Comboni's Challenge: When Your Life Becomes the Message

John the Baptist sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask him a simple question: "Who are you? What do you say of yourself?" And Jesus answered: "Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them" (Mt 11:1-5). Here we have the identity card of Jesus: the God-Man preoccupied and occupied with the last, the forgotten, those who seek faith, hope and real love.

The Comboni Documents and our Rule of Life define our identity: "We are sent to the poorest and most abandoned peoples and human groups: the phenomenon of minorities not yet reached by the Church and neglected by society; groups not yet sufficiently evangelized who live on the outer edge of poverty, through historical causes and the negative effects of globalisation and the market economy. Comboni had identified these peoples with Africa of his time."

It is necessary to review our missionary work and see whether our forms of presence are in harmony with our spirituality and our charism and, with Comboni realism, follow once again the path marked out by Comboni himself. Relocating the charism also means reformulating the where and the how of our evangelizing activity in our changing world. The danger is not that we might change our methods, but that we might preserve our methods while abandoning our mission. Faithfulness to a charism is not about freezing a moment in history, but about keeping the same fire burning in new conditions.

The first way to be evangelizers is to give witness by a life of fidelity to the Lord Jesus: a life marked by faith, hope and love ~ a life that simply tells about God and becomes good news!

People cannot hear the Gospel from someone whose life contradicts it. We must become the message before we can deliver it. Our lives are either a commentary on our words or a contradiction of them.