It was quite often now that the spare room, "cum prayer room" was becoming too small to accommodate all those that wanted to pray with us.
Some months later in the monthly messages that the Little Pebble receives on every 13th of the month, Our Lady asked to form communities for those who felt called.
It seemed to me as if our holy Mother was speaking directly to me. I mentioned it to Maria and she immediately went one step further. It was as if forming a religious community was a foregone conclusion for her and that the name of the Precious Blood was more important than answering the yes or no of being called. She reminded me at the same time of the miracle that had happened in our hometown of Boxtel in the south of Holland almost nine centuries ago. The priest, after the consecration at Holy Mass, accidentally spilled the Precious Blood. After Mass, he went to the river to wash out the altar cloth and immediately it turned red. He hid the cloth in the tabernacle and only revealed his secret on his deathbed. Maria's father, herself and my own dad were involved in a play and procession regarding that event in Bostel and has been celebrated continuously for all of those years.
In the meantime my brother Vincent had also come to believe in the Little Pebble as a prophet of God and had joined as a fourth branch member. It was quite often now that the spare room, "cum prayer room" was becoming too small to accommodate all those that wanted to pray with us. Mostly these people were family members but not all.
The answer soon came back that
yes, we were one of
God's chosen communities and that God inspired the name of the Precious Blood
Community. St. Willibrord was the Saint who brought the faith to Holland. He
would be honoured by naming the chapel we were to build after him. We set about
converting a large shed into a chapel. We could not have anticipated the degree
of difficulty this building would cause. It was not as if building was anything
new to us. After all we had build with our own hands the largest and most modern
egg farm in Victoria. But this was something else. One step forward and three
steps back was the order of the day. It was as if all the hordes of hell were
there every time we attempted to progress. What we expected to take no more than
a couple of months took about a year to complete. The result is nothing less
than "beautiful". It is a peaceful haven away from the bustle of the
world.
It had always
been a secret hope of mine that the physical assets acquired during my life
would some how be left to the Catholic Church. I could never have dreamed how
God would bring this prayer into effect.
