This January, 235 young people and 116 youth leaders from the Central Zone of Kairos were gathered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to take part on the third Youth Conference titled: Tu Momento (Your Time) 2017.

“Why is it that when we speak to God we are said to be praying, but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” —Lily Tomlin

I have been a lifelong committed brother in the Servants of the Word for 35 years, and people sometimes ask me, “Why are you still here?” A simple, possibly glib, answer would be that the brothers have not kicked me out yet, in spite of my many idiosyncrasies. But let me give you three, more serious reasons.

About a year ago I landed in Manila, halfway around the world, for a mission year: I was very much out of my depth, yet with a clear realization that my closest relationship was with the Lord Jesus: a pretty remarkable realization. How did I get there?

On 1st September of 2016, four brothers made their lifelong commitments to the Servants of the Word. For the occasion, all the brothers from the U.S.A. gathered in Detroit, together with family and a few other guests.

I am standing here as a representative of the ongoing and prolific failure of the Servants of the Word as an organization. I was at one point, like many men in this room, an “affiliate,” a novice, if you will, someone who fell into the orbit of the brothers for a time. I lived with them, considered their life, yet ultimately made a different choice in life.

Filipinos have a saying which could roughly be translated as, He who does not know how to look to where he has come from will never arrive at where he is going. The idea is that in order to achieve our aims we must never cut ourselves off from our origins. Or, to put it another way, a tree cannot survive, let alone prosper, if it is cut from its roots.

Last year (2016) was the Servants of the Word’s 45th anniversary as a brotherhood. The brothers in the North American region celebrated the event in September. Some 300 friends joined the brothers at their center near Chelsea MI, USA, with an evening of prayer, reminiscing, sharing, and thanksgiving.

Two years ago, on an October afternoon, I walked into my philosophy discussion class at university. The tutor put up one word on the board: Euthanasia. Our class discussion was going to be on whether or not it was moral for people to have an assisted death. Seen the movie Me Before You? We were going right to the heart of that.