Top photo caption: Song Hwan Nash, left, and his wife, Amy, right, are pictured with their children, Mason, Christian and Mercy, in an undated photo. Song Hwan died May 20, 2017, after a battle with stage 4 stomach cancer diagnosed during the summer of 2016. In grieving the loss of their husband and father, Amy and the couple’s children found healing and hope in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. OSV News photo/Amy Nash
By Andrew Foster / Northwest Catholic, OSV News
SHORELINE, Wash. OSV News — One morning, just like any morning, Amy Nash was sitting on her couch, waiting for her three children, Christian, Mason and Mercy, to wake up.
Six-year-old Mason was the first one up and immediately ran to his mother.
“Mama, Jesus was with me last night,” Amy recalled him saying
Mason told her that there were a lot of people there, including Jesus, who came over to him. He described him as extremely tall and wearing a red sash, Amy said.
She asked if Jesus said anything to him, to which Mason replied, “No. But he gave me his heart.”
She asked her son what kind of heart it was — a Valentine-style heart or a beating heart — to which he responded that it was a real heart, on fire with light emanating from it.
Amy said, at the time, Mason had never seen an image of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, but when his mother pulled up a photo to show him, he identified it as the same heart he saw in his dream.
Mason told her that Jesus wanted him to know that he sacrificed his life for him, and that Jesus loves him so much he gave him his heart. And then, Amy said, he ran off back to his room and she began to cry.
It was a pivotal moment in Mason’s life as he had been deeply feeling the effects of the loss of his father less than one year prior.
“I was just getting over my dad passing away, and I was grieving about it and was kind of depressed at the time,” Mason, now 14, said. “Then after that, everything got so much better. I became happier and (had a feeling that) everything was going to be all right.”
The children’s father and Amy’s husband, Song Hwan Nash, died on May 20, 2017, around one year prior to Mason’s dream. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer during the summer of 2016.
Mason’s sorrow had grown especially bad in the months leading up to his experience with the Sacred Heart, Amy told Northwest Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
“I couldn’t really go places and not have him melt down,” she said. “He would see a dad holding his kid’s hand, and that would trigger his grief. If we went to a park, he would see a parent playing with their son, and that would trigger it. Even at Mass, families sitting together, or sitting around a campfire, even a family gathering, watching movies together, reading a book together. Everything that had something about a tragedy — he was triggered by everything, and it was kind of derailing his life.”
The evening before Mason’s encounter with Jesus, Amy had asked a few family members and close friends from St. Luke Parish in Shoreline to pray a novena to St. Kateri Tekakwitha for Mason, Christian and Mercy.
“Mason picked her to be their intercessor because she lost her mother when she was 4, and she had a strong devotion to the crucified Jesus, which Mason has, too,” Amy said, mentioning that Mason would often grab a crucifix off the wall and lay on his bed with the crucifix on his head.
And that first night of the novena, Mason had his dream.
After that, Mason began drawing the Sacred Heart on pieces of paper in the pews during Mass, some of which are hung around the walls of the Nash household, and the first of which he drew right after having the dream.
He became much happier and began sharing his story on youth retreats as a testimony of witness of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“It was just so etched into him,” Amy said. “He remembers so clearly the dream.”
“Some of us are so broken that (Jesus) can actually replace our broken hearts with his, maybe for a time, to heal us,” she said.
Of the encounter, Mason said he remembers feeling nervous when Jesus stuck his hands out to him but didn’t realize how powerful the moment would be for him.
“I will say to him now, even when he struggles, ‘Jesus trusted you with his heart. Jesus still trusts you with his heart. It’s still in your hands,'” Amy said.
Given the impact it had on the entire household, the family eventually consecrated their family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“We have two images of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart mounted in our house above our dining table,” Amy said. “We say the Morning Offering prayer every day on the way to school. That’s where we turn.”
When they found out that Seattle Archbishop Paul D. Etienne had written a pastoral letter on the Sacred Heart, and that the bishops of the United States were consecrating the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the country’s 250th anniversary, the Nash family was that much more excited.
“I was like, ‘Oh my goodness. Yes, please. Please invite everyone in!'” Amy said. “The power of healing that comes, that Jesus wants to give (through) his heart — he doesn’t just want us to learn about it. He doesn’t want us just praying from a distance. He wants us to receive his Sacred Heart.”
Through the tragedy of losing a loved one, the Nash family found themselves in a dark place. But in that dark place, Amy said, was where the Sacred Heart shined its light.
“For me, as a widow, there was this loss of another heart in the family,” Nash said. “Now it’s like we have Jesus’ heart beating as the other life in our family.”
Andrew Foster is a staff writer at Northwest Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Seattle. This story was originally published by Northwest Catholic and distributed through a partnership with OSV News.
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