This is not a confession of defeat, nor a self-indulgence in a life made of flaws.
This is a spontaneous text, born almost without warning, written in this chapel of the Sacred Heart where my thoughts settled as they came.
A text that seeks neither to embellish nor to excuse, but simply to tell the truth.
I left life here just as it presents itself to me, with its fullness and its emptiness, its fragments of light and its silent corners.
This text is a breath, a way of laying down who I am, here, today.
My life is full of stories of love and hope, full of celebrations and above all defeats. It is made of ordinary cracks, of banal failures that hardly deserve to be told. My life is filled with emptiness and overflows.
No trophies, I have not accomplished much. No this, no that. Just worries up to now.
My life is a poem.
Rich in what makes me poor, poor in what could make me rich, and yet, I am rich.
Rich with little.
Rich with time, sometimes with wasted time.
Rich with lateness, with meetings that could have changed my path.
My life has remained my life:
a life that flirted with talent without ever really seducing it,
a life that brushed up against temptation without fully surrendering,
a life that dared without going all the way.
A life that would exhaust more than one person,
and yet one I carry standing,
with small pieces of luck,
small pieces of dreams,
small pieces of everything that is neither good nor bad.
I write this in a chapel of adoration.
My life has always been like this:
the story of a creature facing her Creator,
the story of a very small me before an immense God.
The story of me in that land of a thousand hills, my first homeland.
The story of me in my first family.
The story of me, today, thousands of kilometers away from there.
The story of me here, in this chapel of the Southwest,
in this church of the Sacred Heart,
praying for a full life,
for many lives within my future life.
My life is full of yesterday’s stories, and of tonight’s.
My life is rich with nothing, my life is rich with everything.
And tonight, I will leave this place with this vast perspective:
my life is rich with God.
It is to this God that I want to dedicate this month.
“I am discovering that every life, even when it seems ordinary, carries a strength we do not always see. We move forward with our questions, our silences, and our small victories, and yet something holds us, something greater than ourselves.
I dedicate these words to those who feel on the margins, to those who doubt their worth, to those who believe they have nothing exceptional to offer. A life does not need to shine to inspire. It only needs to be true, courageous, and faithful to its own path.” I wrote in my notebook
Written by Aliane UMUTONIWASE