Short Stories

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Young and scared

This is the story of how God works in mysterious ways. A story of a life that was meant for early destruction but has a good future ahead now. It is my story and how I went from being an atheist to being a believer and in the process had many battles. Battles where my chains of slavery were broken and I was set free.

As a young boy I was very energetic and talented. I did ok in school, but was no overachiever. At the age of nine I moved to the US to live with my father and had a great time. I was taught discipline and responsibility although it didn’t come easy because my mother always wanted to do everything for me.

I lived for two years with my dad and step mom and in those two years I learned English and developed a habit of reading. My father would obligate me to read for 30 minutes every day. At first it was quite tedious but then after a while I actually enjoyed it. The third year in the states I lived with my mom and at the end of it we moved back to Puerto Rico.

As a child I used to think my father lived in the clouds. I remember being in pre-kinder and as I played outside whenever I’d see a plane go by I’d yell out, “there goes my father!” the reason why I thought my father lived in the sky was because the earliest recollection I have of my father was of him getting on a plane when he left my mother to go live in the U.S.. After that I would see him once a year every summer. Every once in a while he would fly over to the island but it wasn’t very often.

I remember very vividly when my father sat me down in my grandma’s kitchen to teach me how mountains were made. He explained to me very intensely and in specific scientific detail how mountains were made from lava that erupts in the depths of the ocean. But the point he kept repeating and emphasizing was “God didn’t do it! It is a scientific process!” so from a very young age I was taught that God didn’t exist. This created a very great problem for me at the age of twelve when I started to worry about death and its consequences. I was so afraid of death I had constant nightmares about just seeing black and feeling nothing.

I’m sure if my father knew how much damage he did to me by preaching atheism to me he would have thought twice about teaching it to his kids. But hey, you can’t expect a lemon tree to give you mangos. Being afraid of death was the least of my problems. I had a void in my life and tried to fill it with all sorts of things that were dead end roads and roads of perdition. I grew up a slave and needed desperately to break free.


Too much too soon

“are you still a virgin?!” my older and more “mature” 17 year old friend mocked me as the rest of the kids from the neighborhood were arriving at the scene. A very deep sentiment of embarrassment went through my body and I almost bowed my head down but managed to contain my emotion and mask a big smile. “You must be crazy”, I responded, immediately looking around to see if my cover had been blown. Everybody looked at me with disbelief but I managed to change the subject.

That night I went home determined. I would put my last effort into losing my virginity. And I did… I was 14 years old. It wasn’t very hard really and it didn’t affect my family when they found out. Their main concern was whether I used contraceptives.

Now that I reflect on it I don’t know which is worse, having a father that doesn’t believe in God or to have a mother who never even mentioned Him once throughout my whole childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The tragic thing is that if you ask my mom her religion she’ll say she’s a Christian. But I ask myself what kind of Christian doesn’t take his child to church once or even mention the gospel to them in their entire life?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making excuses for my behavior as a teen or adult, but there is a correlation between ones relationship with God and ones behavior. That much is obvious but I’m not here just to state the obvious but to share my life experience so that it may edify some ones life.

It was too much too soon. And although I didn’t catch any diseases, I lived as though I had them all and felt dirty on the inside. To my friends I was a hero with many adventurous stories to tell. But on the inside I was so empty it wouldn’t take that long for me to breakdown.

Now that I analyze it my breakdown was a slow process that started with that lesson about the creation of the mountains. But all praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ who knew me way before mountains were even made, praise to Him that is my real father and creator and loved me so much that died for me even though I didn’t deserve it.

I don’t see my father very often, because he lives in New York and I live in Puerto Rico. But what saddens me isn’t that I don’t see him often but that I might not see him for eternity. And when I see this world that surrounds me and see how lost and empty the people in it are, it brings tears to my eyes. It saddens me about my father but along with him are many of my family members. All I can do is keep praying for them, and hope that they take the step from atheist to believer from slavery to freedom.

Drugs

I didn’t smoke, I was an athlete. Athletes don’t smoke. I thought I had a future in basket ball, but I didn’t. I thought I played better than I really did and my arrogance on the court was my downfall. When the only thing holding you back from smoking is sports, it is only a matter of time before you do it.

Marihuana was a big part of my slavery chain and still today my flesh invites me to taste it again, just once, no one needs to find out. Yes, I say my flesh, because sometimes we give too much credit to the devil for our temptations. But the reality is that it isn’t always him. I know because even though the Holy Spirit is doing a great job with me, there’s a part of me that wants to go back to the old dirty ways and it is a constant battle that I have going on in my head.

I used to justify so well my drug habit it was ridiculous. I didn’t do it to be cool. My excuse was that it calmed me down so I could sleep better. My smoking partners were like, “sure that makes perfect sense”. But it was a lie. It is an addiction like any other and very hard to brake out of.

One of my smoking partners is a lawyer now and doing quite well, so I thought. Last time we talked, I told him I thought that now that he’s a successful lawyer he wouldn’t need or want to smoke. But to my amazement he’s seeing a psychiatrist and the smoking has gotten worse. But I know the real problem in his life isn’t his drug addiction, the real problem with him is he hasn’t accepted Jesus in his heart. And if it’s hard for a believer to break an addiction for a non saved person it is impossible.

Have you ever had a best friend and just spent most of your time with that person or just talking over the phone? After a certain time goes by people even think you look a like or are family. Well, that’s what God wants with us to spend so much time with Him that we start to look like we’re related to him. Which we should if we’re going to call ourselves his children. But this is what I’m trying to get to; the more time I spend praying, worshiping and learning his word, the happier I am. Also my past seems like a horror film so gruesome you never want to see it again.

But the less time I spend praying, reading the Bible and worshiping him the more time I spend being bombarded by worldly things. The less I go to church, the more the past doesn’t seem that bad and the battles in my mind get more intense. I need a lot of things in my life to survive. I need my pastor, I need my brothers, I need my wife and children. But above all things I need an ongoing real relationship with my creator. Because without this all would be lost.


Searching for God

A nervous breakdown, psychosis, there are many ways to describe what happened to me that night. But it is clear I was desperately searching for God. The levels of desperation were overwhelming for me that night and what kept going through my mind was a home video where I was playing the drums with a friend of mine. The thing is that when you look at the video you see just two guys playing the drums next to each other. But to me this video has been crucial in my life.

All I knew about my friend was that he was a great drummer very respected by all of the musicians I knew. But what kept going through my mind weren’t his great rhythmic skills, it was a look he had in his eyes. It was an inner peace with such brightness that it became my lighthouse that night.

I don’t know how I got to his house in my state of desperation and confusion, but I did. By the look in his face and his lack of attire I could tell it was about 3 o’clock in the morning and I had just woken him up. He invited me in and asked if he could be of some help. “I want what you have” I said. He looked at me not understanding. I started to explain about the video, his eyes and how I wanted the same thing. “How do you do it?” I asked as if it was some big secret he was going to reveal.

As I was talking my friend slowly reached into one of his shelves and pulled out a Bible. When I was done and waited for his reply he started to read to me from the Bible. Before he could finish I interrupted him, “I don’t want to hear about God! I came here because I’m desperate, I’m losing it, I need that peace you have.” He waited for me to finish and then started to read again, “you see because here in John it says…”

But I never let him finish, and I don’t remember very clearly the rest of the conversation but I do remember it escalating to the point where I finally realized God was his source of peace and that He was real. When this dawned on me an explosion of tears started to pour down my body and I started weeping like never before.

What happened next some people might regard as sad or even tragic. But really what happened is that I got closer to God, because the times I had were so dark it took divine intervention to bring me back to light. That night with my friend was more of an awakening; an alarm went off inside of me. I started to see things from a very different perspective which to some is called insanity and to others reality.

Mental illness

“He’s got to stay hospitalized for the rest of his life. It is not safe for him to be on the outside. He will become violent and most probably hurt you.” Said the doctor to my mother the first time I was hospitalized. I thank God for my mom’s stubbornness, because she didn’t accept what the doctor said. She didn’t go “ok, well that’s that.” She said “no, there is hope for my son and I’m going to find the doctor that can help bring him back…and she did. She had to fight at the hospital but she found the right doctor with the right treatment and I came back to reality.

It was as if I was in a storm or hurricane and then all of a sudden it stopped and the harsh winds just went away and everything was calm again. Although it didn’t last long. I was in and out of hospitals with frequency and each time I’d go in I would be in a worse condition than before.

When I say hospitalized it was more like jailed. I didn’t feel like I was in a hospital being taken care of… no, it was more like being watched over. The thing is I didn’t feel sick so why am I taking pills? But I had to, I learned that lesson quick the first time I was held down by force by the “nurses” and injected.

It is not therapeutic to be in an intensive unit for too long. But the last 17 days I spent there was the hardest test I ever felt. Sleeping was out of the question. There was screaming and crying all through the night. The noise was so horrible I felt like I was literally in hell.

But I wasn’t, I think God just was teaching me a lesson and giving me a taste of hell so I’d know from where He saved me. I think hell would be so much worse because even though I felt like I was in hell, God’s presence was there with me through the whole ordeal giving me hope. In hell there is no hope or presence of God… it is definitely worse.

Being in a mental hospital is like imprisonment. Most prisoners are in jail for a crime they’ve committed, but when my freedom was taken away because of an illness I felt like my illness was the crime, and so I despised it and didn’t want to accept it.

It took me quite some time to accept this handicap called bipolar disorder and in this time I learned a few things. Among them the guitar, the drums but most importantly I learned to dance. It takes time to accept hard realities, but once we do, we can start to overcome them.

Dancing became a big part of my life, but at times it took me very far away from my relationship with God. Here I’ll express how I eventually danced the victory dance, victory over lots of things but mostly in my spiritual life.

Dancing from a distance

Salsa, Merengue, tango, waltz, swing, hustle, Bachata, cha-cha-cha, the foxtrot, oh my, the foxtrot. Never in my mind did I imagine I’d be a dance instructor. Now days I have a wife that also teaches dance and am still working as an instructor. But before I get to explain the conflict of a Christian dancer I have to explain some things about myself.

As a young kid at college all I could think about was the great job I was going to get after I finished my degree, all the money I was going to have and of course (so I thought) all the girls I was going to get once I was successful. Things did not turn out quite the way I planned. Although it looked like they were headed that way. I finished my first semester with an A+ average and the future looked promising.

But not for long, I lowered my grades, lost interest, dropped out and had a mental breakdown before I finished my degree. I fell… I fell so hard people thought I was never going to get up again. But I think God likes to make statements with people and what he said with me was “I’m not only going to pick him up and make him walk again… he’s not only going to walk, he’s going to dance!”

So I danced. I got the opportunity to dance on television various times and to appear in the Hollywood movie “Dirty Dancing 2 Havana Nights”. I got hired to do dance shows at different types of parties and in the process of all this my head grew a little. I say it grew not because I became wiser or more intelligent but the complete opposite. It seemed the better I got dancing the more foolish I became in my daily life.

I was very proud. My head was bigger than my body. It didn’t last long and I thank God for it because it could have gotten to the point where I couldn’t stand myself. God didn’t let it go on for long. This time the statement he made with me he had already made a long time a go when he said, “ whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted”(Mathew 23:12).

Boy did I exalt my self and boy oh boy was I humbled. The higher the cloud, the harder the fall… Man did it hurt. I was living such a disorderly life, living my way instead of God’s that he literally had to brake me and make me all over again.

I could have blamed the dancing, but who would I be fooling. Some Christians do blame dance for their past behavior and don’t dance anymore. I almost did the same thing and stopped dancing for about a year.

I still dance today and teach other people how to stay on beat… working real hard not to miss the “clave”, but mostly doing that interior dance. That victory dance that I do every day when the day is done, when I think about all that God has given me and how I’m not worthy of any of it. That’s when I say “thank you Lord, for loving me and giving me life. For letting me make a difference in some people’s life, for testing me but helping and coaching me all through the test, thank you Lord.”

Living God’s way

Having God in my life is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Knowing Him and living in sin is the worst thing I ever did. At times driving home late at night I’d see empty parking lots and think “this could be it…Jesus came and I was left behind.” But I wasn’t, and today I’m living life with my luggage ready for when He does.

There are many things that happened in my life during the period of time that I narrated in this story. I was hit by a car, I escaped from one of the hospitals, I did some stand-up comedy for a short while… but this isn’t my autobiography, this is simply a series of chunks of my life that explain how I went from being an atheist to believer.

Now that God’s in my life doesn’t mean all my troubles went away, I probably have more things to deal with now than I ever did before. I am constantly learning more about my creator by studying His word and being around spiritually mature friends that help me with advice, prayer, or sometimes just listening when I have a problem.

Living God’s way is a day to day hour to hour minute to second thing you do, where you let your self be led by the Holy Spirit. It’s about putting your self aside and letting God take over. This is really hard for me because I always want to do things my way, but I’m learning.

Going from atheist to believer is a giant leap, but the small steps you take after that giant leap are very important. If you are living submerged in your incredulity I want to tell you that time is running out and you need to start thinking where you’re going to be after you die. There are many theories but only one truth. That truth and the only way into heaven is Jesus Christ.

I would like now to pray for you the reader, “ Father, I thank you for the opportunity of letting me narrate my tale of getting to know you are real and would like to ask you to bless everyone who reads this. Especially those who aren’t saved yet, may your Holy Spirit minister to their life and bring them to Jesus. Thanks again for the love you’ve deposited in my heart and may every one that reads this be edified in some way. In your name I pray Lord Jesus, amen.”

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