A Message of Faith and Friendship
Eugenio Nembrini - I'm sending you these few lines, written in haste, thinking about the critical situation of the Holy Father.
“You have heard that I said to you: I am going away and I will come back to you; if you loved me, you would be happy that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I am.”
This sentence that Jesus said to his Apostle friends continues to echo in my ears and in my heart since I began participating in 'the little squares,' a friendship that was born among sick people and is nurtured daily through our shared messages.
Today, as I was thinking of and praying for the Holy Father, an infinite tenderness exploded within me. I pray for his recovery, but I also pray, as I do for all my sick friends, that we may increasingly look upon the good destiny that awaits us as something desirable.
The whole life of a Christian is the affirmation of a God who loves every man madly and who, in order to be able to meet him, became flesh, became man among men. Among us sick people, we keep repeating that we are not together to prepare for death but to support each other in living, in the struggle with illness or old age, with all our need for happiness, peace, and fulfillment.
And we repeat to ourselves that there are two ways out of the group of little squares, both beautiful: either because we are healed or because we return Home to definitively embrace Jesus who is waiting for us. “When I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, so that you also may be where I am. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
I continue to pray for Pope Francis and for each of us, so that we may all grow in the certainty of the task that God entrusts to us when He decides to leave us on this earth, to bear witness to Him and to pray that He may grant us the grace of being embraced by Him in the very last days that He wills to give us.
Our dear Spanish friend Alejandra, who has already been blessed with a good destiny in heaven, used to tell us all the time, “I won't die because of the tumor. I'll die the day God wants me with Him. He'll use the tumor. But that will be the day God wants me Himself.” This is the awareness we ask for all of us and for our friends in our daily Mass.
We pray for the Pope every day, knowing that what God allows is always for our good and for the good of the world.
The author of the letter has not reviewed its translation.
