My name is Agnès. I grew up in Nice and now live in Paris. By training I’m a lawyer, and I work on the executive team of Opus Dei in France and Belgium.

Last November, I took part in the Jubilee of the Poor through an association I volunteer with called Aux captifs, la libération (To the Captives, Liberation). We traveled to Rome with a group of people living on the margins of society. I never could have imagined living the Jubilee of Hope quite like this.

Every week, I head out with two other volunteers on a “round” through the Bois de Boulogne to spend time with people caught up in prostitution. Most of them are transgender. I had known the association existed, but never thought it was something for me. What I really wanted was to get closer to people living on the streets. For years, the poverty around me had been weighing on my heart, and even more so the way everyone just looks past it. I felt awkward about it, honestly. I didn’t want to be one of those people who simply doesn’t engage, but I had no idea what to say or how to say it. I wanted to learn how to be genuinely present with the people I walk past every day on my street, on the metro...

I knocked on the door of the association’s office around the corner from my apartment and ran into an old friend, who invited me to join the Bois de Boulogne rounds. It threw me and touched me all at once. These were the very people I had been passing for years. I prayed for them, but it had genuinely never crossed my mind to go and meet them. It brought to mind those Gospel passages where Jesus walks toward the lepers, the people everyone else steps around and averts their eyes from. I had one nagging question, though: would I actually be able to do this?

Then I remembered something from the “Enlarging the Heart” talk that the Father gave at the first BeDoCare gathering in Rome, and it was exactly the nudge I needed: God doesn’t ask extraordinary things of everyone. There is so much that is simply within reach. Going toward people and bringing them something of the joy I carry inside me... that I can do. As a numerary of Opus Dei, it’s what I try to do every day, at work, with friends, with family. And my neighborhood is part of that too; the people I might only ever pass once. That’s where the Lord is waiting for me. Everything clicked. I jumped in.

Every encounter is its own thing, because every person is. Approaching strangers means accepting that you don’t know how they’ll receive you. Sometimes they don’t want to talk, but more often than not, something gets exchanged. Over time you start to recognize each other, learn each other’s names. They begin to look out for us when we come. That’s how a friendship starts. The training I received through the association has taught me to really listen, to take people as they are, with no agenda and no assumptions. I come with nothing to prove.

In the early years of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaría did exactly this: he went to the poor and the sick in the hospitals of 1930s Madrid, and there he found the strength he needed to keep going. I feel that connection strongly. These encounters have become a powerful source of supernatural energy for my interior life and my apostolate. It’s a drop in the ocean of the world’s needs, yes, but a drop that carries real spiritual weight.

Those days in Rome brought us much closer together. What struck me most was their hunger for something deeper. Some of them are baptized; others aren’t. One woman told me she wanted to be baptized and to learn how to pray. I showed her the Carpe Deum app. Another one caught me off guard on the bus: in the middle of the night she just started praying, quietly and at length. The next morning she told me she wakes up every night and spends twenty minutes praying for her family.

Before the Jubilee of the Poor, I had made a point of reading Pope Leo XIV’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi Te. A line stayed with me: that no act of tenderness, however small, will ever be forgotten, especially when it’s offered to someone who is suffering, alone, or in need. Just catching someone’s eye — someone you've never met — and saying “good morning, how are you?” is enough to restore something human between you. It might be the spark that keeps a fading light from going out altogether. That is not a small thing.

The Pope goes on to name the many faces of poverty: those without the means to meet their basic needs, those pushed out of society with no way to claim their own dignity and potential, moral and spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, the poverty of anyone living in a situation of personal or social fragility.

That's what I’m holding onto. I want so much for no one to feel cast aside or unwanted; for every person to know, somehow, that they are loved, that they matter enormously to God and to us. I hope with everything I have that this flame of hope doesn’t go out for anyone.