The Blessing of a Changed Life
I believe that as we are growing up, we are blind to see that the love we wanted so much from our parents and that we did not receive. Fragile emotional life comes from a place that lacks strong core spiritual values in people’s lives. When a child does not have that to imitate what we end up imitating in life are the mirrors that raised us. Therefore, a child’s life grows with an aggrieved spirit, hiding the hurts, hatred, and bitterness.
Resentment towards those who have raised us turns into a natural part of our life. We do not know how to remove the bitterness. As a result, we try to fill our low self-esteem, or that emptiness by making wrong choices. That is, we fall prey to drugs, harmful relationships, lies, peer pressure or wherever we feel accepted. We look for anything that will help us alleviate the pain we carry within.
God was waiting for me at the entrance of a Pentecostal church called Warden Full Gospel Assembly to embrace me; everyone treated each other equally, then I began going forward for prayers at the altar, began to change my living environment, my friendships, and I realized that this was genuine love; it was a reality, not a fairy tale. I discovered a treasure, that unconditional love that they had received and revealed by the Spirit of the living God.
This was what my heart was receiving from these redeemed people of God, I was being ministered to by the Spirit of God through their words and actions, I was becoming a child, being raised in a family of love with spiritual values.
One day in the hallway after service, the youth Pastor came up to me and said, "Rommel, I see you are hungry for God; I have something for you," and he gave me the New Testament Contemporary English Version, I received it and said thank you.
Going home on the bus that day, I started reading the New Testament and started understanding every word spoken by Christ. It felt as if I was walking with Jesus, and I was by the power of the Holy Spirit. The language was easy to understand, and I took the Word of God to heart. I started seeing His grace and hope for my life. I started developing a relationship with Jesus Christ every day through His word. Shame and guilt left my life though His death and His love, I was becoming spiritually alive by making amends, forgiving others, being consciously aware of the changes I needed to make,
I understood it now. Jesus lifted a big weight from me; resentments, grief, and anger left my life, and forgiveness came to set in through rivers of His love.
As I started making independent missionary trips to my country of Nicaragua, my relationships and social network with other churches in Canada increased. On one of my returns to Canada, God directed me to Heron Park Baptist Church (HPBC). One Sunday in 2010, they invited me to share, and a deep relationship began to develop. It was there that God gave me a call through HPBC: I needed to go to the mission field as a full-time missionary. By the end of 2010 I had moved to Nicaragua, starting a full-time ministry. I was ministering to the homeless on the streets who suffer from addictions and I began a prison ministry.
His love through others brought me home to Him, to a place of genuine repentance, “that is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19 NKJV). Jesus Christ has given me a true identity and a new meaning to my life. He speaks to me of a transformed life full of hope, mercy, and love for others in Christ and outside of Him. I know I will never obtain perfection, but today I can recognize my faults, grow, shield my life with prayer, and confront any issues that life brings in doing what is wright for the glory of God.
