Hosea 11:8 — “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.”

About this video

The morning a Belfast kitchen became a church

The video opens with a song rather than a sermon. Gustavo wrote Your life changed my living in 2012, fourteen years ago, when his English was still poor — he says so himself, points out the line that came out wrong, and sings it anyway, unedited. The poem is here on the site.

Then comes the reason for the video, and it is not a comfortable one. He tells what happened to him after moving to Belfast in February 2015.

What he left behind

He arrived from a life he describes without exaggeration: daily Mass, the full Rosary every day, preaching on missions with his charismatic group, playing guitar and keyboard at two or three Masses on a Sunday. Two things were his: the intercession ministry, and preaching the word of God.

Belfast took all of it apart within months. His girlfriend in Brazil ended the relationship. His father, with whom he was living in a Protestant neighbourhood, was uneasy about him going to Mass. He had no friends at all, and the youngest person he saw in church was around sixty — except for Patrick, a man over seventy who noticed a young man staying for adoration and became the friend he needed most.

“Loneliness is a really dark place. And when you have nobody, sometimes you go with anybody.”

The people his own age were workmates who invited him to parties. He went. One drink became two, then ten. He lost his virginity to a girl he had met that night, and from one girl it became two, then three, then ten — Tinder, Snapchat, everything he had spent his youth refusing. He stopped going to Mass. He stopped praying entirely.

He connects this to something he was told at a retreat five years before he ever left Brazil: that the devil wanted to steal two things from him, his virginity and his prayer life. He notes drily that in Brazil it could not be done, and in Belfast it was.

Two days ago this site published the text he refers to on camera — written when he was twenty-three, a year or two before all of this, and translated into English now: The Power of Virginity. He reads the timing as God's joke at his own expense.

Why sin could not hold him

The most useful stretch of the talk is not the confession of the sins but the diagnosis underneath them. Sin cannot satisfy a soul, he argues, and the proof is that it has to be repeated: the constant seeking, the filling with something dirty, the being never full.

“Our soul was made for greatness. Our soul was made for the infinite, for a God that is infinite. How can things from this earth satisfy our inner desires?”

He quotes Saint Augustine — whose feast falls later this month — to the effect that the man who sins stops praying, and the man who prays stops sinning. It is one or the other; you cannot run both.

The false starts

What makes the account credible is that it does not go straight. There is a first return at Christmas 2015: the prodigal son, a poem written, a confession, Christmas Mass. Within weeks of January he was back where he had been. There is a Legion of Mary retreat in October 2016, an absolution from Fr Black, and a vision of the Church as a field hospital full of people wounded in battle. By January he was on Tinder again.

And then the conclusion that anyone who has fallen repeatedly will recognise: maybe I was not made for a holy life; maybe the ten years since my baptism were an illusion. He gave in completely.

15 February 2017

The hinge of the video is a Wednesday morning in a rented flat, with no prayer, no expectation and no church anywhere in the picture. He heard a sentence three times — at the toaster, at the tea, and at the first mouthful — and only found out that night that it was Scripture.

The excerpt below is that passage, in his own words. What follows it in the video is the rest of Hosea 11 read out loud and applied line by line, first to himself and then to whoever is watching, closing with the shaved head on Ash Wednesday and a question he leaves open: when God speaks, what is your answer?

Video: 48 minutes, in English, published 11 August 2026 on the author's English channel. Scripture: Hosea 11 (the whole chapter is read in the second half), with John 8:31-34 on slavery to sin.

A short transcription — the kitchen, 15 February 2017⌄

An excerpt from the video, lightly cleaned for reading. The full account, and the whole of Hosea 11, are in the recording above.

There was one day, the 15th of February 2017. I woke up, and my bedroom was in darkness. I was looking everywhere — it was as if I could see darkness. It was a bright day. I think it was ten in the morning. But it was dark. I went to the bathroom with that weird feeling inside of me, thinking: what is going on?

Anyway, I kept my day as normal. I went downstairs and I put my bread in the toaster. When I took the bread out, I heard a voice out of nowhere. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't praying. I wasn't doing anything. And the voice said, loud and clear, so that I could hear it: “My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender.”

I was really shocked — you know how it is when you are not expecting anything whatsoever and something comes from nowhere. I didn't pay much attention, and I kept going. When the water was ready and I poured the tea, I heard the voice again: “My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender.” And I said, what is going on?

I sat down to eat. When I was about to put the bread in my mouth, I heard the voice for the third time.

I didn't hear anything apart from that. But do you know what happened to my soul, to my heart? I was transfigured. In the middle of darkness, of sin, of disgrace, of being away from God — the grace of God enveloped the kitchen where I was. It wasn't a table any more. It was an altar. It wasn't a house. It was a church.

And I noticed, crying, without saying a word — I noticed that Jesus was there. I knew. I didn't need to open my eyes, because he was there. Our Lady was there. My guardian angel was there. The Holy Spirit was there.

And the same thing happened that happened to Peter. When Jesus died, Peter had denied him, and instead of going to the Lord and asking forgiveness, he wept — and went back to his old life. And Jesus went to the beach, and prepared a meal, and prepared a meeting with him, and called him by his old name: Simon, do you love me? Three times, to heal the three denials.

That morning in Belfast I was going about my own business, trying to live my life without God — and God made my kitchen a place like a church, to remind me of my meeting with him. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't eat. I couldn't do anything any more, because Jesus was there; and when Jesus is there, things need to change.

So I sat on the sofa crying, and he sat beside me — the way he had sat beside me at my confirmation, when I saw him come from the altar, put a chain on his leg and on mine, and say: wherever you go now, I will go with you. And that is the worst of it: where I had taken him. The parties until two, three, four in the morning. The drinking. Pretending I did not know God existed. My denials.

And Our Lady sat on the other side. She could speak to me because I had consecrated myself to her in 2014, as a slave of Mary, by the method of Saint Louis de Montfort — I had given her my freedom, so she had the freedom to ask. And she said: “What have you done with the graces I gave you?”

That night I knew I had heard that phrase somewhere before. I said: this is in the Scriptures, and I need to find it. And I found it. And God spoke to me with a whole chapter — Hosea 11. That was just the one line he wanted to say to me first. But maybe he wants to say it to you today as well. This is not only my story. This is the story of mankind.

The chapter he found is one of the strangest in the prophets: God arguing with himself out loud about whether to destroy a people who will not come back, and deciding against it — not because they deserve it, but because of what happens inside him when he looks at them.

If any of this is familiar, the two doors he went through are still open, and they are ordinary ones: confession, and a consecration made before he had any idea he was going to need it.