This year, I was able to get to know our house in Grenoble where I was hosted while I wrote my thesis. The life of the missionary sisters there is intertwined with that of the high school that surrounds our grounds and with the daily life of the kids in the school where the kids spend three years, risking to encounter one of the sisters engaged in teaching and in pastoral work. This Spring, we accompanied some of them during the difficult moment of their passage into university. In France, in fact, high schoolers in their final year must upload their personal information onto a digital platform, to then have responses relative to their admission into various faculties. At the end, some of them find themselves in front of an open door into the renowned grandes écoles; others, instead, receive bitter delusion.
By the summer, they learn which universities they could attend but other questions, much more important questions, remain open: who am I? What is my value? I too have had to face these questions. While I was growing up in New York, and then in Washington, every year, we took a test at school that gave us a national classification: it seemed to me to be a narrow and lengthy ladder where only a few were able to get to the top.
In the meanwhile, another vision of the world had already been planted in me, the vision that my parents passed on to me and that the Christian community allowed to mature. I was able to discover that the meaning of life did not lie in the difficult struggle to excel in every area of life but in being fully the person that the Lord wanted me to be. Life, therefore, is not a vertiginous ladder where what matters, above all, is working hard to not stay at the button. It is rather like an immense and multi-colored mosaic, where my life is a unique stone in story, which occupies a place all of its own in a great and beautiful design.
I was able to discover that the meaning of life did not lie in the difficult struggle to excel in every area of life but in being fully the person that the Lord wanted me to be
I remember an emblematic moment on this path, on the first day of university. In the end, it had gone well for me: the university was good and I had also won a scholarship. That day, my dad called me: “I wanted to tell you that, for me, you could also be a hairdresser; it’s enough if you are happy. Bye!”. I would certainly not have been cut out to be a hairdresser, but the message was clear: more than anything, it is important that you be yourself, and be happy. In time, to this discovery was added another: not only that behind everything there was Someone who desired my happiness but that He had also thought up a task precisely for me, in the construction of the Kingdom. Living with this freedom made the years of university and the path toward my vocation beautiful, as I began to put my small stone into the design of the Father.
It is this truth that we want to share with our young friends, French and beyond. Through a simple and still germinal friendship, made up of exchanges between lessons, of some meals together, of a meeting every Friday, we seek to help them to discover that they are worth more than their achievements in school or in a future career. That their life is a beautiful adventure in which there is a good Father who has in mind for them a task that is unique and unrepeatable.
