Interview with Laura Gomez Ruiz
Can you tell us a little about your family, your childhood, your formation in school and at home?
Yes, I come from a Catholic family. My father converted when I was little. The formation in school was also a Catholic formation. We didn’t have special catechism but we did receive a normal formation with religion classes.
Did your mother convert around the same time as your father or was she already converted?
No, my mother converted after my father. Her conversion was as a result of my father’s. My father helped her a lot in this sense.
Did you notice all of this as a child or were you unaware of it?
What I was most aware of was that there was a change in my relationship with my father. That there weren’t so many arguments at home, that there was more joyfulness. Some things I did perceive a little. But I don’t remember much.
It doesn’t always automatically follow that the children convert when the parents do. Did your father have to suffer this?
My father suffered a lot with me because I had a very rebellious phase in which I didn’t want to have anything to do with God. He wanted me to participate in what he considered the most important thing of all, which was God, and I didn’t want to know about it. This began when I was fourteen years old, after my mother’s death, and it lasted until I was sixteen.
How did your mother’s death affect you?
My mother died of cancer. She was sick for two years during which time she was constantly in hospital. There wasn’t much stability in my home at that time because my parents spent the greater part of the time outside. My life was suddenly turned upside down. It is true that it had been a long illness during which we had been prepared in some way. My mother had even tried many times, when she realised she was going to die, to get it into my mind that there was no solution.
What did she say to you?
We had many conversations in which she would say to me: “You have to understand and accept that I am going to die, that God wants this and that you mustn’t rebel because of it. I accept it also, I am not rebelling against it”. And then she would try to prepare me also to be a source of help to my father when she was gone, to support him, to obey him, to trust in him.
And did you see she was right?
No. I used to say to her not to talk nonsense, that it wasn’t possible, not to tell me those things that weren’t true, that she wasn’t going to die.
How did you live the new situation?
It was all like a dream, as if I weren’t really part of it. I was expecting to wake up at any moment. As time passed I realised it was true, that this was my life now and that I had to accept it and assimilate it. But instead I became very introverted and didn’t express my feelings. Inside I had huge doubts. I was drifting very far away from God, I began to have doubts about God as my Father and all of this affected my relationship with my father. Shortly afterwards my father met a woman whom he later decided to marry. Today she is my mother. I still hadn’t come to terms with the death of my mother. Things were happening too fast for me.
You said something earlier that was very interesting: “I began to doubt that God was my Father”. Did you also begin to doubt the existence of God?
I couldn’t doubt the existence of God because for me it was clear that God existed, I saw it all around me.
That in itself is a very big grace.
But I began to doubt that God loved me and that God was my Father because I thought that if God loved me He couldn’t want for me the situation I was living in, He couldn’t give me so much suffering, or take away my mother when I needed her. I thought, what did God need my mother for in Heaven? He didn’t need her, I did. In some way I greatly doubted the love of God for me and since I didn’t say it to anyone this doubt grew more and more.
Did it affect your studies?
Yes. It was halfway into the year. My results dropped a lot but I didn’t have to repeat because my results in the first half had been better. The following year I did have to repeat.
And then what happened?
My father got married and it was then that I began to have an even worse attitude at home. Up to then I simply didn’t express my feelings, but from that moment on I became more aggressive, we began to have big arguments because for me, my father had let me down in some way. I accepted his getting married but not so soon. I wasn’t ready for it and I lost my confidence in my father. I didn’t care what anyone said to me. They suffered because they saw I was throwing myself into a path of sin and they could do nothing because I wouldn’t let them help me.
Can you describe your life more or less at this time?
I was unhappy, completely unhappy. I felt unsatisfied. I tried to find happiness by evading my problems with my friends, with different diversions, but the situation was one of constant anguish.
And what solution did your parents come up with?
They tried to talk with me to get me to come out of myself a little and tell them what I was experiencing. They saw that something was going on but they didn’t know what. I started to have problems, I couldn’t sleep at night, I had nightmares, my nerves were very bad, I was aggressive.
Was it a situation of conflict?
Yes. One Christmas time my father tried to speak with me to reason with me about certain things that were wrong in my life but I wouldn’t accept it, I just didn’t want to see what my father was telling me but deep down I knew he was right. I didn’t want to live the way he was telling me to. Then he insisted and he told me that I had to put my life in order, that I couldn’t go on like that. I got really angry and of course told them to leave me alone, that they were no-one to tell me what to do with my life, that I had the right to do what I wanted with my life, even to make mistakes. All of this was said shouting.
Why this rebelliousness?
Because inside of me, on the one hand, there was rebellion against God, against the figure of God as my Father. I was very angry, I didn’t want God to have any part in my life. And on the other hand I had in some way destroyed the figure of my father, he had no authority over me, nothing he said to me had any value.
What things did you have to change? What things did your father insist upon? 
My father insisted very much that I had to go to Mass, that I had to go to Confession, that I had to receive Communion. He spoke to me a lot about the fact that I was living in sin and that I had to change that.
Many young people associate that life with happiness. Did you?
For me that life was an attempt to run away, an attempt to escape from the reality I was living in. Going out with my friends, looking for diversions at all costs, didn’t give me happiness. Deep down I knew that I wasn’t going to be happy doing that. So I had a double emptiness: on the one hand, my life was a mess, and on the other, I was going deeper into it.
And how did you get out of all this?
God never tires, and He continued to knock on my door. I owe a lot to the prayers of many people, including my parents. They prayed a lot for me, because the moment came in which they couldn’t talk with me, all they could do was pray.
When did you come to your senses?
I often reflected afterwards about the things they said to me, about my life, about how I was living. There were many nights when I couldn’t sleep and I spent them thinking. Although I often tried to reject them, I know that in those moments I received special graces from God, graces of understanding, of saying: “You have to do this to be happy, you have to do the other, you have to go to Confession”. My parents never gave up. Every day they went to Mass they would say to me: “We’re going to Mass, will you come?”, and I would say, “No, I’m not going”, and so on day after day. One day my father said to me again: “We’re going to Mass, come on...”, and I don’t know why but I said yes, to this day I don’t know why. I suppose it was because in that moment God gave me that grace and I said yes. I surprised myself. While in Mass I saw the Confessional close by and I felt I was being called with great cries to go in. I didn’t want to but I felt the need to go. I remember that I didn’t go but when we left, I had already been touched inside. That was how I began to open up little by little.
Would you say that the great crisis of the youth is caused by the refusal to think?
I certainly tried not to think in order not to have to worry. Because whenever I began to think about my life I would get upset, so I often avoided thinking but it was impossible because the reality was there in front of me.
Did you avail of the next opportunity that arose? Do you remember what happened?
Time went by. I was coming up to my seventeenth birthday and I hadn’t been to Confession since I was fourteen. I found it really, really hard. But I knew it was something I needed.
And what was it that moved you to confess?
Knowing that I needed that confession to get rid of all the anguish that I had inside, the emptiness I had. I felt so full of miseries and they weighed me down so much. Often when I thought about death a shiver would run up my spine when I considered that I might die and have to present myself before God. What did I have to present?
What was the fruit of the confession?
My path of conversion began, the path of my return to God. Up to then I didn’t want to have anything to do with God but from then on it was as though a little chink was opened to God through which He made his way into my life.
Tell us more. How did God do things?
I got to know the Home of the Mother shortly after having confessed. I had given up a lot of things but there were still lots more, especially the friendships I had. This was the thing I found hardest to give up and at the same time it was what was doing me most harm because they had a lot of influence over me. They were following a path that I saw I shouldn’t follow.
Would you describe yourself as having converted at that time? 
I don’t think I was yet converted. God still didn’t have first place in my life.
And how did He come to have it?
Little by little, because I found it very hard to give up certain things. The group that I got to know, the Home, helped me enormously to comprehend who God was, that He loved me, that He had really died for me, that He had to have the first place in my life because He had given his life for me. It was a whole process, little by little, coming to see the importance that God has in one’s life.
In what sense did suffering bring you closer to God? What value do you see that suffering has, if any?
Yes, it has value, great value. The Lord himself died on a Cross suffering for me. I didn’t live my sufferings as I should have and in that sense the suffering of my mother’s death didn’t help me much to get closer to God, but now yes, when I look back I can see that that suffering also led me to Him without my realising it. If I hadn’t suffered all that I probably would have remained with a mediocre faith, watery faith, a faith of fulfilling bare minimums. I would never have comprehended that God comes first and that we must give Him everything.
What kind of relationship do you have with God now?
My relationship with God is sustained by my faith. For me God comes first. He is present. He is a personal being, He is not someone far away, who has no relevance in my life.
Christians are often accused of always going on about suffering, the Cross, “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears”. How would you correct that perception of Christianity? Because Christianity is about the way of the cross.
Everyone suffers. It’s just that we Christians give a value to suffering, we suffer with Someone, we suffer with the Lord. I have experienced both sufferings. I am familiar with the suffering in the world trying to escape in pleasures and falling into despair. But the suffering borne with Christ is different.
Christianity confronts suffering, not to remain in suffering but to overcome it. How does that happen?
It happens with Christ. It happens when we comprehend that Christ also carried a cross, that Christ redeemed us on a cross and that if He has given so much value to suffering it is because love is demonstrated in suffering. If we suffer for Christ and with Christ we are also demonstrating our love for God, we are giving the value of love to suffering.
What words would you say to those young people who are not exactly following that path of the cross which is the way that leads to happiness with Christ in Heaven and right here on earth also, given that He has promised us a hundredfold? Are you happy now?
Yes. I am completely happy because my life has a meaning not only for now but for all eternity. As well as having meaning my life is full of love, full of God. I was looking for happiness in other places with all my strengths and I never found it. However, happiness was looking for me. God was pursuing me and I didn’t want Him. I would tell those young people to stop running, not to run away from God, to stand face to face before God so that they may discover the authentic Happiness and the authentic value of their life.
