May is Mary’s month* and in honor of her I wanted to do something for all of you wonderful readers who have brought such joy to my life through our shared love for the beautiful names of our faith. I chose today to share this small gift with you, because it’s Saturday (which is Mary’s day) of Mother’s Day weekend!**

Are you all familiar with the National Shrine of Divine Mercy? It’s a beautiful, holy place, and one of the places where I was blessed with one of the turning points in my faith life many years ago when I was in college. In this Year of Mercy and this month of Our Lady, it seemed especially fitting to light a candle there for you in the Shrine’s Our Lady of Mercy Candle Shrine.

I was so happy to find this place of intercessory prayer — how wonderful that “all intentions are remembered by the Congregation of Marians each day during Mass and their personal prayers, and by the Diving Mercy Intercessory Prayer Ministry”!! And how awesome that “Each prayer intention is prayed for individually before the Blessed Sacrament in Our Lady of Mercy Oratory”!!

These were my specific intentions:

I loved that I was able to state specifically the intentions I was asking prayer for, and the “We will also pray for your additional intentions” bit refers to a menu of more general intentions that I could check off — these were the ones I chose to add:

I hope May is a blessed month for you all! With love and gratitude, in the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. ❤ ❤ ❤

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* Be sure to check out the beautiful readings about Mother Mary for each day of the month in that link. I love that today we honor her role as “Our Model in Ordinary Life” and tomorrow her role as “Mother of Christ” — perfect!

** My 6yo likes to tell me I’m the “second best mom in the whole world!” He’s referring to Mary as the best mom, of course. 😂 😍 ❤