What Are We Hoping For?
By Lorenza V., on mission in Peru
Despite this mission being incredible in many ways, it’s also been one of the most challenging years of my life. I realized I was missing hope. At first, I didn’t quite understand what that meant. I thought to myself, what is hope? What does it mean to hope? What are we, as Christians, hoping for? Even though I don’t have all the answers and probably won’t on this side of eternity, I’ve understood how deeply necessary hope is for all of us.
There is one specific place here which is an immense source of hope. I briefly mentioned the Missionaries of Charity house in my first letter. We visit this place every other Tuesday. It’s called Hogar de la Paz, which translates to “Home of Peace”, and it’s a place where the sisters house children with disabilities who have been abandoned as well old people who don’t have a place to live. The first few times I went there, I was very shocked and I honestly felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do when they asked me to feed these now young people through their feeding tubes. I preferred to just clean the patio and not have to be faced with my discomfort.
After a few times, I started growing in relationship with the people who work there, and some of the young people with less severe disabilities, especially a girl named Milagros. Every other week, I felt excited about going to Hogar. A few more times later, I truly started feeling a lot of love for the people there especially the ones they asked me to feed. One of the things that helped me the most was seeing how the sisters, the missionaries of Charity, loved the people who were housed there. There is one specific time, I saw Sister Lucia interacting with one of the younger people there, a kid who might be around 10 years old. She was making him laugh and then at the end of their interaction she just gave him a kiss on the forehead and went on with her day. It’s moments like that that remind me of how good God is and how he really desires to love us through other people. I get to be face-to-face with true personified hope in this home and I can safely say that it has become one of my favorite places in the world. Every time I go through those doors, my heart is filled with both peace and hope.
At the end of the day, I realized that that one of the reasons why the Lord allowed me to feel hopeless was so that I could be more compassionate with our our friends here. Given the lives they live in the place they live, there’s a lot of reasons for them to have moments of hopelessness and lack of motivation. However, the Lord doesn’t want me or any of my friends to stay in this hopelessness, he wants us to hope against all Hope. Despite the world saying that that there isn’t really any reason to hope with all the examples of violence, hate, war, addiction, poverty; the glory that is in our Lord Jesus Christ is bigger than all of that. He became man so that we would become children of God and eventually spend the rest of eternity with Him.