Our Story - Background to our involvement with this prayer
I thought it would be worth explaining who we are and how we came to be involved with the Surrender Prayer.
My name is John and I live in Glasgow, Scotland.
I am a member of a Divine Mercy Prayer group which used to meet in the White Father's residence in, Glasgow. There were about ten people attending the meeting on average. One of those was a man called Joe Livingston. You can find out more about Joe at his website: www.foundationoftruth.org.uk . Joe is an author and international speaker. He travels all over the world giving talks and carrying out healing services on behalf of Our Lord. You can contact him via his website if you are interested in his services.
In late 2014 Joe returned from one of his regular trips to Medjugorje and gave us all a photocopy of the Surrender Prayer. It was on an A4 sheet of paper and he told us that a woman had given him the prayer in Medjugorje.
After reading the prayer, members of the group wanted to get more copies to give to friends.
The problem was they were getting photocopies of photocopies and the quality was becoming degraded with each copy.
I had some knowledge of website design and the idea came into my head to produce a simple website that would allow the group to download a copy of the prayer whenever they needed it. It was only ever intended for the group or their friends. I put a tracking software on the website to find out if anyone was using the site. I did not attempt to promote it.
After about 3 months I checked the tracking on the site and discovered to my astonishment that the website had been visited from about 40 countries throughout the world. I know from my background with websites that this was virtually impossible. I concluded that the promotion of this website must be driven by the Holy Spirit. At the present time (October 2019) the website is averaging about 400 to 500 visitors per day from over 100 countries throughout the world. About 80 percent of these visitors are based in the USA. Australia and Canada are the next highest countries.
I then decided to try to put the prayer into card form. I had an elderly friend, Joe. Joe is in his 80’s. He is disabled walking with sticks. Joe’s wife had died not long previously. I knew that if they found a prayer they liked Joe and his wife would print it on card form on their home computer and printer, laminate them and leave them in churches they visited.
I approached Joe after mass one morning. I showed him the sheet of paper with the Surrender Prayer and asked him if he could produce it in card form. I also asked him if he could put a Divine Mercy image on the front.
Joe produced the laminated prayer card as I requested. I decided to start leaving them in local Catholic churches. I always asked the permission of the Parish Priest first. Joe initially produced about 1000 cards. These cards were picked up very quickly.Once these were gone Joe would produce another 1000 and these would go just as quickly.This went on for a couple of years and Joe stopped counting at about 30,000 cards. I reckon he must have printed about 50,000 to 60,000 cards. All this time he refused to take any money towards the cost of producing the cards.
The cards found their way all over the world including Medjugorje where they proved to be just as popular. Eventually due to ill health Joe had to stop printing the cards.
I knew the demand for the cards was still there so I found £300 from my own finances and took the laminated card to a commercial printer.
I knew that the owners of the printers were from Poland and that they had produced religious cards in the past. I showed one of the owners the card that Joe had produced and asked him if he could reproduce it. He said of course, do you want me to put some colour in it? I said yes and also try to include the Divine Mercy image. The card image featured on our website is the card that he had produced. I believe his design was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
He printed 10,000 cards for me and I started distributing at local churches along with another elderly friend Andy. These 10,000 cards lasted 10 months before they were all gone.
When I was telling my brother the story of the cards and he volunteered to pay for another 10,000 from his business. We are now in the process of distributing these cards.
In the last year we started receiving requests from within the UK and the USA for copies of the cards. We don’t charge for the cards but the cost of postage can be a challenge for us. We are trying to find the best way to do this. One possible solution that my wife came up with was to put an image of the card on the website that would allow someone in the USA for example to take it to their local printers and have them print cards from the image.
We keep working away trying to distribute cards and our aim is to be able to circulate them all over the world and in different languages. We are overwhelmed with the generosity of everyone who has donated to us and offer up prayers for our family so we are able to continue circulating this great novena to reach those in need of peace in their lives.
We were contacted by a woman from Texas who said that there was a lot of Spanish speaking people in her area and could we have it translated into Spanish.
My friend Michael had a nephew who stayed in Spain and he translated it for us.
I noticed visitors to the site from China so I asked my neighbour who was a Chinese teacher to translate the prayer to Chinese.
The Novena has now been translated into Polish with great thanks to a couple from Poland called Marek and his wife Marzena who contacted us wishing the Novena to be translated so they could distribute the prayer throughout their local parishes.
I would like especially to have prayer translated into Italian. Father Dolindo was Italian and we get very few visitors from Italy to the site.
The website, without our promotion, has found its way onto EWTN and Mary TV. The prayer has also been put to music and is featured on Youtube where it has more than 100,000 views.
My name is John and I live in Glasgow, Scotland.
I am a member of a Divine Mercy Prayer group which used to meet in the White Father's residence in, Glasgow. There were about ten people attending the meeting on average. One of those was a man called Joe Livingston. You can find out more about Joe at his website: www.foundationoftruth.org.uk . Joe is an author and international speaker. He travels all over the world giving talks and carrying out healing services on behalf of Our Lord. You can contact him via his website if you are interested in his services.
In late 2014 Joe returned from one of his regular trips to Medjugorje and gave us all a photocopy of the Surrender Prayer. It was on an A4 sheet of paper and he told us that a woman had given him the prayer in Medjugorje.
After reading the prayer, members of the group wanted to get more copies to give to friends.
The problem was they were getting photocopies of photocopies and the quality was becoming degraded with each copy.
I had some knowledge of website design and the idea came into my head to produce a simple website that would allow the group to download a copy of the prayer whenever they needed it. It was only ever intended for the group or their friends. I put a tracking software on the website to find out if anyone was using the site. I did not attempt to promote it.
After about 3 months I checked the tracking on the site and discovered to my astonishment that the website had been visited from about 40 countries throughout the world. I know from my background with websites that this was virtually impossible. I concluded that the promotion of this website must be driven by the Holy Spirit. At the present time (October 2019) the website is averaging about 400 to 500 visitors per day from over 100 countries throughout the world. About 80 percent of these visitors are based in the USA. Australia and Canada are the next highest countries.
I then decided to try to put the prayer into card form. I had an elderly friend, Joe. Joe is in his 80’s. He is disabled walking with sticks. Joe’s wife had died not long previously. I knew that if they found a prayer they liked Joe and his wife would print it on card form on their home computer and printer, laminate them and leave them in churches they visited.
I approached Joe after mass one morning. I showed him the sheet of paper with the Surrender Prayer and asked him if he could produce it in card form. I also asked him if he could put a Divine Mercy image on the front.
Joe produced the laminated prayer card as I requested. I decided to start leaving them in local Catholic churches. I always asked the permission of the Parish Priest first. Joe initially produced about 1000 cards. These cards were picked up very quickly.Once these were gone Joe would produce another 1000 and these would go just as quickly.This went on for a couple of years and Joe stopped counting at about 30,000 cards. I reckon he must have printed about 50,000 to 60,000 cards. All this time he refused to take any money towards the cost of producing the cards.
The cards found their way all over the world including Medjugorje where they proved to be just as popular. Eventually due to ill health Joe had to stop printing the cards.
I knew the demand for the cards was still there so I found £300 from my own finances and took the laminated card to a commercial printer.
I knew that the owners of the printers were from Poland and that they had produced religious cards in the past. I showed one of the owners the card that Joe had produced and asked him if he could reproduce it. He said of course, do you want me to put some colour in it? I said yes and also try to include the Divine Mercy image. The card image featured on our website is the card that he had produced. I believe his design was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
He printed 10,000 cards for me and I started distributing at local churches along with another elderly friend Andy. These 10,000 cards lasted 10 months before they were all gone.
When I was telling my brother the story of the cards and he volunteered to pay for another 10,000 from his business. We are now in the process of distributing these cards.
In the last year we started receiving requests from within the UK and the USA for copies of the cards. We don’t charge for the cards but the cost of postage can be a challenge for us. We are trying to find the best way to do this. One possible solution that my wife came up with was to put an image of the card on the website that would allow someone in the USA for example to take it to their local printers and have them print cards from the image.
We keep working away trying to distribute cards and our aim is to be able to circulate them all over the world and in different languages. We are overwhelmed with the generosity of everyone who has donated to us and offer up prayers for our family so we are able to continue circulating this great novena to reach those in need of peace in their lives.
We were contacted by a woman from Texas who said that there was a lot of Spanish speaking people in her area and could we have it translated into Spanish.
My friend Michael had a nephew who stayed in Spain and he translated it for us.
I noticed visitors to the site from China so I asked my neighbour who was a Chinese teacher to translate the prayer to Chinese.
The Novena has now been translated into Polish with great thanks to a couple from Poland called Marek and his wife Marzena who contacted us wishing the Novena to be translated so they could distribute the prayer throughout their local parishes.
I would like especially to have prayer translated into Italian. Father Dolindo was Italian and we get very few visitors from Italy to the site.
The website, without our promotion, has found its way onto EWTN and Mary TV. The prayer has also been put to music and is featured on Youtube where it has more than 100,000 views.