Ivory Coast
Mission is leaving behind your own security and comfort to go out and encounter others. It is getting your feet dirty with the earth you walk on to go to the market, or to visit a sick person or a distant community: that earth so dry and arid, the very same that turns to mud when it rains.
So much mud that you don’t know where to step, but you don’t have to worry because the young people walk ahead of you, guiding you and supporting you.
Children are the true missionaries; they are the ones who preach the Gospel to us because they are capable of selfless gestures.
We think we are going on a Mission with a full bag to unload it onto others, but instead we must carry it empty to fill it with the values they can give us.
Mission is discovering yourself: moments of struggle force you to get down to the essentials, to ask yourself once again why you set out and who you are doing it for.
It’s knowing how your body reacts to hunger, thirst, or fatigue when you have nothing to hold on to.
It is the Lord who at that moment is granting you a grace, letting you experience what it means to be poor, to be in need, showing you how important the hand of your brother ready to help you is—which we often believe we do not need, because we are too full of ourselves.
Fragility is an incomparable gift that makes you naked before others and brings you into a relationship with them, a relationship that always enriches.
Often there is also a language barrier, yet we understand each other so well. We seek the same thing, each other’s love, we seek and we find each other.
On mission, we learn to stop seeking our own self-interest, our own personal gain in what we do, and this makes us increasingly free people.
On mission, the Gospel is lived; sometimes you have to know how to give up moments of prayer to wash the dishes or welcome someone who comes to visit you. You are forced to seek the Word of God in the tiredness at the end of the day.
Jesus needs you, your hands, your ears to bring life where someone has tried to tear it away. It is Jesus who lives in you when you caress the forehead of a little girl who has nothing left at that moment except your affection. Only God can make you capable of facing all this without despairing.
In Mission, just as in all our life, with some we can talk about Jesus, but with others we must be Him. We are called to do all this with joy. In the heart of the Christian, there is always joy. Joy welcomed as a gift and treasured to be shared with everyone.
I don’t feel like I am making sacrifices or giving up anything by being on a Mission, I don’t feel braver or better than others, I feel I have allowed myself a luxury, I feel that God wanted to grant me a grace, He wanted to show me what it means to live as children of God. Now I have seen, now I know, and this calls me to an ever-greater responsibility.
But it is not the place that makes a missionary. It is the love you put into your life that makes you a missionary.
Photo by Father Giovanni Piumatti
