Aurora and Francisco Ramírez

My name is Aurora Ramírez and we arrived here 35 years ago.

As immigrants, my husband and I arrived with dreams of a better life, but at the start the journey was very difficult. When we arrived here, we had a hard time settling down, but now we understand that it was God’s plan, because although we struggled, those circumstances led us to seek God. I began to seek God and then my husband followed me and we started a new life.

Our family started to form, struggling in this country in all aspects, emotionally, economically, in the language, but since we have come to know God, we have learned to walk with Him. Just like Ruth’s story, God took us to another country and we went through certain needs, then we learned about God, and to walk with Him, and to this moment, we continue walking with Him. He brought us to this church and we have learned that God guides us and puts us in a certain place when He wants to. He places us.

We have felt a great blessing being here with you. We have felt the genuine love of God. We have not experienced this in other churches, although all of them are Christian and love God, being here with you in this church, in this congregation, has given us the opportunity to experience the love of God. You have embraced us, and welcomed us with open arms. We have felt unconditional love in all forms, not only for me, but also for my husband, my children, and my grandchildren.

We have truly seen the hand of God, the genuine love of God through you. We are very happy in this place and we only have God to thank because we feel loved, we feel at home and we believe that this is the right place for us and not only for us, but also for our family so together we can continue to walk in the ways of God.

We arrived in the United States by train. On November 31, we got on a train in El Paso, Texas, and arrived without knowing where to go, without money, without luggage, without having any family here, we came with nothing but our clothes on. It was very cold. When we got off the train we were in very bad conditions, we were hungry and clueless. We lived in abandoned houses; my husband would go to restaurants like Chicken-Go at closing time and would wait for the food to be thrown away. He would then look in the garbage and take out the chicken, and that was our way of surviving. There was a church in downtown Kansas that gave breakfast for people in need. We lived like Ruth, picking up the crumbs and the leftovers, doing what we could to survive. Nevertheless, we learned to be grateful to God. We learned that sometimes God has to bring us down to a certain level to value what God wants to give you back. To value what God wanted to do with us, He first had to lower our pride, our arrogance, our ego, because where we came from in Mexico, we had a bad reputation and a bad life. We did everything bad. Without God, without fear, one does everything bad, but God brought us to this country and took us to zero, to the bottom, then later God restored us and we saw God’s hand. God really wanted to do something with us, and to this day, He has done it.

Francisco

At the moment of crossing to the United States, my wife saw that the situation was very difficult. I was not a Christian, but at that moment I cried out to God and said, Lord, help us, if it is Your will for us to make it, then open a door. It seems like magic, but we passed at that moment, without anyone telling us anything, of course, we were uncertain but we crossed. At that given moment, we did not understand what had happened, but then we understood that the Lord had a plan. We started to read the Bible where it says that we should never forget where God took us. I now understand that God is not wrong when He has a plan for your life; God does what He can to fulfill His word.

Aurora

A funny thing that happened to me was that I had the desire to seek God, and nobody evangelized to me, nobody introduced me to God, nobody invited me to church. I only heard two other women talking about God at a job, and I started to listen and I felt my heart was bursting, I felt like a fire, as if my heart was exploding. There was something in me that said – tell her to invite you. I had felt a new emotion. Back in Mexico, I was Catholic, and I did not know about God. When it was time to clock out of work, I waited for the person who was talking about God to leave work, and I said – excuse me, but I heard you talking about God, and I wanted to go, take me to your church. She said – yes, but it is not a church, it is in my sister’s house (side note: 35 years ago, there were no Spanish-speaking people in the city). She gave me the address, and I arrived alone one Sunday morning and I remember that I sat in the last chair. It was a small living room/dining room space. There were about eight people praising God, and from the moment I entered there, God broke me, and I cried and cried, and I could not stop crying, and I did not understand what was happening to me, but the pastors prayed for me, and from there I began to seek God until today. God has a purpose for each one of our lives, God calls us and seeks us, and no matter where we go, God will always reach out for us. I feel grateful to God because I was in His plans. I am grateful to be where I am now.

How can I not be grateful to God, look, He not only called me but also my husband. I have a beautiful family, which I profoundly love.

God has brought us to this church that is a missionary church, and I see a lot of opportunities to travel and achieve the dream of being a missionary, even more so now that we are getting older. It is also beautiful that the call of God is for everyone, we all have a calling, and the calling that we all have in common is to make disciples to the people around us. We do not have to go to another country.

I found out about Central through Ceci Navas, she is a friend of almost 14 years. When she began attending Central, she told me she was very happy with the church and that she liked the social atmosphere.

We always talked about the church, but one day she invited me. My granddaughter was looking for a church, so we both decided to start attending. From the first day we came we felt at home, we felt good. Ever since that day, we have been attending, and have had illnesses, problems, jobless, and the church has supported us a lot morally.

We have always felt the love and support. For us, Central Church is our family. We feel loved because Central is part of our family, although we all think differently or have different culture, ideas, and tastes, we have something in common, we have the same Father, we have the same God. That is more than enough because we are children of God. At Central we are loved, we are at home.