PARAGUAY, Natalia Regúnega •
It was a great and pleasant surprise the one that Juan Vicente Ramirez shared a couple of days ago. A couple who are members of CIEES (International Community of Schoenstatt Businessmen and Executives) installed an altarpiece with the picture of the Mother Thrice Admirable of Schoenstatt at the main entrance of their warehouse Pazos de Toledo, a loading and unloading warehouse in Ciudad del Este. —
Why? Natalia and Saúl explain:
After a nice work experience in Ciudad del Este in 2019, we decided with our family to leave Asunción and take up residence in this city, working in our warehouse stores, located at the mall.
Ciudad del Este is a small world city, a city of work, a city that gathers, gathers and promotes opportunities.
Paraguayans, Brazilians, Argentinians, Arabs, Orientals… Everyone crosses paths, comes and goes. A city for everyone!
No time to lose
On the other hand, despite being in our country, we feel that “lack of identity”, generated by the diversity of cultures. Uprootedness reveals a pragmatic man, limited to the materialization of action, evidence of the mundane: man as a machine of doing.
Here, time is tight: we must win, and to do so, we must take advantage, get there first, be quick, cunning. You cannot “waste” time.
In this hustle and bustle, we tend to abandon our “being”, consumed by inertia and mechanized impulses. We forget that we owe it to ourselves, to our society, which welcomes, contains and integrates us.
This happens, above all, when we do not stop to observe, when we do not contemplate, when we do not value… when we do not love.
This is what calls us!
A culture of diversity.
The life of coexistence in diversity, where many cultures dwell together, must have a reason of great value in its existence: respect, the daily and manifest experience of true love, in spite of the differences.
Diversity is a good thing! It nourishes, teaches, challenges, strengthens and magnifies.
We ask ourselves: What about our passage through it? Do we come to be or not to be? Do we leave traces? Does God want us to be invisible? It is there, in the search for these answers, that CIEES (International Community of Entrepreneurs and Executives) appears in our lives.
We long for a diversity devoted to the world of work, from commitment and brotherhood. Therefore, we decided to stop the wheel -our lives-, to observe and center Mary -mother and endless source of love and inspiration- in our lives, making her the center and axis of our actions and thus also consecrating her to our lives in the world of work.
The message of the altarpiece
The spokes of the wheel symbolize the compromising actions that we must assume as her children: “From the world of work to the heart; from the world of actions to our mother”.
Only in this way, if our actions (the spokes) are directed to Mary and Jesus (center and axis), our life (the wheel) will turn in the right direction, with the best of gait and under the mantle, strength and light of her love.
To open the spiritual to the world of work and to offer our actions… that is our great mission, with Mary, Mother, as the center of our lives.
Original: Spanish 2022-02-21. Translated by: María Aragón, Monterrey, México
