A bomb can...

There are people you can talk to, and others for whom you write an article in the hope that the message gets through.

It may have happened to you too: you gave some good advice, but whether because of your friend's circumstances or their inability to accept your help, your friend got angry or offended.

If I analyse my life, I too was once that angry or offended friend. I was permanently angry or offended, but the reality is that I lived in a town of touchy, proud people.

When life takes you, not necessarily, outside the borders of your town, like it or not, you have to clash with other realities and ways of doing or thinking. Often this helps change. Often you realise your mistakes and wrong attitudes and you restore your life. For a few, though, it ends in emotional destruction because they cling to their own character.

I haven't become perfect, because we know perfection isn't of this world, but I've learned to manage the wrong sides of me, turning them into beautiful and helpful things. Something beautiful and helpful that life then gives back to you and that makes you feel good.

I was like a bomb in its own bomb factory that was taken outside, and someone defused it. Now, if I had gone out and exploded, right now I would surely be destroyed, because I couldn't have given vent to my life, only to an explosion of my figurative death. Having been defused, I've been able to be myself, aware both of my dangerousness and of what I was and didn't want to be. A bit like so many people's statement: that's just how I am. Almost justifying themselves for being bombs that have to explode.

When you've had such a regenerating phase outside your town and you go back, what you face is certainly not pleasant: one, because you clash with your past; two, because you see your mistakes again; three, because you think you can help as you were helped, but everyone knows you and you're no longer credible.

Thinking again of the defused bomb going back into the bomb factory, do you expect the bomb-maker to consider you a tennis ball? No! He surely wants to make you a bomb again. But why!? Because he doesn't see you as a tennis ball, nor as a relic to put on a shelf on display, but always as what you are, a bomb.

How can someone, defused of their toxicity, go back to their own town? Simple: go back as what they are, with what they have received.

Not everyone will understand you, not everyone will appreciate you; maybe out of 11,000 inhabitants one will appreciate you, but that's fine anyway. We know bombs are built to destroy, and think what would happen if that defused bomb went into its own factory and, instead of having been properly emptied, had actually been primed. A crazy explosion, a massacre.

An exaggerated comparison, I realise, but it's what I live, and it makes me laugh when I think of Christ: when He went back home everyone said, but that's Joseph's son. It makes me laugh when they tell me: you're Carminuccio's son (a nickname for Carmine).

Imagine if the bomb had gone into its own factory and been able to talk to the other bombs to tell them: you know, out there there are wonderful meadows, there's the warmth of people's hands holding you close, there's a blue sky above us. I imagine the other bombs, aware of being bombs, answering: you're crazy!!! They've emptied you to the core!!! They've pulled out your safety pin and you misfired!!!

In the end that's how it is, and I don't expect anyone to understand me for no longer being who I was, but what I've understood for myself and for my life is enough for me; it has changed every kind of situation and the substantial quality of what I live. Those who have the patience to listen to someone's story can discover the starting point and the finish line. Those who only look and judge can only develop their own prejudice, which becomes a condemnation.

You can change your life, and many try to do so by taking refuge in situations that don't really set them free, because they fill themselves with things that contaminate. Imagine putting coffee instead of gunpowder in that defused bomb: the bomb would no longer be a bomb, and the coffee would no longer be coffee. The bomb was born as such for the purpose it was made for, but it can change and show a different side of itself, showing itself and letting people see that what you are is only the fruit of what was built around you.

The bomb is a bit like our body: I can be born like Nick VUJICIC and become wicked because I'm angry with God and with the world, but I can also become the proof that one is like this for a very precise, clear purpose that gives you the chance to change. If you really want to know your enemy, then do it, get to know him well.

If you think Christ is on the side of losers, that He's for the unlucky, if you think God caused the death of someone you know, if you think God is your enemy, learn to really know Him, and then you'll be able to defeat Him.

We've been given a body (however you judge it: beautiful, ugly or disabled), we have our soul, but we have a spirit compromised by the continuous, lasting sin of living in certain circumstances of place and people. It would be enough to draw near to what the Holy Spirit needs to whisper to us, to get out of our pride in being this way.

You don't need my help to tell you how to do it: look for Him in your room, close the door behind you, and He, the Holy Spirit, is there to talk with you and ready to defuse you from everything you've been filled with.