WE HAVE GONE

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” Isaiah 55:9, NIV.

God is good, all the time… All the time, God is good. My wife Nadia and I had nice plans for the beginning of 2021. We had been working in River Plate University (in Argentina) for ten years.  With  a Masters in Education, my wife was working as vice principal in the elementary school and with my PhD in Public Health, I was academic coordinator at the Health Science School. Through the years we always held in our hearts the deep desire to say “We have gone” in response to the calling, “I Will Go,” born out of the first “I Will Go Congress,” organized by the students and staff of River Plate University in 2011. Many times, since then, we have received that call and for one reason or another we always delayed our decision to go. 

One of the limitations we felt many times was the language, since our English is not so good. We had the desire to serve in mission service wherever God called us and to do whatever we needed to do. That is why we decided to spend a year or so studying English some place around the world, and started looking at places like Australia, England, South Africa and the US. We received many offers to go somewhere, but we decided to go to an Adventist institution. After some research we picked the Andrews University’s ESL program to improve our English so we could better serve wherever God called us. We were all set to start classes on January 2021. Our airline tickets were paid, our belongings were sold, and we were ready to start our own adventure . But COVID-19 was in our way...  When we were all ready to go, we received a text from a close friend, who was living in the United States, telling us that the state of Michigan would start a lockdown in mid-December 2020, or earlier. A few days later, we received a formal communication from Andrews University saying that classes would be partially online. 

We were wandering what to do, praying for wisdom and talking with friends and family to get advice on the matter. We wanted on-site classes, but at the same time we had been accepted to start classes in the Spring semester 2021. Finally, after many prayers, we decided to postpone our classes for Fall semester 2021. After that decision was made, one particular issue needed to be resolved: we resigned our jobs  the end of December, 2020, so if we postponed our trip we would have nothing to do! 

In that situation we needed to decide what to do with the airline tickets. After many prayers we felt that God was calling us to change our flight date to February, 2021, despite that we didn’t have any clue about what we could do in the US! For some reason we felt secure that God had better plans for us and we decide to move forward by faith. We thought that if anything opened up for us to do, we could take some vacation and visit some friends before returning to our country. 

Three weeks before our flight, we talked with some friends that had friends in common with some people at Blue Mountain Academy (BMA), in Hamburg Pennsylvania. At that time they told us that some farmer assistants were needed, and that could be a call for us through Adventist Volunteer Services. We felt that opportunity came only by the grace of God, who knows much more than us the timing and what is best for us. 

Because we have been planning for so long to go as missionaries, we had already done all the prerequisites from the Adventist Volunteers Services webpage, so everything was ready to go quite fast. (Besides, we had an experience working in Honduras as volunteers in 2009, just after my wife got her Bachelors in Education, and me a Bachelors in Physical Therapy.)

The three weeks before our flight we felt an incredible peace, knowing that God is the only one who is in control of our lives. Since the first moment we arrived at BMA we felt so welcomed and part of the marvelous staff at the Academy. We have taken the torch to try to impress the students of BMA with Christ’s love for every one of us in every task we do at the farm. Our prayer is that God continues guiding us and we can follow him wherever He calls us, no matter if it’s more months at BMA, or going to Andrews University and learning English  to be ready to follow God’s calling.”