A year has passed since I met you—a year so brief, yet so full and intense with joy and love that it has warmed me and restored my sense of life itself.
Life and love had gone dark when my heart broke with grief. I thought that if God existed, He did not love me. I felt abandoned, alone—left to face the world alone because I had given birth to a child who was different.
What I did not know was that through this child, God would reveal Himself to me. How many times, I wonder, did He reach out, only to decide that this was the truest path to bring me to Him? He let me know the deepest suffering, the hardest to bear. And then He placed you in my life—all of you—to teach me, in the simplest and most genuine way, how to love Him, how to recognize Him, how to reach Him through prayer.
At first, when we would meet and you spoke of Him with such ease, as if He were your intimate friend, I felt awkward—like someone in the presence of a stranger. Now, day by day, I feel His presence. I recognize Him in the things around me. I am finally finding the peace of knowing myself loved with a love that cannot be questioned.
Meeting you has given me—and my whole family—something precious: the certainty that there exists a world more intelligible than we knew, a world made not only of things, but of human beings and brothers and sisters.
- Rita Ozzimo, 1990