There was a specific day, not too long ago -it was August 25, 2017- in which I began to see more clearly and the disunited fragments of my life seemed to have found their place. That afternoon, I said to Fr. Francesco: “I think that I love God more than anything else!”. What I meant to say was: I had discovered that God loves me, and this gives meaning to everything else in my life. That day, what I discovered for myself was that God was calling me; in reality, He had had me in His gaze since the beginning.
I was born and raised in a small town in the mountains of Abruzzo and the first threads that kept me connected to God go back to the years of my childhood. Above all, the love of my parents and the baptism they chose to give me; then, the education to the faith received from my mother and, in the end, wonder for creation: the starry sky, the giant oak in front of my room, the human body. In front of all of this, my child’s heart spoke with God and asked Him: “Who are You that You make these things so beautiful? Did You do it thinking of me?”
I had an intuition that in their life there was also a promise for me.
Another strong way that God drew even closer to me was my encounter with Gioventù Studentesca during my final years of high school. This encounter responded to the great desire that I had always safeguarded to meet a true friend, one who would be a friend forever. And this is what happened. Meeting GS, I began to experience an immense treasure that was friendship and the beauty of life together.
All of this came to fruition even more during my years in university. I moved to L’Aquila to study Biotechnology, and there I was able to live a full life with my friends. They were exciting years and the companionship we provided for each other was real, made possible by the presence of Christ. I was loved without measure, corrected and looked at with truth: I was able to walk, and even to take risks on certain decisions because I was not alone.
Within all of this fullness, there was still an empty space in my heart that was not able to be filled by anything. For this reason, at a certain point, I began to think that it was up to me to fill it. Obviously, this did not work: my frenetic attempts did not add anything. One day I asked God, explicitly, to change this situation. I wonder at this: the Lord always gave an answer to my cries!
Shortly after, in fact, during a summer vacation, I came to know Fr. Francesco Ferrari, who at the time was the rector of the House of Formation of the Fraternity of St. Charles. In a simple dialogue, he told me: “Giulia, you are, above all, the daughter of a good Father who loves you, He wants you just as you are and He gives you everything.” These works began to quarry within me, and in the course of living I discovered that they were true. So true that, just a short while later, on that day in late August, I was able to confide to him my intuition: recognizing that God was giving me everything, I felt a desire to give all of my life to Him.
From that moment began two years that were immensely beautiful, in which I felt literally at the center of the heart of God. I spent most of my time in the laboratory, for my thesis studies, and I was passionate about what I was doing. My life in university and with my community continued as well. Each day was similar to every other but I brought to each one the question: “What do You ask of me today and what do You want to give me?”. It was in these years that I met the Missionary Sisters. If at the beginning I looked at them with a bit of suspicion, still attached to my own projects, at a certain point I desired to get to know them better because I had an intuition that in their life there was also a promise for me.
