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On February 27, 2022, I exchanged my pastor’s suit and tie for an ADRA volunteer vest at the Siret Customs point on the Romanian border.

Did you wrestle with your decision to have children? Or did you know motherhood was for you from a long time back? More than six years ago, I found myself wondering about children. I couldn’t really find a “point” to having children. “Underpinning all of these [ideas] was the knowledge that the world is overpopulated and under-resourced,” I had written.

Some people may feel particularly inhibited in social situations. Meetings cause them stomach-aches, conversations overwhelm them with shyness, and anxiety does not allow them to utter a single word.

Sometimes I think I was born with a magnifying glass in my hand, one through which I critically scrutinize everything I do and say and which relentlessly magnifies every imperfection.

What do a foul-mouthed, drug-abusing Canadian, a stately Frenchman from Bourg-en-Bresse and an American businesswoman whose prison nickname was “M Diddy”, all have in common?

Making any choice denies the possibility of at least one other choice. When confronted with this truth, young people often find themselves unprepared for life’s big choices.

I love books as much as I love people, but if I’m honest with myself, sometimes I find a little more comfort in the company of books than in the presence of my fellow humans.

Mel Rees, a contemporary Christian author, observed that “money [...] is life [...] in a tangible form.” He reasoned that life is “an expenditure of time and talent,” while money is “the result of the use of time and talent.”

I was only 13 when I first experienced it. My three best girlfriends handed me a letter. It said they no longer wanted to be my friends. The only reason given was, “The guys pay you too much attention.” After delivering the letter, they simply shunned me.

Could it be that, beyond economic, political or geostrategic difficulties, there are obstacles to the ideal of the common good that are inherent in human nature? And if something specific to human nature stood in the way of achieving this ideal, would it not lead to failure, regardless of overcoming all other difficulties?

The young generations of women raised with the ideal of the family in which the man and the woman are team partners, equal both at home and outside it, discover that their expectations have taken precedence over the real course of society. The most surprised are, unpredictably, women who are highly educated.

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength,” says Corrie ten Boom, thus underlining a truth all Christians burdened by worry should remember.

It has been said before that the wars of the 21st century are hybrid wars, in the sense that, in addition to the environments in which the hostilities have taken place until now–land, water and air–a fourth environment has appeared: the virtual one.

“Why are you still single?” Even though I have been asked this question countless times, I still never know how to answer it. 

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.