Do not look away.
Do not hang up the phone.
I want to speak with you…
I would like to do so with everyone…
But now, with you.

Let’s contemplate the face of Christ, the map of His wounds.
We are surrounded by wars,
persecutions.
We are surrounded by a world that speaks another language: unknown, broken.
The human heart grows confused.
Multiple options that overwhelm and slow us down.
Thousands of different paths to arrive,
to where?

Infinite possibilities. Uncertain destination.
And yet, a temptation assaults us, advancing silently: to stop the clock, to freeze time.
We want to think, to inhabit our own silence.
Something stirs within us and, like a child lost in the forest, we stop without knowing where to go. We long for freedom, but we have forgotten what it tasted like. Multiple options, infinite possibilities that satisfy
without nourishing.

We confuse freedom with possibility.
That “I can,” but I don’t have to…

How often those multiple options blur the “for what,” darken horizons.
The immediacy of the trivial drags us like a snowball rolling downhill.
The law of gravity makes us forget that we have wings.
When “I can” does not pass through a pure heart, it becomes rebellion: I refuse to do what I am capable of doing.”

And yet, I cannot erase what is burned into my heart:

I can think before acting
I can speak from the heart
I can ask for help
I can rise from my falls
I can begin again

When I “want” what I “can,” my destiny is illuminated. My day is rebuilt.

Freedom involves risks, and that frightens me, paralyzes me. Uncertainty freezes me. Staying in the harbor is calm, but it does not lead us anywhere.

There is no destination, or we do not know it.
There is a storm, and no one moves.
We are broken.
We are afraid.
We do not know how to read the navigation chart.

Freedom is not only choosing; it is also accepting.
Accepting a single option (you give it a name)
What does not change,
What you do not understand,
And all of this without breaking inside

Freedom is not only choosing among options; it is also embracing that one option through personal decision.
Also, knowing how to surrender the intellect before what is not evident—that is humility and it is freedom.

Let us speak of pain
That pain we have not chosen,
That pain that comes from the one we love.
It calls for action, governance, and not allowing it to settle in our heart.
The trench is the defense of the one under attack.
The entrenched heart hardens.

The fear of suffering makes me incapable of loving. I have the capacity to love to the extent that I have the capacity to suffer to sustain that love. Like the flying buttresses that support the building, transferring the weight to the counterforts, gathering the pressure.”

Love is mercy and it is forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a personal decision.
It is not forgetting
It is not justifying
It is not weakness
It is the gift par excellence.
It is a gift, undeserved on many occasions.

The supreme act of freedom is the decision to love,
The supreme act of love is
forgiveness,
without compensation,
without keeping accounts.
Forgiveness requires understanding that perhaps
The other person didn’t not know
didn’t have the ability to do it
or didn’t see it due to personal blindness

And then you understand that

TO LOVE HURTS, and to love in that way

you choose it
you decide
you are the one who forgives

THERE IS A DEEPER TRUTH

Forgiveness is not only action but also reception.

If forgiveness is not received, it does not heal the wound.

It only frees the one who forgives

and leaves the other’s wound open.
The wounded heart needs the grace of God

it needs to be reached by the One who is forgiveness to break the chains:

Of resentment
Of “an eye for an eye”
Of infected pain
Of the gangrene that advances

The love that forgives:

Does not negotiate
Does not calculate
Does not demand

Let us remember the
Ancient poem, masterpiece of the 16th century

I am not moved to love you, O my God
That I might hope in promised heaven to dwell;
Nor am I moved by fear of pain in hell
To turn from in and follow where you trod.
…

Pause here
Read slowly and savor its words.
If what moves your heart is the reward,
your freedom is fragile.
And if what restrains you is punishment,
your freedom is conditioned

Give me not because I love You,
For even if my longing wouldn’t long
All the same I’d love You even more.

To love without response
To choose without reward
To remain, even if no one sees it

The height of the flight depends on the one who decides to fly.

“Look at me,” says Jesus Christ from the cross. “I want to speak with you.”

“I thirst,” Christ says from the cross—
thirst for you, thirst for your response.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

Look for that love in every revealed gaze.
And listen, as though it were spoken to you alone, to the question Christ asks each person who comes near to Him:

WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?

And is me who answer:

Help me receive Your forgiveness.