Fr. Alessandro De Borbón L.C.

It often happens that we want to see the whole path of our life in advance. We plan everything. We choose a career; we decide if this or that line of work will be the source of our income and professional fulfillment; we project our future and see ourselves starting a family, etc. And yet, how easily we forget one simple, but essential question: What does God want with my life?

This question reached my heart after I had taken many of the steps mentioned above. It came to me as I was finishing my career in business administration in Brazil. At that time, I had been living in the States for two years already. My life seemed to be heading in a certain direction. My work was going very well; I was working in a real estate business in North Carolina and had been there hardly a year when they promoted me to the New York offices. The salary already allowed me to be almost independent of my parents. To finish the picture: good friendships, healthy trips, sports, etc. In short, everything that one could wish for. But I didn’t know that God had other plans. What does God want with my life?

A Providential Invitation
In Holy Week of 1998, I had everything planned for a week of vacation with some friends… yet a little seed sprouted in my soul. Suddenly, I was presented with the invitation that my sister (now a consecrated woman in the Regnum Christi Movement) had made to me some years before: Holy Week missions in Mexico. I can’t explain how, but a few days before starting Holy Week, I found myself changing my plane tickets. It was almost as if I had an urgent appointment and I saw the need to go on missions.

It was a life-changing experience. I had thought I could give a lot, but I ended up receiving much more than what I was able to give, maybe not in terms of knowledge acquired, but in terms of finding a deep meaning to life. I met people who had nothing, materially speaking, but who had everything: joy, serenity, a sense of life’s meaning, intimacy with God. I have to say that this struck me and made me reflect. Why is it that I, who have everything, do not have the same joy and the same enthusiasm for life? Could it be that I am forgetting something essential in my life? I discovered that I wasn’t just lacking something essential, but the essential thing: “What does God want with my life?”

I returned home convinced of two things: that my fulfillment was to be found in giving myself to others, and that I had to give God the first chance in my life. The recipe was simple: intensity in personal prayer – up to that point, it had been reduced to an Our Father and a Hail Mary before bed – and go to Mass more frequently.

Open Yourself and Let God Act
Little by little, God was speaking to my heart, unveiling his plans, and igniting in me a desire for total self-giving. This is the reward of the soul who opens to him: God speaks, God moves, God lets himself be found and reveals himself. And this is transforming. After having experienced God, his intimacy, his goodness, you cannot continue being the same as before. Your vision of life changes; your priorities change. God lives and becomes someone in your life—a someone who calls, who loves, who wants your response, who desires to be answered.

What does God want with my life? With these simple words, I perceived that the only and the best option was to do God’s will. I saw that this was the best life plan and guarantee of happiness and fulfillment—not in a selfish sense, but above all, because you come to see that you are responding to a plan that God had thought of from all eternity, trusting in your yes. Before so much love of predilection and with the certainty that he will always be the support of my life, I can only say yes. “Entrust your ways to the Lord and he will act.”

Father Alessandro de Borbón was born in São Paulo, Brazil on August 9, 1974. He is the youngest of four children (two sons and two daughters). He studied business administration in Brazil and worked in the United States. He entered the Legion of Christ in September, 1999 and did his novitiate and humanistic studies in Salamanca, Spain. He studied philosophy and theology in the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum in Rome. He worked as part of the team of formators in the Salamanca novitiate in Spain and is currently working apostolically in Budapest, Hungary.