Permanent formation meeting Region Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida - Brésil

Encouraged by each other, let us follow the path firmly, which the lord has opened before us!

We began our formation meeting with the Eucharistic celebration, which invited us to take a path of mercy and not of sacrifice, in search of the Lord who wants to "wound us in order to heal", starting from the situations that separate us from community life, one from the other, pushing us towards isolation-individualism, the fruit of sin.

Religious life was born to live in community. There is no point in doing what we want in isolation without communion as sisters. It is a way of Salvation which is done on the third day as Jesus did - he was arisen and not like Lazarus, on the fourth day, when he no longer had life. The experience is that of the Resurrection, on the third day. This life is a life of freedom, it does not imprison us, but invites us to interior freedom, to serve like Mary with Elisabeth, being a slave of the Lord, to serve our brothers and sisters with freedom, for the love of Jesus the Master.

Religious life needs to join forces for communion, we are invited to be experts in communion. Community Life, in welcoming the sisters whom the Lord has sent to us, in mutual respect. You have to experience it to feel the joy of living.  Every religious life has its pastoral works, which also express its charism, its mission and its spirituality. Community life has the same value as pastoral action.

Religious life is for us a new birth, which calls us to conversion to live as sisters and with sisters, who manage to live together, but by faith. The real experience is in the difficulty and not in the joy of each day. This experience makes us mature in front of difficulties, and makes us stronger in front of daily adversities and challenges.

We are vocation promoters, first ourselves, then we will invite others into this life - "Come and see"! We have a treasure: the evangelical counsels for living. We have everything and, at the same time, nothing belongs to us, everything belongs to all and without privileges; we are equal in the sense of belonging.

For all of us, this meeting was considered as a moment to rediscover the essential values ​​of our Life in Community; a space to cheer up and bring hope to this world that suffers from so many threats.

For everything, God be praised and thanked.

And, like a challenge and a deep conviction, we end by singing: encouraged by each other, let us follow the path firmly, which the lord has opened before us!

Sister Lourdes Carvalho
Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady.