JUAN ANDRÉS ROA

My name is Juan Roa, I am 28 years old, I was born in Guayaquil and I stayed in my city until God called me to follow him to announce his love in different cities, I am in the fifth community of the "San Antonio de Padua" parish, Guayaquil.

At this moment I am on mission in Montevideo, after five years of formation in the seminary, seeing every day the concrete call of God to me to be part of his Church.

My parents, of Catholic faith, had begun to form part of the Neocatechumenal communities when I was in the arms of my mother, the second of four siblings, and from that moment God began a story of salvation with my parents, my brothers and me. . I remember the Easter vigils each year, how my father explained to me the power of God over death in our family: the transmission of the faith during Sunday Lauds was planting in my heart every Sunday the seed of faith, which with the time began to flourish and bear fruit.

I started the vocational center at the age of 15 and the temptations of the world were a great fight for me: within a couple of years I would be swept away by different winds of doctrines that led me to doubt the love of God, deceived by thoughts and ideologies that produced in my head a voice that told me every day that my life was destined for failure and destitution.

I walked away from the Church for three years living in a disorderly way, sowing chaos and hopelessness in my family, causing a lot of pain to my parents. His prayer, that of my catechists and my brothers in the community was the light in the midst of my darkness that made me return to God. I experienced the unconditional love of God at the moment of being received, again by the community, without any kind of rejection or judgment: in my community brothers and sisters I found the forgiveness, affection and tenderness of Mother Church towards her lost son. I continued in the community, listening to the word of God and seeing its effectiveness in my brothers: I had returned to God, but despite this I carried bad habits with me. Suddenly, I felt an impulse towards the call to life within a seminar, in which God would take care of uprooting all false reasoning about life from my heart, and would dedicate himself countless times to teaching me how to live (so far he follows doing) and the dignity I have for being his son. Currently, every day, I fight with that demon that invites me to curse my life and I am happy for that, because at the end of each day I see the MIGHTY and MAGNIFICENT right hand of the Lord that sustains me and makes me victorious over the one that one day put in I doubt that God makes a love story with man. Thank you very much for your generosity, please pray for me.