Special note: This is our fourth in a series of six articles on how Vincentian characteristics (Congregation of the Mission) help to guide our mission as Misevi. Today our focus is:

Authentic community spirit in all our apostolic works, so that we can support our common vocation.

Community spirit and vocation are inevitably linked. Vocation is a call to which we can respond with a YES or a NO. And the Spirit moves us, drives us, gives us the strength so that the answer is affirmative. But in the same way that the person has different dimensions to develop throughout his life, the call to a concrete vocation and the strength of the Spirit do not grow without the support and challenge of a Community.

Because the Community, understood as the group of people with whom we walk towards the same goal, protects us, gives us security, offers us a place to belong but at the same time challenges us to share our gifts, to accept fraternal correction, to continually review our virtues, to forgive and above all to go out to meet the neighbor whom we have discovered as a brother or sister.

What is the goal of a Vincentian? To meet God in the service of those who need it most. But being a Vincentian is a community vocation. We Vincentians are a huge family made up of many branches and associations in the light of a single charism. And our tasks do not have an individual purpose, but each and every one of them make up a universal task, from the moment we understood it as the work carried out in the world by the missionary dimension of the Church, because we are missionaries, ready to go out and proclaim the Gospel in all corners of the world, with our voice, with our hands, with each of our steps.

Misevi members form and feel part of a Community, even if we do not share a physical space. The Misevi International team, a community to which I have belonged for almost three years, is made up of people who make my heart beat to the rhythm of what happens in Venezuela, Colombia, Eritrea, Ireland, the United States, and Lebanon, and of course in Slovenia and of Spain. And together we feel that our Mission is where there is a Misevi. Accompanying, supporting, forming, caring for, uniting in prayer all the Misevis of the world and by extension all Vincentians, is part of our Mission as a team. But without a doubt, the most important Mission, the one that has become our true apostolic work, is to infinitely LOVE and serve those whom Saint Vincent pointed out to us as our masters and lords.

Monica (pictured on the far right), with part of the Spanish delegation that went to Rome for the anniversary.