Discovery of the work
I remember being in the local parochial house at a meeting with the priest at the time, about twenty-five years ago, and I saw this book, The Poem of the Man-God, in his book cabinet. I asked him about it, and he said, “Would you like to read it?” and I said yes. It was Volume Four. I couldn’t wait to get the other volumes. Little did I know what I was being prepared for.
Impact on love for the Gospel
It made it all so real for me. I became enthralled by this incredible mission, I would call it. I feel very fortunate that I had a great love of reading, given to me by my father. When I was a child, I would sit at my father’s feet and listen to him reading cowboy books.
Concrete impact on faith life
I started to take my faith very seriously: to go to Mass more, to receive Jesus at every Mass and to do so with reverence, and to try to live my life the way Jesus would want me to.
What would you say to someone who hesitates to discover this work?
I have just gotten my sister to read a paragraph where Jesus appears to Judas’s mother to console her. My sister is seventy-seven years of age. It’s never too late to learn.
Additional testimony
At seventy-three years of age, I feel I was being prepared for events that I would not have been able to face without God’s help. You see, twenty years ago this month, my only son died in a car accident. He was just twenty-one. It was our nine-eleven. He was a passenger in the car his friend was driving. I had gone to sleep the night before reading Volume Five, the paragraph where Jesus was lying in the arms of his mother after being taken down from the cross. Shortly after, at about five a.m., I got the word that my son was dead. I just said, “God, I’m finished; you have to take over,” and He did. That is why I’m here to write this. God bless your work. Tony