When the wish to go in mission appeared in our hearts, we already had 8 children, of different ages, and we did not know how would be their reaction. They welcomed our desire very well and we have been sent soon in Vitoria, where we stayed two years and four months. We arrived there on October, 18th in 2014, we were welcomed very well.
I believe that one of the greatest graces we reaped during the mission time was the faith in God generated in our hearts and in the hearts of our children. During this period God provided everything and we lack of nothing. He provided everything, in an impressive way. God surprised everyday with His care, given to us through our Shalom Community brothers, who freely, unexpectedly, arrived home saying that the had been to the market and that they remembered us, our children, and everything we would need just arrived in this way. A great grace…
God gave us the grace to have two more children during the mission period. The question of the openness to life gave us the opportunity to evangelise and irradiate the Shalom Charisma anywhere we would go.
Another great grace we could reap was to see the protagonism of our children. They felt that they was a part of our mission of evangelisation, they welcomed every apostolate and became evangelisers of others young people and teenagers of the city, gathering much of them. We were happy to see our home full of young people who came to have fun, to share their lives with us.
Today if someone would ask me what we did for that people, I would say with a great joy that we have been Shalom, that the face printed that has been printed in them was not ours, but the one of Christ. We are a missionary family, we can say with a deep gratitude in our heart that only love justifies the mission. Much more than before, is beating hardly in our hearts the desire to go in mission, to be on mission, to go wherever God wants to send us. We are happy to be a missionary family, a Shalom family.
Otavio e Patricia Almeida, members of Covenant Community