Everyone who is going to the Malta Conference

Okay,

I know what you are all thinking. It has been a month since his last blog. What will he say?

What I am going to say is that I will write more later, but right now...

Book your tickets now if you are going to Malta in July/August. Cay and I just booked our tickets and got them for a reasonable price (200 Euro each). Do it soon!

Okay... more to come. 

Vince

A new love...

I love someone. 

We met in the beginning of July.

Have you ever heard the song "Accidentally in Love" by Counting Crows? Our love is like that. Completely unexpected, and at one of the most inconvenient times. But when the Lord calls you to something you must respond.

Lots of questions rise when relationships begin. Will this work out? Is she/he the one? 

I think the answer can be found in a combination of things...

The first part is submitting to the Lord in all things. His will is what needs to be done in our lives. He is in control, and if He calls us to something we must follow. I submit this relationship into His hands, and He may do with it what He wants. I must be open to what he calls us to do. 

The second part is something I believe we have more control of, and it's where a lot of people give up (certainly where I have given up in the past). In this part we must work. We must give our effort and our labor. This is the part that is both beautiful and difficult. It is where we love. Love has this tendency to be described in many different ways- some right and some way out there. 

Mark Twain writes that love is "the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." Now, I am not saying that this is not included in a romantic love, but I think the "world" reduces love and its immensity into this "feeling." (I will wrote more in a different blog about the different kinds of love as defined by St. Paul and the Greeks). I contest that love is more than a feeling and sentiment. 

Love is a sacrifice. Love ultimately has is fullest definition on the Cross, where our God  became one of us gave up His life for us, so that we may spend eternity with Him. Wow. That is more than I can even fathom. Love is an effort and sacrifice, because the maker of love made it be to that way. The definition is like was coined by our Theology professor: "Love is to will the good of the beloved." This is a packed sentence, and I want you to hear it again: "Love is to will the good of the beloved."

It may seem like I went into a tangent (which I probably did), but the point is that love takes effort and sacrifice. It is willing what is good for the person being loved. This is how relationships make it; through sacrifice and effort. You gotta work it girl. I was talking to Cay about this last night. I approach this this with great humility, because I have never been married, and I know I will be in for the surprise of a lifetime when I am. However, I believe that most marriages fail today because after a point, the couple just gives up. The effort and sacrifice stops, and ultimately so does the love. 

Sorry to get a little negative... so lets bring it to a positive light.

I am in a relationship now, with a woman that I love. I have never been happier. I will the good of you Ana Carmina Santayana. 

Driving and Peace...

I am writing to you all in the peace and quiet of the Santayana home in Vienna. Let me just start this blog by saying that these past couple of weeks have been the most stressful weeks of work that I have had. I have been averaging 12 hours a day at work. Although it has been long hours in the office, the work has been great. The students have been exceptional. They are the most prayerful, respectful, kind, and attentive group of students I have experienced. But nonetheless, it has been good to get away from them time to time. Tonight has been good.

I began my day off by waking up late. I woke up around 10:30am and made some lunch. By the time I ended up leaving Gaming it was around 1:30pm. I arrived in Vienna around 3:30pm. I both love and hate the drive from Gaming to Vienna. I love the drive, because it gives me time to think. I hate the drive, because it gives me time to think.

Let me explain… I need time to myself to process things and figure things out. However, I find that if I don’t take enough time on a constant basis, when I do find the time I end up thinking too much. That happened today. I was thinking way too much about the future and work and money. I believe it is something that all men who are in my age range think about. It might even be something that preoccupy the thoughts of all men who are striving to be fathers and the sort.

So here I am in my car freaking out about all these hypothetical situations… How will I be a good father? How will I find a job to support a bunch of kids? Where will I live with my future wife?

Crazy what happens in the mind of a man. Then something happened…

A soft voice pierced through the chaotic mess…

“Take care of my affairs Vince, and I will take care of yours.”

It was so soft, yet so firm. The Lord’s voice was so true. Immediately I began to process that and I began to laugh at myself. The Lord is in charge. He is not just a part of my life. He is my life. He is the center. He is the reason I am doing what I am doing, and He is my God. Without Him, I am lost.

When I was praying tonight in the chapel I asked for two things. The first was that I don’t ask for my life to get easier. The life of a Christian cannot be easy. If we are to carry our cross, we are in for a challenge. The second thing I asked for was for grace to make it. Grace is all we need. That is what gets us through. I pray that all of us can discover the grace of God in our lives. It is what strengthens us. It is what allows us to step outside of our own concerns and do what it is what we are called to do in this world. Love. We love with the grace of God. That is when we find our purpose here on this earth. That’s it.

Realizations...The New Year...

Man, this new years really took me by suprise... I think it's because of all the activity preceding it. Right before New Years I was in the City of Love with my beloved Ivan. Hehehe. Anyways... I fly into Paris on December 25th... no joke, I was in Paris for about 5 hours and then we get in a car with Manou, John, and Ivan's aunt and head to Feldburg, which is on the German-Swiss border. It was a long car ride, and like on almost every road trip I've been on, I had some realizations. What a great time to have them... right before New Years... 

We pulled into Feldburg at around 9am. Exhausted. We are greeted by Ivan's cousin Father Louis (who is a priest). We have coffee and talk. We crash for about 5 hours and then get in the car and head to Geneva, Switzerland. It was a nice quick ride. We happened to suprise Nadia, by telling her to meet Ivan's cousin in a mall so that he can give her a present from Ivan. Little did she know that we were the present :-)

We meander around the city for a bit and meet up with Kathia... who gives us bags of Starbucks pastries... yummy. It was our fuel for a few days... After the pit stop at S-bux we cruise to the train station and suprise another set of people: the lovely Razonables and Lester. It was quite shocking for them considering that they were coming straight from Paris, and then were greeted by people from Paris (Ivan, John, and Manou), and myself. I think 

they liked the suprise. After the night of suprises, exhausted, we drove back to Feldburg.

I think we slept until 10 or 11 the next. It was nice, considering how much Ivan and I drove the day before. We proceeded towards the mountains for some skiing, however, because of our delinquent wake we were unable to ski. We made it our goal to wake up early the next morning to get an entire day of skiing in. We left the slopes and went to Mass in nearby Freiburg. 

I love Freiburg.

Again... we ended up in Starbucks that night... chatting the night away. After coffee and talk we drove back to Feldburg for an early night. Father Louis and myself ended up chatting the way back and I realized how amazing the Lord is. Let me digress...

It's funny how some people who do not know the love of the Lord, and the sweetness of living a life for Him (not saying that I know the love of the Lord entirely, or live a life for Him perfectly) think that it can be boring and simply worth the exchange of your will to Him. 

Father Louis is a man that has truly given his life to the Lord. His sacrifice for the service in a unique way to the God and His Church makes you really think. Because of Fr. Louis' "yes" God has taken him literally all over the planet. God does that. Do not doubt that. What is even more cool is that all these different places that the Lord takes you to prepares you for the next place. It truly is a journey with a destination- an eternal one. 

I can also attest to the goodness of God, for He has taken me to many places as well. 

So here we are sharing our lives with each other in this car ride from Switzerland, and we realize that the Lord has shaped our journeys so that we could meet and have the conversation we had. Amazing. The Lord really knows how to introduce people. That brings me to a major point in this blog...

The Lord has brought us together. Our journeys have all been shaped so that this happens. I want to thank all of you brothers and sisters that I have met this year. You have all been blessings to my life. You have touched my heart and moved me to closer to Our Lord. Some of us have shared pain. We have all laughed together at some point. Either way, we have all seen the face of God in one another.

and to you... you know who you are... you have been the best gift to me so far.

Brothers and sisters, let's continue to live our lives for God. It is never a one time decision to say "yes" to God and have a radical conversion experience. Our decision to say "yes" to God should happen at every moment of the day. Furthermore, it is in all the small decisions that we do this: from smiling to a stranger in the Metro, or holding the door open for someone, listening to what your parents tell you to do without complaining, calling an old friend, mending bridges, going to the chapel to pray for 30 minutes, saying a rosary, going to daily Mass, give a sandwich to a beggar, etc. This is what we must do. This is what I got to do. 

But when we start to do these things, we begin to see, in retrospect, that through the small "yes"s our bigger "yes"s take care of themselves. A saint once said that being holy means doing the small things with great love. 

Small things... let's do them.

Enjoy the pictures. Keep praying. Don't give up. It's worth it.