Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

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For Consuela Cordoba, life had no meaning anymore. Hit by the depth of human wickedness, she had lost faith in humanity and wanted out. She was going to kill herself and had set a date with death and an appointment with a doctor who will kill her (Euthanasia is legal in Columbia)

Once a pretty woman, with chocolate colored skin and gleaming white teeth accentuated her dimpled smile. All that changed in 2000 when her ex-boyfriend poured acid all over her. He was arrested and spent just one month in jail, but for Consuela, nothing would ever be the same again.

She will spend not one month, but the rest of her life breathing through straws tubes sticking out from what was once her pretty nose. Her face or what remains of it must be covered at all time with skin mask or it would desiccate on contact with sunlight. Her life was over. 

After countless surgeries, she finally succumbed to despair. Wickedness has triumphed and evil has had his way with her. There was nothing. She would help her ex-boyfriend finish what he started so that his complete and utter triumph over her would be final. She will end her life and that was that. She paid the required fees to the death doctor and a date was fixed. 

But just before the date arrived, Pope Francis visited Columbia and met with her. 

She was one of the crowds but Pope Francis spotted her and asked them to bring her to speak with him. 

When she stood before him,  she made a simple request, ‘Papa, give me permission to end my life for I am tired of this world”

Pope Francis crushed her into his arms and looked deep into her eyes and said, ‘No”

“Why,” she asked him, weeping and shaking from the magnitude of love she be-held in his eyes

“Because you are very beautiful and I love you”.
That was it.

That moment was all it took.  She changed her mind. 

“I will never kill myself,” she swore to herself.

 Rather, she will live on, determined to be a witness and an inspiration for millions of other people, victims of wickedness. She will give hope to the raped, to those suffering violations of any kind. She will turn the great evil done to her into something good. In her suffering she will share in the sufferings of abandoned children, of mutilated girls and of starving the world over. She will offer her pain in expiation for the crimes of war and injustice throughout the world. In-short her agony will pay the ransom for girls kidnapped and sold into prostitution and slavery in Europe and all over the globe. Her beauty so cruelly and brutally erased she will accept, in exchange and in atonement for those beautiful women who misuse their beauty in pornographic ways to ravage the hearts of men lead and lead them into sin and addiction ruining their families. For every ounce of diabolical hatred with which her ex-boyfriend poured acid on her, she would pour out all her love for every creature for the rest of her life.