A few months after arriving in Baltimore in 2006 to begin studies at the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, God led me to the Hopkins International Fellowship. Soon afterwards, Pastor Bill [Nelson] invited me to join the leadership team.
I then had to review my purpose for leaving Peru to come to Hopkins. For sure God brought me here to study and grow intellectually. At the same time, God challenged me to believe that He could indeed reach students that I had previously doubted would embrace the gospel through me.
I have heard about people in countries that know nothing about Jesus Christ, but I have never been in front of one of them. Seeing this makes me really cry out to God, “What are we doing? What are we waiting for? Who is going to go to them?” Maybe I will never go to China to share the word of God, but I can share it with my Chinese classmate, and he/she can then go back to China to do the same. In the same way, I felt the need to gain further training so that I could be more effective in ministering to the needs of the people in my country.
I have the extraordinary opportunity to meet people in academia here that love God with all their heart, mind, and soul and live for Him. It is, for me, such a privilege to learn from them. I could not have had this experience in my own country. Another challenge awaits me when I return to Peru: tons of university students and people in academia think that it is not worthwhile to love and serve God. Now I can say to them, “It is possible.”
This article is part of the Fall 2007 issue of Internationals on Campus magazine.
