As a young adult, who worked hard to earn what she wanted, I thought I was living the dream: getting into the college that I wanted, studying the major I was in against the odds of my parents, dating a nice guy. You could say that my life was pretty awesome, but after the first semester I was feeling empty; I was a practicing catholic but I was doing zero apostolate.

Then all of a sudden I remembered that I used to belong to a team, a team of young teenagers where we got together to pray and do apostolate, and I realized that was missing in my life, I was like a crazy consumer getting and not giving, or like a person that has a checklist and believing that in fulfilling that checklist I was obtaining happiness.

So I went to the house where these young adults lived servicing the group of teenagers, and I just offered myself to do whatever they needed to be done, whatever task.

These young adults were something called “coworkers” now called “missionaries,” they worked with girls ranging from 10 years old to 25 years old and the ages were divided into two groups: from 10-15 years old and from 16-25 years old approximately.

I have to say that after a month of helping out these missionaries, I was all in; I needed to do the same, and one thing that made me jump to it was my boyfriend, always criticizing the church but not doing anything to help or fix the problem, so I wanted to give my time to the church to make a difference to give back a little of what I have compared to the much I had received.

Long story short, after an interview, two months of formation, I was assigned to Cozumel, Mexico, with two other women. We had our struggles but we survived, we worke in the Cumbres school and in the Regnum Christi house.

Now 27 years after being a missionary, having an amazing husband and five wonderful children, I had the pleasure to meet four amazing missionaries at an event of ECYD at the Rye house.

Their names are Valeria, Josiah, Nico and Majo (Maria Jose). They worked with the ECYD kids of the area doing activities, adoration and meditation. They are very committed, very full of energy, happy, enthusiastic, but most important, full of love for Christ!

I can say that it was such a remarkable experience and a refresher to me that age shouldn’t be an obstacle in fulfilling God’s mission, and to say “we don’t have a way to do this” is not an answer without adding the “yet”, so the proper statement would be “we don’t have a way to do this YET.”

In other words, we are always missionaries looking to bring Christ to others, but that shouldn’t be an obstacle, and one main job that we have is to encourage young people to give back but not just like a philanthropist, like Fr. Francis would say, but to give in the name of Christ.

Saint John Paul the Great had great hope for young people, he was overjoyed to see them because he knew that when a person is young there are no limits.

If you want to learn more about what a missionary is please click on this link: https://www.regnumchristi.com/en/rc-mission-corps/