Ending in order to start again

We will never make it on our own;
God’s gifts can live
only by renewing His grace in us.
Otherwise, they are lost.
Habits, the law in place of the Spirit,
have killed many vocations,
and cancelled many dreams.
Hardness often has become structure
and this has become scandal.
Even us, called by the Lord,
if we don’t love Him with all our heart
and we don’t love each other
with paternal and maternal love,
we may enter this habit:
to have merely a label
and no longer a heart.
History warns us of these risks.
Mary, with her maternal goodness, will never cease
to keep this wish alive
according to the words of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit that is love,
and recreates and makes all things new,
will guide us to be what God wants
at all times.
The total unconditional yes
can generate results every day,
can lead to do things much greater than Him
not because we are good,
but because our poverty
encounters grace at all times.
Loved, we love
forgiven, we forgive
understood, we understand
consoled, we console
because God’s compassion is within us.
With the same compassion that God embraces us,
we embrace our brothers,
to help them encounter God,
so that no one, who comes to us,
will feel lost.
Coming to the end of these pages,
I feel a growing and profound nostalgia.
It’s the nostalgia for all my children
scattered around the world.
Most of them do not yet know
that one day they will come across,
and knock on the door of an Arsenal
and say: "I want to give myself to God".
They don’t know it, God knows it, and I feel it.
And already I love them with a father’s heart.