Chapter 13
The voice he follows
Bairo sends his God ahead of time and follows, like a blind man, a voice he trusts. His faith, told with respect for believers and nonbelievers.
By Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez · Published
Picture an unfamiliar street, at night, in fog.
A man walks down it with his eyes closed. He doesn't stumble, doesn't feel his way along the walls, doesn't stop at every corner to check the sign. He walks with a firm, almost calm step. Whoever watches from the sidewalk thinks he knows the way.
He doesn't. He is listening.
Somewhere ahead, a voice says: this way. And he goes.
A blind man and a voice
He likes to say he is like a blind man following a voice he trusts.
The image is his, and it says a lot about the man who chose it. Bairo spent much of his life seeing far: the course before the field had found its place, natural cosmetics before the wave, artificial intelligence before it became a trend. A man who sees before others could describe his own faith as vision. He preferred to describe it as blindness.
Not for lack of eyes. As a choice of trust.
Whoever can see chooses the path by what they see, and so goes only as far as the eye can reach. Whoever follows a voice goes as far as the voice calls. For Bairo, faith begins exactly where sight ends. It is the definition he learned at rock bottom and never traded for another: trusting in something you cannot see.
God up ahead
Before any step, he does something he describes with a curious image. He sends his God ahead of time.
Before a meeting, a trip, a decision that could change everything, he asks God to go first. To see the place where he has not yet arrived. To connect the people he does not yet know. To open the road that does not yet exist. Only then does he go.
For a believer, it is a prayer. For a nonbeliever, perhaps it is the gesture of a man who refuses to walk alone into an unknown place. Either way, the consequence is the same: he never arrives anywhere as a stranger. In his faith, someone has already been there first and left the door ajar.
And this from him, who was truly a foreigner. Who arrived in a country that was not yet his and knew, for years, what it is to be somewhere no one was expecting him. Perhaps that is why this image weighs so much for him. Sending God ahead is the certainty of never again arriving alone.
Without fear
The voice can lead him to many places. It already has.
To a chair in front of a computer, for six months, building what he did not know how to build. To conversations with banks that said no. To countries where he knew no one. To new partners, after being abandoned by the old ones. To new beginnings that, seen from outside, looked like stubbornness.
In none of those places, he says, did he feel fear.
The sentence deserves care, because it is easy to misunderstand. He is not saying he never had misgivings, never hesitated, never lost sleep. He did, and this series tells of several of those nights. He is saying something else: that fear stopped being the one who decides. Apprehension shows up, as it does in anyone. It just no longer has the last word. The last word belongs to the voice.
Whoever follows someone they trust does not need the map. They need the trust.
No book says He lost
There is a line of reasoning Bairo follows that says a lot about his faith.
He recalls that humanity has written many sacred books, in many languages, over many centuries. Each people gave the Creator a name, a face, a way of being sought. Religions speak of that God in different ways, sometimes in ways that clash with one another.
And yet, he says, in no book in the history of humanity is it written that this God of life, love and truth was defeated.
He can be called by many names. He can be served in many ways. He can be denied, forgotten, argued about. But defeated, on none of those pages does he appear. For Bairo, that is one of the simplest reasons to go on without fear: whoever walks behind someone who has never lost need not fear the road's defeat.
From there also comes a conviction he defends firmly. He found faith in a Christian congregation, listening to accounts from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. But the faith he carries does not belong to a building, a flag or one doctrine against another. For him, whoever trusts in the God of creation is right, whatever their belief. The faith that lifted him off the ground is not a faith that excludes.
In the air we breathe
Ask him where this God is, and the answer does not point upward.
It points close by. For him, God is in the air we breathe. Every time the chest fills, it is presence. Every time it empties, it is presence too.
And it points, curiously, to hydrogen.
The chapter The frequency of silence told why that element became a symbol in his life: hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, it is in the water we drink and in the molecules of our own bodies, and it emits the signal the whole world agreed to leave in silence. Bairo looks at this and sees something else. He sees God in hydrogen.
It is important to say clearly what this sentence is. It is his faith, spoken as poetry. It is not a scientific claim, and he does not present it as one. Chemistry explains what hydrogen is. What that element means to a man who found God at rock bottom is another conversation, and it belongs to him.
But the image is beautiful, and it is not hard to understand why he chose it. If there is something that is everywhere, from the beginning, in every star and every drop, discreet, simple, almost invisible, it is a good portrait of what he calls God.
All connected
From there comes the last piece of Bairo's faith, the broadest one.
If this God is in the air everyone breathes and in the element everyone is made of, then no one is beyond His reach. For Bairo, we are all, in some way, connected to a new reality where everything is possible.
He does not say this as a promise that everything will work out for everyone. This whole series contradicts that promise: he himself fell far too many times. He says it like someone describing a door that is always open, even when no one walks through it. The impossible, for him, is not a wall. It is a place no one has reached yet.
That is what he learned listening to those simple accounts, from people who had crossed what seemed to have no way out. The God of the impossible is not the God of those who never fall. He is the God of those who get back up.
For those who do not believe
This chapter was written with reverence for his faith, and with the same respect for those who have none.
No one needs to believe what Bairo believes to understand what he did with that belief. You can read this story the way you read the travel diary of someone who has been to a country you do not know. You do not need to have gone there to recognize what the journey changed in the traveler.
What faith changed in him is visible to anyone who cares to look: a man who lost almost everything and who, instead of closing himself off, went back to trusting. In God, first. Then in people. Then in his own ideas.
If you do not believe, perhaps your voice has another name. Intuition. Conscience. The memory of someone who believed in you. What this story suggests is not that you adopt his faith. It is that you discover which voice deserves your trust, and start walking behind it with less fear.
Eyes closed
Go back to the street in the fog.
The man is still walking with his eyes closed. Whoever is on the sidewalk still thinks he knows the way. Now you know that is not it.
He does not know where the street ends. He knows who is up ahead.
And, in his faith, the one up ahead has already seen where it ends. Has even seen a version of him that has not happened yet, waiting there at the end. That version is what the last chapter of this series is about.