The Book of Heaven
—Unofficial Version—

March 2, 1907

There is nothing that equals suffering willingly.

Continuing in my usual state, and having learned that almost the entire town was with the influenza, and that in other places people were dying, I was praying Our Lord that He would be so benign as to spare so many victims, and that He would make me suffer to spare them, since nowadays I suffer little or nothing, for He has taken this also away from me. While I was saying this, He told me in my interior: "My daughter, it was said about Me ‘that it was necessary that one would die to save the whole people’. It was a truth, but at that time it was not understood. In the same way, in all times it is necessary that there be one who suffers to spare the others, and this one, in order to be accepted must offer himself voluntarily, and only for love of God and of his neighbor, to suffer himself in order to spare all others. And the suffering of this one cannot be equaled by the suffering of all the others put together; there is no value that matches it. Do you think that the void of your suffering is nothing? Yet, it is not a complete void; and if I suspend you completely, where will the peoples end up? Woe, woe – things do not end here."