After noticing how people in the office were anxious about this new reality of the pandemic, I made some effort to lighten up the atmosphere and bring positivity to everyone because, first and foremost, I believe that when we experience joy, and share love and goodness, others will feel God’s love. Since the start of the lockdown, I had immediately implemented regular online sessions with my team nationwide. Sixty people sharing stories, praying together, and working together – it was not just about work but about how to help someone who is in need mentally, spiritually, and, to some extent, also financially. On Mondays at 9 am, I conduct learning sessions where we choose a topic not related to work, but which can be about some useful activities like how to love others, how to take good care of ourselves, how to nurture relationships in the family, or how to be grateful. Every meeting, we always start with a prayer – expressing all our sentiments – and I assign different persons to lead it every week. I know that these meetings were special because we felt the tangible presence of God in our midst.
On Wednesdays, we break up into smaller groups – of five to ten persons – to share our own experiences on the topic. There, we can go deeper and help one another. Then, on Fridays at 3 pm, we meet again – we call it “Coffee Break” to share all our experiences for that week. We identify five to six people to share during the plenary. And listening to everyone sharing, I can feel the joy and the presence of God in each one, as they continue to be grateful and not be worried or anxious about all the difficulties we are facing, like working from home, the burden of family members losing their jobs, and neighbors who are so afraid of being infected. Thus, I can say that my team became more resilient and became instruments of God’s love to other people.
I spent all these months listening to experiences of teammates like cooking food to be distributed to the poor, sharing stories about reuniting with their families, the joy of being together, and so much more. But what struck me recently was a message from an associate who was, at first, quite indifferent but who was now asking me if she could donate to our former officemate whose entire household got infected with COVID-19. She initiated a fund-raising campaign on her own, and joyfully, just the other day, she shared with me her happiness about having raised such a huge amount.
I was so happy that the people I work with were able to experience joy during these tough times. For sure, the source of this is our constant effort to live every moment doing concrete acts of love – as Jesus has shown us.
John Rey Villorente
