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Get Connected!
The project Get Connected! aims to offer a process of development and human growth to our young Puerto Ricans between the ages of 18 and 35. Through a group experience, they can acquire greater understanding and integration of human life in its various dimensions – affective, social, spiritual, etc.
Reality is complex and difficult, and the needs that face today’s young people demand creative responses. Since 2001, then, we have been providing them with the experience of Get Connected! so that they can:
- Have a living experience of the love of Jesus, for “in Him all find their true growth as persons and the way towards reconciliation with one another”.
- “become ever more aware of truth, of love and of freedom”.
- “discover the significance of their lives and devote themselves to others”.
- Help to build a world with more justice, solidarity and humanity.
(cf. Constitutions, Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, #11)
Get Connected! is spread over a year, and includes the following five stages:
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GET CONNECTED with yourself GET CONNECTED with other men and women GET CONNECTED with the world GET CONNECTED with a Spirituality GET CONNECTED with a voluntary service or mission |
The experiences of our young people show that the project Get Connected! generates a process of formation in which they are finding the meaning of their lives…
Madeline Ortiz, rscj
Province of Puerto Rico - Haiti
Sharing Experiences…
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Get Connected! has added a new dimension to my life. I think it’s a marvellous experience. At first I wasn’t very clear about what it was, though I knew its aims, but I didn’t know what I was in for.
I think that all the programmes we have taken part in, from getting to know our own selves, the Enneagram, to the theme of sexuality, are experiences that have had an impact on me. This has helped me to grow personally as well as spiritually. Besides, ever since I came to the use of reason, the idea of helping others has always been at the back of my mind.
Get Connected! has also meant that I have been meeting God more, something that I had lost at one time of my life.
“If you walk along the path of simplicity, you are walking towards Peace.”
Giovanni Pagán
For me, the process of Get Connected! has been one of self-knowledge; it has allowed me to reflect and explore aspects of my being that I had never experienced before, not because I didn’t know they existed, but because I hadn’t found a way of working with them.
This experience allows me to see certain aspects of myself, personality, tastes, anxieties and attitudes that form the background of my life-experiences. Relationship with my parents, myself as an integral part of my surroundings, nature, all that I have inherited, and personal relationships, are some examples of the themes I’ve been working on, with the freedom to do so at my own pace.
I suppose that self-knowledge is a process that lasts the whole of one’s life, but in the personal sphere, Get Connected! has been a way of beginning the journey. I don’t yet know where it will take me, nor how it will affect my outlook on the world and the future, but I am sure that the better I know and accept myself, and face up to life while acknowledging myself, the more God’s love will fill my heart.
I know that as yet I’m barely beginning, but the very desire to keep on with the process is an incentive to integrate it into my life.
I don’t yet have any clear idea of how it will end, but I do know that this is “the first day of the rest of my life”.
Lynette Belardo Rivera