A Story of Mercy: Pastor Nery's Testimony

As we head out to Purulha again, I wanted to tell you part of Nery's story. It's really a story about God's mercy.

Nery was 11 years old when his father became a Christian. As a boy, he was right there in the middle of it, playing guitar and helping lead worship at church. It looked, from the outside, like the beginning of a life fully given to God.

But as a teenager, Nery drifted. He fell into sin and eventually left home for the capital city, and later for Salama, moving from job to job. Along the way, he began living with the woman who would become his wife, neither of them was a Christian at the time. It wasn't a story that looked, on paper, like the makings of a pastor.

Nery doesn't shy away from that. Looking back, he says plainly that God cared for him even in his disobedience. "I probably wouldn't be alive if it weren't for God," he says. Many of his friends became alcoholics, but by God's mercy, he was kept from that path.

At 26, Nery returned to God, and he married that same year. That's when everything changed. God called him into ministry, and when He did, Nery couldn't even read. He had never gone to school. So he learned to read for the sake of the call, teaching himself the words of the very Book he'd go on to preach.

Out of his own story, he's come to believe something he now teaches others: that when people leave the church, it's often partly the church's fault, not theirs. He's learned that the church has to love youth, really love them, because too often it doesn't.

"We all have different stories," Nery says, "but God has kept us and brought us each here."

Not someone who arrived with a perfect record, but someone who knows, firsthand, what it means to be found by mercy.

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  Deep in thought!

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  Can you sense how interested everyone is!?

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  I got the groceries ready!

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  We love blessing these people. Some of them travel hours to attend this class.