Shall I let them go through?
His voice is strained as he speaks to us, disappointment and anger and sadness all conveyed in the tone.
He has been held up at the Checkin counter of the bustling airport, one of the busiest in the country. His two younger siblings and him are about to embark on a holiday abroad, the first one that we are sending them for, all alone. Till this time, we as parents have accompanied them.
There is an issue with his visa, and the official is not letting him through. Both my wife and I are at home, distressed by the news too. What is the right decision to take? All this time my son is thinking something that he has been looking forward to for a long time and was involved in the planning from the start is not happening. The other children are confused too. Three of them bound by common emotions in the swirling crowds around them.
It is a moment of deep despair. We all get on a call with the travel agent who assures us that he will try and do his best to get a new visa organized by working with the immigration office in the issuing visa country on priority. We are to be quite honest, skeptical and angry too. Minutes tick by, our confused children at the airport. The time for boarding formalities is at hand.
We finally take the call after speaking to them.
Let them go.
My son hands over to them the essential things for travel he has been carrying for them too, foreign exchange, cards etc.
It looks so dark. No way out.
Then, my wife and I do the only thing we possibly can do at that helpless moment.
We start praying the rosary together, imploring Mother Mary to intervene in this situation, to turn this hopeless situation around.
Before the second decade of the rosary is recited, our phones ping with a Whatsapp notification.
The new visa has been received!
A real miracle, that the immigration office in that country could be contacted just minutes before it closed for the day and could issue the new visa.
My son is allowed to board the flight.
The children are able to travel together as planned after all. They have now reached the destination as I pen these lines, its wonderfully cool there and a historic place.
Really marvelous for us to have experienced this.
The power of the Rosary.
October is the Marian month dedicated to the Rosary.
Post breakfast in a nice restaurant this morning, my wife and I experiencing a silent house with no children for the first time in over three decades and go for a walk in the nearby leafy park, weather pleasantly cool after the overnight rains.
Shall we say a rosary?
The thought occurs to us simultaneously.
We say the rosary together, or is the correct word, recite or pray?
Thankful to Mother Mary for the graces received.
The power of the rosary.
The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description (Archbishop Fulton Sheen).
