Father Luis Guilherme da Silva Mendes was born and raised in Brasilia, capital of Brazil. He was raised in a Catholic family with eight siblings.
During his teenage years, he started having strong doubts about the Church and his faith. For many years, he ran away from God thinking he had nothing to offer and that he didn’t need him. When he was 19, as he witnessed a priest ordination, Father Da Silva finally gave up and realized the Lord had been calling him and was waiting for him with unconditional love.
“The Lord touched me with his grace, he showed me that he was not asking me to give anything, but he was the one offering me unconditional love, a meaningful life, his Holy Spirit and, above all, his forgiveness,” Father Da Silva recalled.
Although the sign of the new priests laying on the floor and offering their lives to God got stuck in his head, he didn’t answer God’s call until later. Luis had plans of what his “ideal life” would be, without realizing that God had a different path for him. Once he achieved some of his personal goals with a successful career, a steady job, and a fiancé, he finally realized that his life wasn’t complete and that he was trying to escape God’s call.
Father Da Silva then recalled Luke 9: 24-25: “For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”; and immediately decided to take a different path, the one God had been saving for him.
“That was the moment I radically answered to God’s call, leaving the nets and following him in the adventure of the new evangelization, allowing him to send me wherever he wanted, to announce his love and the forgiveness that I have received in abundance,” he said.