09/22/2025
Prayer warriors, unite! 🙏
On our knees, today, let us fast, pray and mobilize for Lisa and Ewen McPhee and their family!
Lisa is a mother of four, devoted wife, faithful parishioner, generous soul. On a personal level, she has been a great friend and supporter and the life of Sacred Heart Academy since near its inception until the present. Shortly after she and her son came into the life of the Academy, her family was afflicted with burden after burden, cross after cross.
The heaviest of these to bear has been her Stage IV cancer diagnosis around this time last year, 2024. She was told that she might well not live until Christmas 2024.
Yet looking at Lisa, you would think she did not hear the diagnosis right: instead of thinking about herself and what were to be her last moments, she could only think more and more about others, about her family, about the Sacred Heart family. Even in the midst of debilitating treatments, Lisa would pull herself into the school, bringing goodies for the hard-working teachers, sharing materials and resources that might be helpful to staff and families, line up donors and supporters from among her friends and fellow churchgoers.
Very justly, Lisa could have come in to complain about the difficult hand that had been dealt to her in life… but no, she would be there to listen, to encourage, to console, to be a shoulder for OTHERS to cry on. She brought joy, music, determination, goodwill. She rolled up her sleeves, read to the students, baked, attended functions, volunteered at events… all this and more… even as her life hung in the balance.
Well today, friends, today is our moment to come together for Lisa and Ewen and their family. Despite the hardships, setbacks and difficulties, this faith-filled couple is currently in Lourdes, a place of healing and powerful grace, where Our Blessed Mother appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous not long ago, in the mid-1800s.
It is to here, in Lourdes, that Lisa and Ewen’s faith have brought them. On a journey of healing. A journey of miracles.
I ask each and every one of you, wherever you are right now, to raise a prayer of healing for Lisa McPhee, for her family. Mother Mary, you who are a Mother, you who are OUR tender mother, have mercy on this mother of four children who turns to you with love, faith and devotion. She and her husband have been granted authorization to lower themselves into the healing waters of the Shrine of Lourdes (something that is rarely granted only to few these days). May it be said of her and to her by your Divine Son: “Your faith has made you whole again!”
Lisa is a walking miracle. Doctors did not give her until last Christmas. And yet here we are approaching a new Christmas, and she is in another continent, in a pool of healing water, at your feet, dear Lady of Lourdes. Mary, we thank you for the miraculous grace of bringing dear Lisa to you in Lourdes. Now in your mercy, grant through your Son, full healing and restoration to Lisa, if this be Your Son’s most gracious Will, to the honour of your name, and to the glory of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit!
Mary of Lourdes, in your Son’s Holy Name, we humbly beg this miraculous healing of you.
AMEN!
