Sorry for the long one, but stories like this usually aren't short. I was born in a catholic family and received a catholic education. The usual type where you aren't told why you should believe in God but one that you must believe. Soo, naturally, when I was a teenager, I started to drift apart from church and God. When I was around 16 I told to my father, that I didn't believe in God anymore. He said to me that it was like I had shoot him and heard him cry that night. I didn't spoked about religion for years after that and just went along to not create any more conflicts. When I initially went to college, I moved to another city and just completely cut off faith from my life. After a couple of years I had to move to a college close to my hometown and that meant living again with my parents. To avoid going to church I started to go to "another church that I liked better", but would just stay in the car reading an ebook or something. Soon questions started appearing like who was the priest today, how was he, if person x was there... Soo, to be able to answer, one day I decided to enter the church and go to mass. The homily of that day was exactly what I needed to ear and I liked the priest, a Brazilian guy completely different from what I was used to. I started to attend mass every couple of weeks just to ear that priest, but sometimes I would leave in middle of mass if it wasnt him that day or I just didn't feel being there. After a few months I was invited to become a catechist at my parish. I was extremely reluctant but I liked the idea of being able to teach principles and help those children become good adults, soo I accepted. I would teach them what the church wanted and try to guide them to be be good people the best I could. With that I started to learn a little about the principles of the catholic faith and eventually I started to reconnect with my own faith. I joined a youth group and other church and community activities. But things really changed last year. At the start of the pandemic we still wanted to do something with our kids but the catechism and become obsolete. Soo I was looking for inspiration online when I came across the story of the now blessed Carlo Acutis. He was born almost the same year as me, liked most of the same things and grew up in a very similar way yet had went followed a completely different path. Just liked that I had someone that I really connected in my faith, who could me a role model in the age of today, for me and for my kids. When I heard that his beatification would occur last October in assisi, italy, I just knew that I needed to be there. I decided to go alone, in a kind of pilgrimage or trip of self discovery. A lot of things, coincidences, happened for me to be there, in the days before and during the trip. In that place I felt everything, happiness, loneliness, sorrow, comunion with the people there, but most important I felt God in those streets and in that place. In that place I found my faith and evidence that I needed to just surrender. It was like I have been talking to God trough a window and someone had just opened a door. I don't know where this newfound faith will take me but now I feel the presence of good in my life and the company of blessed Carlo Acutis, the patron of my faith and my generation.