PADRE PIO REVEALS: If You Have ONE Of These 3 Things, You Have Been BLESSED

The last time somebody told you that you were blessed, it was probably about something going well — a grandchild, a clean scan, a bit of luck with the house. Pastor Robin Schwartz gives the three in the first minute, and none of them is money, health, comfort or success. The first: a cross you did not choose and cannot put down. The second: a hunger for God you cannot explain and cannot satisfy. The third: somebody who prays for you by name, living or dead. And the point of the whole reflection, said at the start and again at the end, is that almost nobody watching has none of the three. An honesty note first. Padre Pio published no list of three signs of blessing and there is no such document. What he did, over and over, for fifty years, in letters and in a confessional, was tell frightened people the same three things in a hundred different ways: that the cross they were carrying was not a punishment, that the restlessness they could not explain was Him, and that they were being prayed for by name and would go on being prayed for after he was dead. That is not a list he wrote. That is the shape of his life's work. On the first: the video puts a fence up before it goes anywhere near it. A situation you could and should walk out of is not a cross, it is a danger. If a doctor can help, go to the doctor. If the medication works, take the medication. A cross is what is left after you have honestly done everything you can. And the verse people throw at the suffering — count it all joy — is the most misquoted line in the New Testament, because they stop reading before the word steadfastness, which is not a feeling at all. It is the capacity to still be standing in five years. On the second: you are the proof of it. It is late, there are a hundred thousand easier things on this device, and you are here again, and you are not here for information. But the video also draws a careful line between spiritual dryness and depression, because they are not the same thing and people spend years praying about something that needed treating — and it says plainly that a man who treats his diabetes and refuses to treat his mind is not holier, only suffering more than he has to. And for those in the dry room, it hands over Mother Teresa, whose private letters, published after her death, document roughly fifty years of feeling nothing at all, during which she got up before dawn every single day and picked dying people up off the pavements of Calcutta. On the third: Padre Pio took on spiritual children by the thousand and prayed for them by name for the rest of his life, and the promise his spiritual children have repeated for sixty years is that he would stand at the gate of Paradise until every one of them had gone in. That is a reported saying and not a doctrine, and the video says so — but it has lasted because it is a picture of something true that most people were never told, which is that the dead who loved you are not finished with you. That is the communion of saints, and you say you believe in it every Sunday. Each of the three comes with one concrete thing to do this week. Name your cross out loud and then say the honest sentence after it — I did not choose this, use it anyway — rather than offering God gratitude you do not feel. Do one thing that only makes sense if God is real, precisely because you will feel nothing while doing it. And the best one, which is uncomfortable: become the third thing for somebody else. Start a list, on paper, five names, pray for them daily and never tell them — and the video tells you exactly which five to put on it, including the one that changes you rather than them. Breathe. God is here. TRUST GOD with the cross you cannot put down. He is nearer to it than you are. If this named something you have been carrying, our written companion of prayers and reflections is here: pastorrobinschwartz.com --- Honesty note: no list of three signs of blessing was ever published by Padre Pio, and the video says so in the first two minutes. The promise about standing at the gate of Paradise is presented as a reported and much-loved saying, never as doctrine. What is documented and used: his counsel to his spiritual children about the cross, his repeated line "pray, hope, and don't worry — worry is useless," and his lifelong practice of praying by name for the people who asked him. A health note, said in the video and repeated here. Spiritual dryness and depression are not the same thing. If the flatness has taken the taste out of everything — food, company, the garden, the people you love — and sleep does not touch the tiredness, please see your doctor this month. God made your body and the chemistry in it, and there is nothing unspiritual about treatment. Nothing here asks anybody to stay in a situation where they are being hurt, to refuse medical care, or to love their pain. A cross that can honestly be put down should be put down.