Right after college, I moved to Honduras to be a missionary. What began as a two-year commitment became six years of my young adult life serving with the Missioners of Christ, the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and the Missionaries of Charity in the city of Comayagua. That experience shaped me in ways I could not have anticipated and later proved difficult to fully integrate into my life back home.

When I returned, I stepped into what felt like the expected rhythm of adulthood — searching for a job, figuring out where I would live, and reconnecting with friends and family. Yet beneath that movement there was a quiet dissonance I could not ignore. Although I had been changed by the people I encountered, my life did not reflect that transformation in any sustained way. The
question that would not leave me was, If I live my life in a way that I could have if I had never left, then can I really say my experience was life changing?


Service shapes futures, not only in the moment of encounter but in the decisions that follow. If it is to be truly transformative, it must lead to lives that reflect the dignity of those encountered and a commitment to a more just and connected world.

Service and mission cannot simply be part of regularly scheduled programming. When approached as something to complete, these experiences can become transactional, especially when the receiving community is treated as a means for someone else’s growth rather than honored as partners in encounter. What matters most is not the activity itself, but whether we create the conditions for that experience to take root, focusing on who the participants encounter and how those encounters disrupt and expand their understanding of the world.

This becomes most clear in the return, where they wrestle with what they have experienced and who they are becoming, and where, without intentional space to process that tension, the depth of the experience can be absorbed into old patterns of everyday life.

Through shared reflection that is honest and grounded and connected to a broader call to faith and solidarity, new values can take root as conviction, shaping how they choose to live.

CECILIA FLORES,
Executive Director, Catholic Volunteer Network, NFCYM Board Member

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