Last evening, I was sitting on a kid-sized painted chair in the child-care center at the YMCA, waiting for Milo to get settled in before leaving him there to go watch Oscar’s swimming lesson. I was reading a little booklet I’d gotten at church last week.
The booklet was about the "First Saturdays" devotion that Our Lady supposedly requested from the faithful when she appeared in 1917 at Fatima, Portugal to three children (Lucia Santos, Francisco Marto, and Jacinta Marco) and later during an apparition seen by Lucia alone. The booklet also covered the Fatima apparition more generally. (This article, published by the same group, appears to be a shorter version of the same booklet.)
I picked it up because I’ve been thinking about starting to make the First Saturdays devotion, so I wanted to learn more and maybe to read something that would get me psyched up a little bit. I had just about finished a chapter that recounted the Fatima apparitions when I distinctly heard a woman’s voice calling out, "Fatima!" and then more urgently, "Fatima!"
I looked up, startled, for the source of this voice… only to see the "kids gym" attendant calling out "Fatima!" a third time. Then a little Somali girl with pigtails and a big grin scampered across the floor and leaped into the arms of her daddy, come to pick her up.
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