The idea of 10 minutes with Jesus is very simple: it is a 10-minute audio that talks about Jesus. The surprising thing is that it has reached so many people, without us having done any thoughtful marketing or anticipatory work. If it has worked, it is because people share it.
It is difficult to estimate accurately how many people hear 10 minutes with Jesusbut about 60,000 people receive it every day via Whatsapp, about 80,000 are subscribed on Youtube, about 13,000 are subscribed on iVoox, about 10,000 on Spotify, etc. In any case, we estimate that more than 100,000 people listen to it.
A great disproportion
From the beginning we have been surprised by this great response. The disproportion between what happens and what we do is enormous. If there are so many people who want to listen to this, if we receive information of so many conversions, if we promote so many acts of love directed to God... it is because Jesus is there. What we do is very little: in fact, we only talk about Him for ten minutes, record it and transmit it to the world; and the Holy Spirit, who moves souls, does much more.
I think people are surprised to hear the message of Jesus Christ explained in a normal tone of speech, not in abstract or overly clerical language, but in a natural way, so that it seems more like the priest is with you over a beer, but talking to you about Jesus and praying, than in a church.
Helping to pray, and to want to pray
The idea came from a layman, not a priest; more specifically, from a mother of a large family, a teacher at the Montespiño school in La Coruña, where I am chaplain. She had a very good idea and was determined to carry it out: she wanted to record in audio format the talks we gave at school and send them to the students in the summer. We started in a somewhat disorganized way, giving a key so that each student could choose the meditation he or she wanted. But that teacher also thought that if it was useful to her, it would also be useful to her friends, and she began to send them daily to a hundred people, who in turn distributed them. That's how it started: like foam, uncontrollably.
Our desire is not only to arouse the desire to pray, but also to nourish those who want to pray. What is desirable is that the audios we record not only appeal to those who are already in the Church, but that the listener, seeing that it is useful to him, says to himself, for example: this will be useful to my daughter, to my son, who has not been to Church for a long time, and with this he can connect. We would like all the audios to be like this, although it is difficult to always achieve. In any case, we do not speak only for those who are there, but we want them to want to share what they receive.
A year after the summer in which we started in Spanish, on August 22, the English version began; the Portuguese version began on Ash Wednesday of last year 2020; at the end of the summer of the same year the French version began, and recently the German version was born. They are carried by priests from the countries where these languages are spoken.
Two "you's"
The one who preaches is always a priest, but an anonymous priest, because we never say our name. That explains why I am signing this article with the name we usually give each other jokingly. We usually use the Gospel of the day, but we are not tied to that; sometimes one of us directly exposes something he wants to say and that serves to connect, an idea or something that works, naturally always referring to Jesus Christ, or to the Virgin, or to St. Joseph, especially this year.
We try to translate our colloquial speaking style to audio. It is not easy to do this when you are alone in the room recording; but the basic thing is that we are addressing a single listener, not thousands "who are listening to us", maybe one who is going with his headphones in the subway or who knows where. In the audio there are always two persons: the priest, who addresses Jesus and that specific person, is before two "yous", a divine you and a human you.
Ideally, I imagine that this particular listener is a girl or a boy in the last years of university, with a Christian background, but who has stopped going to Mass. And his mother, who listens to him, says to herself: I am going to pass it on to him to see if, with the normality of this language, and in this way, he will get back in touch. Sometimes the priest will give you a smile or even a laugh, which is also part of the 10 minutes with JesusThe texts include many testimonies of people, conversions, anecdotes of daily life, and always the Gospel. And in the texts are intermingled many testimonies of people, conversions, anecdotes of the day to day, and always the Gospel. Everything mixed, updated; everything alive.
The priests, the volunteers and the listeners
Now they do 10 minutes with Jesus sixteen priests (I am referring to the Spanish edition), many of them young, spread throughout Spain. What they have in common is that they understand holiness in the midst of the world, the encounter with God by doing the natural, normal things that any ordinary person does. A good part of them belong to the Prelature of Opus Dei. Of course, among the saints we mention there are many, but anyone listening to the audios can perceive that St. Josemaría Escrivá is very present, because of this spirit of holiness in the midst of the world.
The technical means are very elementary, and the expenses are practically nil. The only thing that has cost us money has been the AppBut with people's help we managed to pay for it in 24 hours, and with it their next updates. It was a joy to see how well people responded. We don't have to pay any salary, and everything is supported by volunteers. How many are there? I can't say precisely, but each of the 320 groups of Whatsapp The current system is managed by one of them, and volunteers are the ones who maintain the channels of Youtubethe website, or those of iVoox, Spotify, Instagram, Facebooketc.
Talking to Jesus in a different way
The reactions we get from the people who listen to us are only the tip of the iceberg. We receive many messages like this: "I have learned to pray with you. I have always been a Christian, but these 10 minutes They have taught me to talk to Jesus in a different way". During a meeting, one of the volunteers approached us and told us: "I had been away from the faith for many years, without going to Mass and with a certain reluctance for anything spiritual. I don't remember who sent me an audio, but I started to listen to it every day, I got hooked, and one day I said: "What if I go to Mass? So I went to Mass. And since you talk so often about confession, you managed to win me over, and I went back to confession. And then: I became the administrator of a group. I wanted to tell her story. Now she is a Christian woman, she goes to mass regularly, not only on Sundays, she attends the sacraments, etc....
Another person was climbing a mountain pass with little traffic, in the snow and without chains. She was stuck for a long time, and to fight her nerves, she put on the 10 minutes with Jesus. That day they were talking about the holy guardian angels, so he asked his Guardian Angel to fix the problem. Just as the audio ended, a snowplow appeared.
We also know of people who have made great decisions of surrender to God as a result of listening to some audio. God also moves hearts through telematics: the Holy Spirit also works, whatever the means.
Prayer: authentic life
To pray is to begin to live the authentic life. Authentic life is not a solitary life. And prayer allows me to live with someone who loves me, who knows me, who has been waiting for me for a long time, and who teaches me who I am.
To live in prayer is to know who you are, and to discover something that is a joy, a marvel, as St. Augustine discovered: I was looking for God everywhere, and in the end I found him within me. It happens to people who begin to pray: there is a voice inside them that says: hey, I am here, you are not alone, and I am in the deepest place of your own depth. For anyone who doesn't know who God is or how to pray, I would encourage them to listen to an audio of 10 minutes with Jesus which is entitled: "For Atheists Only". It is easy to find. It is intended for the one who does not know God, for the one who is perhaps an atheist at heart, and it is an exercise to be able to address Him for the first time.
