¡Hagase Tu Voluntad, Señor!

Your will be done Lord, that is what I am learning to say with more and more fervor and less fear. Especially now that this past Friday, I officially joined the Asociación de Fieles del Fiat, the lay movement here. ¨Fiat¨ being the ¨yes¨ that Mary gave to the Lord when the angel told her she would concieve the Son of God, we strive to imitate this same profound ¨yes¨ to ¨la voluntad¨, will of God, no matter what it may be. Even if it means leaving this place I love, I strive to give that complete and trusting ¨yes¨ to the Lord. Well, it´s a work in progress :)

I do want to apologize if I came off a bit strong in my last post. Actually, I don´t apologize if it got your attention, I do apologize because it was lacking in hope. You see, for all of the physical needs of this base, these children, I had forgotten our primary mission. Above providing medical care, education and nutrition to these children, we must first be striving to get them to Heaven, meaning, to learn to know and love the Lord. Yes, the Gospel says we must feed the hungry and cloth the naked, but Jesus also said that the primary comandment was to love one another. And so, I have rediscovered what I truly wanted to do here - love these children so profoundly, meaning with that love that Christ brings, that it reaches down into their little hearts and stays. As Pope Benedict XVI says in Deus Caritas Est,

¨Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.¨

And that is my mission. I can´t believe that I forgot this simple thing, as it is demonstrated to me by the misioñeras every single day, in every patient reprimand, in every hug, in every look of love that they give these children for whom they care for.

So now, as my days really and truly are numbered, I look to pour out as much love on these children and on these misioñeras as possible so that in ten years, when they might no longer remember me, they will remember that someone loved them with a different type of love and hopefully, for this memory, they will live their lives or even just make one small decision for the better. As Mariya says, let´s not hope they remember us, let´s hope they remember the Jesus in us. That´s the goal and that´s why I´m here. More than this, of course, I will continually seek to provide for them materially as well because action always follows true sentiment, but I have hope once more that maybe I just did do something for them in my short time here and that same something I can continue to do, even if it is from a million miles away.

I hope to have one more post from the flipside, I am currently waiting for my mom´s flight to arrive as she is coming just in time to visit me here and meet the people I love. I am so glad to be able to share it with her and am going to try to show her everything I can in the short time she is here. Mostly though, I hope she experiences the love I have received from these people. And I hope to be able to write to you all about it in the week to come. With that said, I´m off and running, but as always, you have my prayers and I hope I may still count on yours, if not for me, for this beloved people.