I wrote a song once, in a small wooden room on a humid night in the Fiji Islands. I did it in English and Spanish. I was a young missionary priest then, barely beginning to understand the world, yet convinced that my own time in it was drawing to a close. Illness, exhaustion, and the quiet loneliness that sometimes visits missionaries had wrapped themselves around me. I felt fragile, like a candle flickering in a restless wind.
So I wrote what I thought might be my final prayer—a song that began with the words “If I go, let me go, with a smile on my face…”
It was not a lament. It was a surrender. A way of placing my life, trembling and unfinished, into the hands of the One who had sent me so far from home. I remember the moon that night—how it hung above the palms like a patient witness. I remember the faces of the people I served, the laughter of children running barefoot on the coral paths, the quiet dignity of the poor who carried joy as if it were a birthright. I wanted to take all of that with me. I wanted my last breath to be gratitude. But God, in His gentle and disarming way, had other plans.
Thirty years have passed since that night. I am in the United States now, still walking, still working, still discovering that the horizon stretches farther than I ever imagined. The song I wrote as a farewell has become something else entirely: a reminder that my sense of time is not God’s sense of time. What I thought was an ending was only a pause, a moment of reshaping, a doorway into a longer journey.
Looking back, I see that the song was never about dying. It was about learning to live with open hands. It was about trusting that love, the love I received, the love I tried to give, would outlast my fears. It was about believing that joy is not naïve, but necessary; that the poor, whom I once asked God to let me “feel their joy,” would continue to teach me how to see the world with unguarded eyes.
Time has softened me. It has also sharpened me. I no longer rush to interpret what God is doing. I no longer assume that I understand the seasons of my own life. I have learned that God’s timing is not a schedule but a mystery, unfolding quietly, like dawn over the Pacific.
And so, I keep the song close. Not as a farewell, but as a compass. A reminder that whenever my time truly comes, whether soon or far, I want to meet it the same way I wanted to meet it then: with a smile, with peace, with gratitude for the people and places that shaped me, and with the certainty that love, if it is alive, can still make this old world better for everyone.
In the end, the song was right. But the timing was God’s.
If you want to listen this song please go to my Youtube chanel: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3JsUkHt_g18
Columban Fr. Diego Cabrera Rojas lives and works in California.