This valley of tears that we all need to traverse is part of God's plan. The discomforts here should help us aspire for the definitive life in Heaven, where there is all perfection with God. There will be no more need for creatures to satisfy us. Heaven will satiate us without any cloying.

Several things should come to mind when we recall her apparitions to three shepherd children.

There is God.

God is offended by man's sins.

We need to do penance, a lot of penance.

God's victory in the end is assured.

We cannot shirk from the responsibility of obeying the Lord's last words on earth prior to ascending to Heaven. Go out to the whole world. We find ourselves set up by the Lord in our positions and roles in society. Ask yourselves how we have preached the Good News.

We can do this by practicing the Lord's other commandments, especially that of the New Commandment, namely, Love one another as I have loved you. We should practice this with those around us. That means spirit of service with everyone, absolutely everyone, even with those we have a difficult time with.

The name we need to use to get what we ask for is the Name of Jesus Himself. But this name-dropping assumes we have a relationship with Him. Thus, we need to evaluate how our relationship is with Him. In fact, this is the real reply to all our petitions and prayers, namely, Jesus Christ. Nothing trumps Him as the fruit of our prayers. Having this relationship with Him is the bottom line in our existence. Without this relationship with Him, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hope is the theological virtue we all absolutely need to get to Heaven. This world is only a leg of our trip. We have all these difficulties here, even with joy because we hope in seeing Jesus in the end. We need to shore up our hope in Heaven.

According to the Gospel today, Jesus forewarns His followers of His coming departure. He encourages them despite the loss because they would see each other again anyway. Temporary inconveniences should not mar our cheerfulness in our trip to Heaven. If we keep our hopes in Heaven alive, we can still be joyful there on earth because of the hope we have in Heaven.

More on the Holy Spirit! He will move us to love the truth. He will spur us to be united with God. It is proper of love to be united to the beloved, while what is characteristic of knowledge is that we bring the known object to our minds. We reduce it to fit in our minds in an intentional manner. The Holy Spirit will foster in us to seek to be united to the Truth, Who is the Son of God and the Word.

Losing things we value always gets us thinking about the situations. We will miss those important items, and we are moved to re-evaluate ourselves. Losing Jesus apparently is what Jesus lays down as a condition for the sending of the Paraclete. He will convict us of sin and judgement.

This is how our lives as Christians is to be described. The Gospel today tells us so much about it. We need to be loyal, hardworking, honest, charitable to those it is difficult to love, be diligent when everybody wants to waste time and so forth. It is much easier to do evil. We only need to succumb to the temptations. It is much simpler to destroy than to build. But there it is! The consequences of destroying in horrible and perhaps very expensive. But to build, this is our task as Christians. Karl Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. His characterization of Christianity is unfair. Someone challenged Marx--to bad Marx was already dead at this point--to live as a good Christian for one day and then he will see that Christianity is no drug of the people to put them to hallucinate or render them intoxicated.

The Gospel for the Sixth Sunday of Easter tells us about Jesus' invitation to remain in His Love by following His Commandments, just as He remains in His Father's Love by following His Commandments. His Father wanted Him to die on the Cross to save mankind from sin and death. The acid test of whether we truly love God whom we don't see--it is so easy to claim we love Him--is by checking on how we love the others. Loving the others is crucial because God loves them too. He died for all of us. How is our struggle to love the others?