The Road That Brought Us Here
When we chose the name Teleiós for our digital home in 2006, we were drawn to a Greek word associated with completeness, maturity, something that has reached its purpose. There was a beauty in it that we wanted to affirm: human life, and all creation, have their origin, dignity, and destiny in God.
Over the years, however, the word began to reveal a tension as well.
The life we actually live does not look like a finished work. It is made of fragility and incompleteness, of encounters and missed connections, of decisions we only understand much later. There are stretches when we walk with clarity. At others, we can see only the next step. Sometimes moving forward means leaving; at other times, staying. And there are moments when we have to go back in order to find the road again.
Perhaps Teleiós is not the name of those who have arrived.
Perhaps it is a word about what we become along the way.
Setting Out Without a Map
We began our journey together when we were still very young. We grew up in the same small church in Vila Romana, on the west side of São Paulo. There we learned faith, music, care for one another, and also how to live with the limitations that belong to every human community.
In 1985, just a few days after our wedding, we boarded a bus for a thirty-day journey through northeastern Brazil with MILAD.
We did not have enough money to complete the itinerary. Often, we had only enough for the first leg of the journey, and whether we could continue depended on the offerings received in each city. We unloaded the equipment, set up the stage, played, packed everything again, and got back on the road.
We did not know then that this experience was introducing us to one of the grammars that would shape our entire lives: walking with what we have in our hands, depending on other people, and discerning the road as we travel it.
It was also on that bus that we began to encounter Brazil.
Not the abstract Brazil of books or speeches, but a country of truck drivers, fishermen, prostitutes, gold miners, waste pickers, pastors, musicians, and families who welcomed us.
We traveled to sing, but we were continually being taught by the people we met.
Over the years, the cities, countries, and institutions would change. What remained was this willingness to leave protected spaces and meet people where life is actually happening.
The People Who Begin to Walk with Us
Even before MILAD, a flute had already opened a door.
With considerable sacrifice, my father managed to buy the flute I had wanted since childhood. I was seventeen—a late age for someone hoping to study an instrument seriously—and I could not get a single sound out of it.
There was no internet. We began asking our neighbors where we might find a teacher.
That was how we discovered that João Dias Carrasqueira lived about a hundred meters from our home.
I walked the short distance, rang the bell, and stepped into a world far beyond anything I could have imagined. Carrasqueira was not simply a flute teacher who happened to live nearby. He was one of Brazil's great flutists, a contemporary of extraordinary musicians and a teacher whose musicality and way of teaching would shape me profoundly.
Years later, his son Toninho—whom I had first known as a concert musician, someone who seemed to belong to a world very far from mine—would sit beside me in the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo and become one of my closest friends during that season.
That pattern would repeat itself in different ways.
People who seemed to belong to one chapter reappeared much farther down the road. Friends from music became colleagues in orchestras and churches. A friend from a journey to East Timor reappeared fifteen years later, opening space for refugee families in São Paulo. Relationships formed in our youth crossed our path again four decades later, in Greater Curitiba.
We learned that people are not simply encounters we pass through on our way to vocation.
The encounters themselves are part of the vocation.
Some people walk with us for many years. Others remain for only a short time, but leave something behind that continues to bear fruit along the road.
The Garments We Wear
Along the way, we have taken on many roles.
I have been a musician, pastor, teacher, director of a mission agency, researcher, network builder, host, and apprentice in caring for the land. Val has been a traveling companion, mother, host, organizer of our common life, caregiver, counselor, and an essential presence wherever vocation needed to take tangible form.
We call these roles garments.
A garment allows us to move through a particular climate and fulfill a particular role. It can protect us, identify us, and open doors. It can also become tight, heavy, or no longer suited to the season that follows.
But we do not always have to take one garment off completely in order to put on another.
The musician did not disappear when I became a pastor. Music remained in the act of listening, in learning to live among different voices, and in trying to create harmony without erasing difference.
The pastor remained when I left the staff of a church to accompany refugees.
The teacher moved through classrooms, churches, homes, and conversations with people discerning their own calling.
The executive learned to organize structures, but had to discover that no institution could ever contain an entire vocation.
The danger lies in confusing the garment with the person—or with the road itself.
Titles end. Organizations change. Roles cease to exist.
Vocation, however, can reappear in another form.
Stones, Walls, and Interrupted Roads
Our story has not been made only of open doors.
There have been conflicts, departures, financial scarcity, projects that could not move forward, unplanned changes, and periods when we lost the ability to perceive a direction.
Some obstacles were like stones: the limits of our bodies, our circumstances, our resources, or the places where we found ourselves.
Others were walls built by people, cultures, and institutions: prejudice, racism, religious fear, concentrated decision-making, and relationships unable to sustain difference.
Not every stone needs to be removed.
Some must be walked around.
Not every wall will fall when we confront it.
Sometimes we have to look for another way through.
We also learned not to explain suffering too quickly.
Years later, a closed door may appear to have been part of a direction. But that does not erase the loss it caused when it closed. Some wounds should not be turned too quickly into lessons.
Some questions remain open.
In 1994, after leaving the Jazz Sinfônica to serve full-time in a church, a conflict led us to leave for Costa Rica. Years later, an unexpected encounter on a sidewalk made possible a difficult conversation and an apology.
Reconciliation did not erase the trauma.
But it kept that broken relationship from having the final word.
Some separations end a relationship. Others change its form.
Only time, truth, and a willingness to speak again can reveal the difference.
Going Back Is Part of the Journey Too
We returned from Costa Rica earlier than planned because of a pregnancy that required rest and care.
We returned to São Paulo after years in northeastern Brazil because our children were growing up far from their extended family and because a pastoral initiative had ended in deep disappointment.
At other times, we returned to people, questions, and places we had assumed belonged only to the past.
For a long time, returning can feel like the opposite of moving forward.
Today we know that some returns saved us from insisting on a direction that could no longer sustain life.
To return does not mean becoming who we once were.
We bring with us the garments, scars, relationships, and discoveries accumulated along the way. The same place is no longer the same because the traveler has changed too.
In 1995, as I stepped off a plane at Cumbica airport in São Paulo, I heard a sentence that would stay with me:
“I have a ministry for you in Brazil.”
At the time, returning to the country seemed like a meaningless interruption of our plans. Not long afterward, a phone call received while we were crossing on the Santos–Guarujá ferry opened a new season that would lead toward MIAF.
Years later, when a planned move to South Africa was stopped at the very last step, the question that emerged was not about finding a new direction, but about remembering the last direction we had received.
Sometimes discernment is not about searching for another voice.
It is about remembering what has not yet finished making a road.
Helping Others Move Again
In 2013, the face of mission appeared to us again in Syrian families arriving in Brazil.
We went repeatedly to Guarulhos airport, not to travel but to wait for people arriving in a country they did not know. Church rooms became bedrooms. Our home received families. Friends, churches, interpreters, and organizations formed a network before we had either the language or the structure to explain what was being born.
Over time, we learned that welcoming someone is more than opening a door.
It is helping a person recover movement: learning the language, finding their way around the city, working, studying, cultivating friendships, and beginning once again to make decisions about their own life.
We also discovered that roles are not permanent.
The person who arrives is not merely the recipient of care. They can become an interpreter, counselor, host, teacher, and guide for those who arrive later.
The traveler who imagined opening a road for someone else discovers that the other person has maps too.
That experience gradually took the form of houses, networks, projects, and places.
In Marília, we learned that a house can also be built with bridges: universities, public services, businesses, churches, volunteers, and relationships that make a city easier to navigate.
In Greater Curitiba, different places are beginning to sustain different parts of the journey: arrival and protection, finding a place in the city, work, formation, cultivation, and care for the land.
No single place needs to do everything.
No one person can walk the whole journey for another.
The Present Season
The José and Val who look back at this road today are not the same young people who boarded that MILAD bus.
We still recognize in them the musician and the young woman beside him as they began their life together. But we also carry the teachers, pastors, parents, grandparents, hosts, bridge-builders, friends, and apprentices we have become along the way.
We arrived in Greater Curitiba surrounded by old relationships that had reappeared and new people we are only beginning to know.
The new Casa do Abuna and Abuna Ambiental do not represent the conclusion of a story.
They are the present season of a vocation still seeking ways to welcome, connect, form, and care.
Teleiós is being born—or perhaps being born again—as a place where we can look at this journey more attentively.
Not to prove that everything made sense.
Not to offer a universal map.
We want to remember scenes, recognize people, name losses, give thanks for encounters, and preserve questions.
Perhaps these stories will help someone look at their own road with a little more patience.
Because we do not need to have arrived for the journey itself to already hold meaning.
Read The House a Hundred Meters Away →