In the context of the jubilee year, 2025, which has the motto Pilgrims of Hope and together with it in the celebration of the 150 years of our Daughters of Christ the King Institute, I have the joy of sharing the anniversary of the 25 years of my religious profession in a festive context in which I am grateful that you accompany me and share my joy.
After these years, how can I stop recognizing God's passage through my life and being grateful for so many blessings received!
First of all, thanksgiving for the gift of life, for my parents, for being born into a simple Christian family, accustomed to working the land and looking to heaven. To wait and cultivate patience. In that home I learned to know God and also Mary, under different invocations, which my grandmother and my parents transmitted to me.
To Our Lady the Virgin of Mercedes, the Virgin of the farms, Lady of chaparros and olive groves, to Her Woman of Yes, and Confident Mother, I entrusted the hard beginnings of family incomprehension to respond to the call of the Lord, and to Her I continue to entrust the direction of my life: “Mother, give me/give us what is most convenient at every precise moment.”
Throughout these years I have been growing as a person and as a religious in the different communities and apostolic works in which I have carried out various services of the same mission: Making Christ reign, together with sisters, families, catechists and fellow missionaries from whom I also learned: in San Gregorio, Palacios, Benifaió, Alcalá la Real, Betis, and El Carballo.
Thank you Lord, for the sisters with whom I have shared these years, for the rich formation received, who have taught me to know, love, and live a charism within the Church, a gift for my life.
Thank you my King for receiving so much, to be able to deliver it to you. Thank you for filling my heart with names, for giving me the opportunity to live and participate in different ecclesiastical pastoral activities and also in important moments in our Institute, which once again set my heart on fire with apostolic zeal.
Thank you for loving me dearly, with my limits and frailties. For waiting for me every night to give me the well-deserved rest, and waking me up every day with the light of a new dawn. Thank you for your fidelity, for your closeness in events and sisters who tell me that I am not alone, that it makes sense to live giving my life every day for Jesus and his Kingdom, in the simple, in the small.
Thank you for my community, in which I feel loved and where in these years I have met so many sisters, who despite their fragility live with meaning and joy their being a Daughter of Christ the King. It has been a blessing to know, and accompany in pain, those who are no longer here, but from the Father's house they continue to care for the Institute and its works.
Thank you for my current colleagues, who, feeling like a charismatic family, give their best for evangelization through education... on the different fronts and services that today means taking a school forward.
I am, we are, collectors of the fruit of so many lives given... that I have nothing more to say:
Thank you Lord, for so much received…. Grant me the gift of joy and faithful dedication, to live each day saying “I belong to Christ…” Let it be done. AMEN
Sister Rocío Ramírez. Community of El Carballo (Spain)
