Ester Ramiro, the 34-year-old Spanish woman whose testimony was heard this Friday at the Via Crucis presided over by Pope Francis in Lisbon, has stated that she wanted to communicate to the young people of World Youth Day (WYD) that God came looking for her. “It's never too late to start over,” he says.

Ester transmitted her message, recorded, in the Via Crucis that gathered 800,000 people yesterday, according to the Vatican, in the Eduardo VII Park in Lisbon. “I still can not believe it. I wanted to tell a little about my story, because I was far from the Lord, then I got lost and it was all horrible and once I met God my life changed. Now I'm much happier,” he says.

As a young woman, at the age of 24, Ester had a spinal cord injury. She lived far from God and, at a party, they passed her a piece of a cake with hallucinogenic substances and, drugged, she threw herself out of the window, as a result of which she was injured for life.

“I got mad at God. I had the mentality that if you do good things, good things happen to you; if you do bad things, you have a bad time. But they tricked me and gave me that cake and that happened to me. It was unfair.”

However, as he explained in the Via Crucis video, with the injury his life took a first turn: “It was a gift. It changed my look”. He started doing sports, and complaining less. “I am more grateful to those around me, starting with my family, and worry less about the future,” she says.

Two years after the accident, Ester meets her current husband, Nacho. They go to live together, she gets pregnant and they decide to have an abortion.

In these circumstances, Ester, takes an emotional intelligence course, without any relation to anything religious.. “I meet the great love of God. The awareness that he was close to me awakens in me,” he says.

“God came to look for me completely like the good shepherd who goes to look for the lost sheep. He came looking for me and healed me. From there I get closer to Him and return to faith,” he explains.

At the end of the course, I need to confess. He enters the first parish he finds, adapted for wheelchairs. She had never cried before, because it was difficult for her to express her feelings, but she bursts into tears when she finishes.

“From then on, the sorrow and the sadness were taken away from me at once.. Guilt takes longer to fade. It was very difficult for me to forgive myself, more than even those who gave me the cake that caused my accident,” says Esther, who has a daughter named Elizabeth and married her partner through the Church.