BOCA RATON | A one-day Women of Grace healing conference is coming to St. John the Evangelist Parish, 10300 Yamato Road in Boca Raton, featuring well-known Catholic television/radio host and author Johnnette Benkovic Williams, founder and president of the nonprofit Living His Life Abundantly International Inc.
The conference will be Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023, with registration/coffee at 8 a.m., welcome and opening prayer at 9, and three talks by Williams: “Heart Wounds: What are They and What Causes Them?,” “Discovering and Healing Our Heart Wounds” and “God’s Healing Power and Mercy.”
There also will be Eucharistic exposition, an opportunity for the sacrament of reconciliation, praying of the rosary and Benediction leading up the 4 p.m. vigil Mass for the parish. A box lunch will be provided.
“Our hope is that the women who come will experience the healing mercy of God to help resolve, if not resolve completely, those areas of woundedness that they’ve experienced through their personal sin and the sins of others against them,” Williams said by telephone from her home in Birmingham, Alabama.
Running concurrently with the healing conference will be a Young Women of Grace retreat for teenage girls that aims to help them “discover the awesome reality of their feminine identity,” she said. The retreat speaker will be Mary Dillenback, one of the developers of the Young Women of Grace study book and outreach, Williams said.
“Let’s face it, the culture of the day is offering them a message which is anti-woman, is anti-feminine, is anti-God, anti-truth and it’s anti-reality,” she said. “We want to speak truth to that lie, and we want to bring light into the darkness of that lie.”
It is hoped that women will bring their daughters, grandmothers will bring their granddaughters, etc. “We think it’s a beautiful opportunity for a mother and daughter to share an event separate from but at least related to each other. We think that they would have an opportunity to have very good family discussions around what they have experienced through the day there,” Williams said.
Women young and old should attend the healing conference and retreat “so that they can experience the great and glorious reality of who they are,” she said. “And if they can come to see that they are the chosen daughters of the Most High God, that God has given them life at this moment in the history of man to be his presence in the world today by way of the Marian character.
“The day will be affirming. The day will be healing. The day can possibly set them on a new trajectory in their personal lives and in their life as daughters of God,” Williams added.
The Women of Grace apostolate, which has study groups throughout the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Central and South America, Ireland, England and Australia, is marking its 20th year of leading women to faithfulness through the Catholic Church, she said.
“We continue to find this message ever fresh. We continue to find this message ever true. And we continue to find women who are invigorated by the knowledge that they come to experience as a result of the study groups,” Williams said.
The cost to attend the healing conference is $55. The retreat for young women is $25. For information and to register, visit www.womenofgrace.com.
For more information on our Diocesan website, click here.
