Do you want to learn new songs with a Vincentian Flavor? This is your place!
Welcome to a growing collection of music-based resources designed to inspire, engage, and empower children, teens, young people, and adults through the Vincentian spirit. Each post features a single song, paired with a practical guide to help you lead meaningful sessions with teens and young adults. You’ll find activities, questions for reflection, and simple ways to connect the message of each song with the lived experience of service, compassion, and faith.
You can expect songs from a wide variety of musical styles—gospel, pop, rock, folk, indie, liturgical music, world music, and more—crafted for people of all ages. Our goal is to reflect the richness and diversity of the Vincentian Family itself, offering resources that resonate with different tastes, cultures, and generations.
We’ll be adding new songs regularly on famvin—so stay tuned, check back often, and let these melodies spark deeper conversations and transformative encounters!
And… if you want us to write a Vincentian song about a specific topic… leave a comment!
© 2026, Javier F. Chento
What would happen if a group of teenagers could sit down with St. Vincent de Paul and ask him where they are needed now?
“Send Us Where the Poor Still Call” begins with something close to that question. The song is a preview of On a Mission, an upcoming album by Javier F. Chento created especially with adolescents in mind. Rather than presenting Vincent as a distant figure from another century, the song addresses him directly and allows his life and spirituality to become part of a conversation with the present.
The young voices in the song are not asking simply to admire what Vincent accomplished. They are asking to be sent. They look at loneliness, exclusion, hunger, forgotten people, hidden suffering, broken hopes, and those whom society chooses not to see, and they ask what it would mean to respond as Vincent responded: with faith that becomes action, mercy that becomes service, and love that refuses to remain only a feeling.
At the center of the song is a deeply Vincentian conviction: Christ is encountered in people who are poor and vulnerable. The repeated prayer, “send us where the poor still call,” therefore becomes more than a refrain. It is a request for direction, courage, and a different way of seeing the world.
Lyrics:
In dawn’s first light, we hear the cry of those alone,
a whisper calling us to rise and freely give,
for love that burns in mercy turns all hearts of stone to gold.
You walked where weary souls had nowhere left to live
and sowed a trust that lifted all who felt the night.
Your steps still lead us on where broken spirits rise,
to meet the Christ who waits within the poor in quiet light
and sends us forth with joyful hearts where grace is found,
to heal the world with hope that overturns the darkest hour.
Teach us to serve with humble hearts aflame
and see in every wounded one Christ’s name.
O Saint Vincent, guide our steps with fire—
send us where the poor still call.
Make our hands the mercy they require;
lift the least, defend the small
where broken hopes aspire;
raise the weary when they fall.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
You taught that love is born where suffering is embraced,
that Christ is found not on the throne but in the street,
and every act of kindness leaves the world more graced.
You blessed the hungry hands that longed for food to eat
and raised the fallen hearts that hope had left behind.
Your life became a song where justice found its beat,
a steady rhythm teaching us compassion’s mind.
So send us, Lord, to walk the paths where strangers wait
and make our hearts the shelter where Your love can shine.
Give us the strength to love without retreat,
to carry grace to every hidden street.
O Saint Vincent, guide our steps with fire—
send us where the poor still call.
Make our hands the mercy they require;
lift the least, defend the small
where broken hopes aspire;
raise the weary when they fall.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
Your faith became a lamp that brightened every door,
a courage urging us to serve with joyful will,
to “go to the poor” and find the face of Christ once more.
You taught that love must act, must run, must labor still,
and lift the ones the world has chosen to forget.
Your call resounds today upon each valley and hill
and bids us walk where tears and hopes together set.
So send us forth in peace where deepest wounds await,
that grace through us may rise and never falter yet.
Lord, make us bold to love in every place
and shine through us the radiance of Your grace.
O Saint Vincent, guide our steps with fire—
send us where the poor still call.
Make our hands the mercy they require;
lift the least, defend the small
where broken hopes aspire;
raise the weary when they fall.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
Let every heartbeat echo mercy’s song;
let every road we take make justice strong.
With open hands, we rise to serve again,
for Christ is waiting in the poorest one.
O Saint Vincent, guide our steps with fire—
send us where the poor still call.
Make our hands the mercy they require;
lift the least, defend the small
where broken hopes aspire;
raise the weary when they fall.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
Now send us forth in peace, with hearts that freely give;
in serving those You love, we learn for whom we live.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
Form in us a servant’s one desire:
to love Christ present in them all.
— – —
Where are the poor calling us?
The most important word in the chorus may be a very small one: “send.”
The young people singing do not ask simply to feel compassion. They do not ask to become spectators of other people’s difficulties. They ask to be sent somewhere.
That changes everything.
It is easy to care about poverty in the abstract. It is harder to notice the person sitting alone at school, the classmate everyone has learned to ignore, the young person whose family is struggling financially, the migrant who feels that nobody wants them there, or someone who seems surrounded by friends online and yet feels completely alone.
Some forms of poverty are obvious. Others are hidden.
There is the poverty of not having enough food or a safe place to live. There is also the poverty of exclusion, abandonment, loneliness, discrimination, or believing that nobody would notice if you disappeared from the group. There are people whose wounds are visible and others who have become experts at hiding them.
The song asks us to develop another kind of eyesight.
“Meet the Christ who waits within the poor” does not mean pretending suffering is beautiful or romanticizing poverty. It means recognizing that every person possesses a dignity that cannot be measured by popularity, money, success, appearance, ability, nationality, or social status.
And then comes the harder part: doing something about what we see.
“You taught that love must act,” the song says. Love becomes concrete when someone sits beside the person who has been excluded. When we share what we have. When we speak up because someone is being humiliated. When we volunteer. When we listen without checking our phones every few seconds. When we refuse to participate in cruelty simply because everyone else is doing it.
Changing the world does not always begin with something enormous. Often it begins when one person decides that another person will no longer be invisible.
The chorus also asks Vincent to “guide our steps with fire.” Fire is not passive. It gives light, warmth, and energy. A faith with that kind of fire cannot be reduced to words, ideas, or occasional good intentions. It moves.
And that is perhaps the challenge hidden inside the song: if we ask God to send us, we must also be prepared to go.
For young Vincentians, these words have an even more specific resonance.
St. Vincent de Paul did not leave us a spirituality centered on admiring him. His life continually points beyond himself—to Christ and to people who are poor. Following Vincent therefore means learning to ask one of his fundamental questions in every generation: Where are people suffering, and what can we do together to respond?
The answer will not always be found in the same places Vincent knew in seventeenth-century France. Young people encounter different streets, different forms of exclusion, and new spaces where human beings can be wounded or forgotten. Some of those spaces are physical. Others are digital. Some injustices are centuries old; others take new forms.
The Vincentian response, however, remains recognizable: notice, approach, listen, organize, serve, defend dignity, and act.
Vincentian service is also more than occasionally helping someone who has less. It gradually changes the person who serves. It teaches us to stop dividing the world too easily into “us” and “them.” The person we approach as someone in need becomes a neighbor, a teacher, a friend, and—through the eyes of faith—a place where Christ himself waits for us.
That is why the final prayer of the song matters so much:
Form in us a servant’s one desire,
to love Christ present in them all.
The deepest mission is not merely to do more things. It is to become people capable of loving differently.
And perhaps that is the question the song finally leaves with every young listener:
If St. Vincent were standing beside you and said, “Come with me,” where do you think he would take you?
A resource for use with teenagers, based on the message of this song
The following guide offers a complete 1-hour session built around the song, with listening and discussion, a short Vincentian catechesis, interactive activities, a concrete personal commitment, and a closing prayer.
You can download it by clicking on the image below:
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