LOOK, FEEL, LOVE…! AS JESUS DID

Hello everybody!I´m going to talk about my last weekend experience with teenagers in San Miguel de Valero.

 First of all, I would like to say that I had a kind of feeling we all have felt several times throughout our lives: I felt myself tired and happy at the same time. it was such  a typical feeling in faith´s life.

The topic of these three days was: look, feel, love…! As Jesus did. Nade –mi partner- and me, we both chose it after two weeks of thinking and talking about it. We wanted boys and girls to look at their own life and to look at the other people as Jesus looks at them.  We were interested in helping teenagers become conscious of whatever they feel. It´s not a wrong feeling: happiness or sadness, love or hate and so on. However, we all are expected to ask Jesus for his own feelings. Jesus looks at us with tenderness. Jesus feels tenderness to us. And we wanted boys and girls to experience themselves the fact of being invited to love as they have been and they are being loved. We tried to and we trusted in God´s help.

Every day we started our time with a morning prayer. Twenty minutes in order to be aware of God´s company. And at the end of the day, we had the ignatian examination to thank the Lord what we had lived and to ask Him for energy the next day.

It happened two exciting moments. The first one was the moment when each boy or girl was talking with Nade or me about his faith, about his life and about himself. That morning we were doing personal work in depth. We invited them to discover their own masks: the things they usually show and the ones they don´t like to because they hurt them. And they all were able to talk deeper than I expected. It was a nice surprise. The other moment was the mass and lunch with all of them and their parents. Gerar was the priest who celebrated the Eucharist and I felt we all were a small real community. We hadn´t ever met each other but our behaviour was very familiar. Thanks God.

I said I arrived home exhausted. I mean we had a long long Saturday night. We were singing and dancing until 4 o´clock in the morning and then –remember, they are teenagers- they wanted the party to continue in their own rooms. Impossible to shut them up. Youth involves happiness and power. Maybe this is God´s language. I´m sure.

Alberto Cano.