I was raised in a family that decided God did not exist, or if He did, one could not prove it, so why waste one’s time wondering about such an esoteric and irrelevant concept? As I child, I often pondered what life meant and was overcome with a sick, foreboding when thoughts of death entered my mind.
“Mom,” I asked her one night, while lying in bed. “What will happen when I die?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, which increased my worry.
“Ok, but what will happen?”
“You will cease to exist.”
“I won’t be anything anymore?” I asked, and thought to myself: “So, therefore, I won’t even know that I ever was because I will no longer be.” A cold chill blew through my heart.
“But your body will be cremated and nourish the earth. It’s the cycle of life. You’ll help a tree to grow.”
“With my luck,” I thought. “My ashes won’t even be next to a tree.”
Atheists cannot console the heart with lies.
As St. Augustine of Hippo said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
My restless heart and the search for meaning continued. I developed a passion for ballet dancing when I was young, and for many years, ballet was my substitute god that filled the God-shaped hole in my heart. But then I suffered from foot injuries. Three foot operations later, my short dancing career ended, and in a desperate search for meaning and comfort, I fell deep into serious sin.
My sins drove me to the brink of death—a death due to cervical cancer. But when I had very little time left to live, Mary came. She asked Jesus to save me, and suddenly, the cancer was gone. I was given my life and my soul back, in one brief moment of divine mercy. My heart and mind soaked in the realization that life was not at all what I had been told it was—a meaningless journey with a terrifying, nihilistic end. Life was, in fact, a miraculous gift from a loving Creator, with meaning imbued in every second, and paradise its goal.
Jesus communicated to me that He wanted me to join His Church. I didn’t know what “His Church” meant, nor anything about different Christian denominations. He was asking me, I quickly learned, to join the Catholic Church, and I have never looked back. [Mrs. Watkins’ full story can be found in the book, Full of Grace: Miraculous Stories of Healing and Conversion through Mary’s Intercession].
As a Catholic, I began exploring the Faith with a three-year master’s degree in Theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. Then desiring to be of service to the world in a concrete way, I pursued a two-year master’s degree in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley. Upon graduation, I spent nearly ten years working in hospice, and another ten-or-so as a post-abortion healing director, along with travels around the United States giving parish missions and speaking at retreats and conferences.
Though Mary was key to my conversion, it wasn’t until a pilgrimage to Medjugorje and reading her messages that I better understood the importance of her role, and that of the Eucharist, fasting, the Rosary, and the high value God places on the priesthood. Medjugorje also opened my eyes to the world of Marian apparitions and the ways that God is reach out to the world through His Mother and other chosen souls to correct the wayward course of humanity through authentic private revelations, of which the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.” (CCC §67)
It was also in Medjugorje that I received a calling from the Blessed Mother to write down my story for a book, which became Full of Grace. Little did I know that many books would follow and that a new chapter had begun in my life. In time, I founded QueenofPeaceMedia.com with a YouTube channel of the same name. All of these endeavors were born from my desire to evangelize, to convert hearts, to help Jesus save as many souls as possible, to prevent them from traveling down a dark path, as I did, causing unnecessary pain and risking the loss of the light of God forever.
My life isn’t mine anymore. Actually, it never was. It is God’s. And being a Catholic means everything to me. It means the difference between life and death.
Christine Watkins is the founder of Queen of Peace Media and the author of several Amazon #1 best-sellers. Click below to learn more.
