To build peace

 After his opening speech, in the synagogue, Jesus calls his disciples and from that moment on we was never again alone. He was always surrounded by them. With them he would share his mission and life and he would send them to preach the Kingdom.

However, we know that some times, disciples surround the Master so much as if they didn’t want people to reach Him. Jesus expresses this in a clear way: “Leave children get close to me, don’t stop them, because the heaven kingdom belongs to those who are like them”.

On these such special times of Lent, if we look at the rich experience of life of the guide community, the small group that is patrol, we will find out that it has a programme, an experience, and the richness that means living and growing in the community. There is where God is manifested, becomes presence, becomes solidarity because he looks at reality beyond those young hearts that look for and want a better world, a world of love and peace. When we see each of our girls and teenagers we can discover a personal history of joys and pains, a history of searches, conflicts and necessities. That personal and unique history will find in this experience of patrol and community the spaces for freedom, to discover what God has always dreamt for everyone of us.

Life in patrol if deeply lived, really in deep, its fruit is making people of peace, imbued with the communitarian being, compromised with a society that not always can live in peace.

Building peace mustn’t be an isolated fact, a solidary gesture. Building a long lasting peace, with real bases, is learnt acting in community, living the adventure of building and reconciliation. This is the great challenge of patrol, this is the compromise that the Lord asks us.

The Lord calls us to create communities, but fraternal communities, full of hopes that become real in actions for life, it is walking the Lord’s footsteps, is making from this world a real community of brothers and sisters who giving the best of themselves, are able to live the experience of God with brothers and sisters, living the experience along the walk along life. I fonderly remember what a guide wrote to me, about the experience of her summer camp “when the sun lights turned off, a little lamp turned on its light, then it seemed contagious when other patrols turned on their lamps, everything was enlightened by the lamps and everything was enlightened by each ones life”. That life that is in each and everyone of us, is enlightened by giving oneself in a personal and communitarian way.

We wish this Lent to be a way to discover the beauty of the movement, the gift of being community, the opportunity of living the patrol, the certainty that God walks with us to be Light and truth in a world that rejects many times the light and stays in lies. We wish this Lent make us grow in the courage of living and doing it in community, to be witnesses in the Kingdom.

F. Carlos Gómez O de M