what it meant but we were happy to have joined most of the other pilgrims in witnessing an extraordinary ‘sign’ but we were aware that this was intended to convey some sort of message to us and we had no idea what it was.

I sought out our English pilgrimage organizer who was a constant visitor to Medjugorje, feeling sure that she would have met someone who had shared this experience. She did not nor could she explain it. However, she said that we would know what it meant at some point in the future, perhaps the next day or the next week or the next year, or at some other point in the future. I was eaten by curiosity and a bit deflated.

Our organiser went on to ask if we had been to the Church at Tijualina where Father Jozo was the priest, I said that we hadn’t and she advised me to go and listen to one of his talks. She then went on to say that he had recently asked a group of pilgrims if they knew where the rod of Aaron was today, the miraculous rod that gave the wandering Israelites water from the rock and had parted the Red Sea. He then told them that he not only knew where it was, but that he himself had it! He then produced his Rosary and said to the pilgrims “the Rosary is the rod of Aaron”.

I went home, not understanding what the sign was about but the moment I arrived home I remembered the reference to the Red Sea and the Rosary. What I had seen was a coded and unforgettable message to say the Rosary and to believe in its power. I rang Kevin to tell him, he said that he had opened the bible at random on his arrival home and found himself reading about the crossing of the Red Sea and had reached the same conclusion as I had.

Steve