THOUGHTS ...
TO PREPARE FOR A CHAPTER

""You have not only a glorious history to remember and to recount, but also a great history still to be accomplished!""

(Vita Consacrata, Nr. 110)

"Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"The deepest dreams are often the ones that appear the craziest."

(Sigmund Freud)

"To dream is to anticipate what is to come.  The dream in us is of God, it is not our dream.”

The mission is not what the Order does for God, but what the Spirit of God intends to do through and with the Order for humanity and creation.

This is not a moment of despair, but a call to start again. Abraham was not young when God called him to start something new: Moses spent forty years in the wilderness, and at his age of 120 never reached the promised land. Ezekiel had his vision in captivity. We must stop using the pensioner card. This is the call. This is the time to sow. We are bridge builders, transition builders! We are not here to save religious life, but to collaborate in the salvation of the world.

Our deepest dreams allow us to discover God's dream for us: what will be "God's dream for our Order in this third millennium"?

Let’s try to discover in life, in people and activities how God works, how the charism is lived and shaped, what the most obvious shortcomings are that are perceived, but also what the challenges are.

Let us not seek solutions to problems, but focus our attention on discerning God's will, formulated here as "God's dream" for the communities, the Provinces and the Order in the charismatic key of "followers of the way of St John of God".

(P. Jose Cristo Rey, cfm)