Testimony of Conversion and Call To Ministry

In 1992, I was 18 and in my first year of my bachelor’s degree in nursing. I came from a family of divorced parents with formative influences from both family wings, the maternal one of catholic formation (by my maternal grandmother) and religious syncretism (by my mother). The paternal, a solid Marxist formation, typical of the time and generation. I had grown up in several homes: with my mother, uncle, and maternal grandmother for several years, with a great aunt for about two or three years, and with my father from high school until I reached the pre-university where I entered a scholarship, something obligatory in those times if you wanted to pursue a university career. In all that time I was a young man with the characteristics of my generation: atheist and very given to sexual promiscuity and my own vices such as alcohol that had been growing in me. At the same time very eager for professional and material success. 

I had never heard of the Gospel until the aforementioned date. Jesus Christ was nothing more than a historical myth that only served to dominate ignorant countries by the most powerful powers. In 1992 I met many new people because I had moved again with my mother due to the proximity of this university. Among my new friends, I met a young man studying medicine who accompanied us on our trips home. He began to preach the gospel to me and even invited me to church. I attended and began to pray to God every night. But then I encountered the demands of the Gospel and its call to holiness. I saw it as too rigid for me. These thoughts, paired with some incipient syncretic beliefs sown by my mother, I decided to attend the Catholic church. There I could relate to God without so many demands.

I was baptized in the catholic church and made my first communion. However, my impious stratagem didn’t last long, and after a while, I returned to my dissipated life, but with fear of God’s judgment and hell. Over the years, I began to accumulate a deep depression. I drowned myself in alcohol and was miserable in my emptiness. By the age of 24, my desire to live was gone.

During a visit to my mother’s house, I met again with that friend from my university studies. He was studying in seminary to be a pastor. He was sorry to see me in that condition and came back to preach the gospel to me. I agreed to start visiting the church, and sometime in 1998, I came to the light by the blessed grace of God in a local Baptist church where after two years, I was baptized and where my mother also made a profession of faith and was baptized the same day as me. It is not the church where I am at present and where I serve as a teacher and preacher, and I am part of the leadership council because we are without a pastor at this time.