Concurso TopFiveFamily Observa, Piensa y Escribe: La Misión, un relato de vida. Texto Original.

First of all cordial greetings and best wishes this Easter season to all members of the Top Five Family community and to all Hive members in general.

This is my participation in this week's contest, which gives me the opportunity to tell a story about a personal life experience.

Finally, I invite all my followers to participate and exercise their creative writing process in this weekly contest.

This is a story of a personal experience, to which the image posted by @lanzjoseg makes reference, and I refer to my time as a Capuchin Lay Missionary, where I had the opportunity to live and share with indigenous families in Zulia State and Bolivar State.

My experience began in adolescence, in the process of searching for myself and trying to give answers to various spiritual concerns that I had, which led me to participate in several meetings with youth groups of the Catholic Church, which led me to get more and more involved in the processes of the church within the Venezuelan society of the late 80s and early 90s.

In this process, very interesting situations occurred, where I became involved in processes for the struggle for human rights, the defense of minorities, support for the excluded, the care of the sick in terms of spiritual support and the visit and accompaniment of grandparents abandoned by their relatives in old people's homes to their own fate.

To this, we must add that as part of the Catholic Youth, we helped nuns and priests, such as Father Chui, a Uruguayan priest, who went into the hill of Los Rosales in Caracas and created a house where he cared for abandoned children, with drug problems and neglect by their families, whom he rescued from the street and helped them to have a dignified life free of violence, from this beautiful work came engineers, doctors, poets, graduates in letters, educators and so on.

With Father Chui, I had the opportunity to learn to take Mate, to learn to enjoy solitude, I learned not to complain, to see in the weak and the abandoned the true face of Christianity and I learned that the real struggle of the church was not seen and was not in the big churches, nor behind the opulence of some clergymen and bishops.

Those were times of strong social changes, came the mass murder of the poor people of Caracas by the old and now disappeared DISIP, the metropolitan police, the army and the national guard, (in small letters, since they do not deserve more than that after their actions) due to the "Caracazo".

In those moments, hard for the country and for life, we launched ourselves to fight for the defense of Human Rights, among the most remembered priests with whom I had the opportunity to share, were Father Gazo, Father Matos, Father Olazo, Father Antonio of the Paules Fathers among many others.

With all these activities and many others that I could not comment without making a huge litany, I ended up meeting a Nun of the House of St. Vincent de Paul, who invited me to several of their houses and the one that impressed me the most was one in San Martin, where the Nuns collected teenage homeless mothers and abused women.

After that I was invited to a spiritual retreat, where I met Father Antonio Gonzalez and ended up in the Major Seminary of the Paul Fathers, being with them and after having started the formation period, I felt imprisoned, I lacked the air and I did not really feel comfortable, and it was not because of the discipline as such, which began at 5 in the morning and ended at 10 at night, but what I really lacked, was contact with people and pastoral activity as such.

One day I got my hands on a magazine of Venezuela Misionera, so I decided to request an experience with the Padres Menores Capuchinos, which was granted to me, ending up in the Tukuko Mission in the State of Zulia, as a Secular Missionary.

With the Capuchin Fathers I had the opportunity to live and do many things, from taking care of a girl bitten by a Jaguar, to learning to run a business, as well as working with cows and milk production, or ending up detained by the national guard (in small letters) for taking with a Friar and a group of indigenous people a hospital that did not want to give attention to two indigenous Yukpas.

With the Capuchin Fathers, I also had the opportunity to live for a while in the missions of La Gran Sabana in the State of Bolivar and to live with the Yekuana, to whom the photo of the mural shared for this challenge reminds me a lot.

To finish this story, I will say that I ended up leaving the church because of family situations to which I had to respond and that were unavoidable, more as a responsible son. But according to what they tell me, from my friends to my ex-partner, I continue to see myself as a monk and to worry about situations that they worry about.

These are the memories and anecdotes that this mural brought me and that I share with you today, although very, very, very summarized, a very rich, fruitful and impacting life and spiritual experience, which I enjoyed every minute that I had the opportunity to live it.

Thank you for reading me.

If you like this contest, I invite you to participate through the following link.

I take this opportunity to invite @alicia2022, @esbat and @nahueldare3627