My parents
My father was born in Peru. He is a 1st generation Seventh-day Adventist and lived in Venezuela before coming to the US. He became a mortgage broker and financial advisor.
My mother, a 3rd generation Seventh-day Adventist, moved to the US from Puerto Rico. She came here with her mother and her grandmother, both of whom passed away before my parents met. My mom has two older siblings: A brother who lives in Maine and a sister who now lives in California.
My parents met and eventually married in Queens, NY. I was conceived while they were in Maine and I was born when they were in Florida in the year 1988. Due to my mom’s mental health, she got her tubes tied so she couldn’t have more kids, so I’m an only child. Shortly after that, they moved back to New York. I was raised in the Bronx.
Early childhood
My father led family worship and the family went to church every week. I wasn’t very interested in spiritual things as a child, daydreaming during most of family worship, and at church I anxiously waited for potluck just so I could play with the other kids.
I had no social nor prayer life growing up. All I seemed to care about was watching cartoons on TV. During the week, my father would be busy with work. My mother would often end up in the hospital due to her schizophrenia. I wasn’t able to connect much with either of them.
At school I was talkative, but I didn’t know how to connect with the kids there either, so I was marginalized by most of them. And while everyone else was reaching puberty, I didn’t because I have Kallmann’s syndrome, which is a form of hypogonadism.
Early struggles
When I was 11 years old, my mother’s sister gave me a “Pokémon” video game for my birthday. I instantly became addicted to it, playing it for hours. My father tried taking the game away from me, but then I figured out how to use emulators on the computer to download a pirated copy of it from the Internet and play it there.
During that same school year, I noticed that boys started talking about liking girls. I, however, had no interest making connections with anyone, so I ignored them. A classmate tried to introduce me to pornography, but I was disgusted by it at first.
When I was 13, my parents and I were living in a suburb near Atlanta, Georgia. A pastor there got me baptized and my parents got rebaptized. I didn’t really understand what we were doing though. I was never given any Bible studies. I didn’t even know about basic concepts like the “gospel” or “salvation”.
Around that time, I began to experience fantasies about anime characters, though I felt dirty about it. But since I didn’t know how to "relieve" myself when aroused, I ended up hurting myself and so I cut that habit of fantasizing. I was still addicted to watching TV and playing computer games. I did develop some interest in understanding the Bible, but I had no real relationship with God yet.
College
Our family had moved to Queens shortly before I finished high school. When I went to college, not being sure what I wanted to study, I ended up enrolling in Paralegal Studies. A decision I later regretted as I didn’t enjoy studying that at all.
Meanwhile, through watching a certain TV show and facebook game involving having supernatural powers, I began developing an interest in Eastern mysticism. I listened to sound frequencies called binaural beats, thinking it might give me some kind of psychic ability. However, I began experiencing sleep paralysis and got worried, so I stopped doing it.
Around this time, I also I discovered how to "relieve" myself when aroused and so practiced "self-abuse" for a time, but my feelings of disgust made me eventually quit that for good as well.
Living in Queens became unaffordable, so our family was forced to move to Pennsylvania before I could even finish my two-year degree. I had to start a completely new degree because most of my credits weren’t transferrable.
Early adulthood
I wasn’t able to watch television anymore because the city we moved to required households to have cable and my parents didn’t want it. At the same time, my favorite Facebook game got discontinued. And so, my attention shifted to Youtube.
One day, while watching Youtube, I discovered a video game called “Minecraft” in 2012 and became obsessed with it. In 2014, I completed a bachelors in liberal studies but sadly, it left me with $40,000 of student-loan debt. I haven’t been able to make enough of an income to make any payments. My mother passed away from cancer that year and that’s when I began to finally become interested in God.
Finding God in my mental crisis
And then one day, again while watching Youtube, I came to this realization: Successful people know how to make friends. This is when I started getting more involved in church to become more sociable (I became the new bulletin editor and AV guy). But this desire to be more social led me into a bitter trial of social anxiety, which turned into mental health crisis.
My mental crisis was basically triggered by a misunderstanding and people pleasing. This led to so much mental confusion that it took me almost five years to finally find closure to clear up the misunderstanding of a seemingly convoluted situation.
So here's what happened: Back in 2017, I thought a girl had romantic motives, I pretended to reciprocate those motives, I got left on read, I called her out for being rude, she blocked me, and I thought she was punishing for calling her out. I kept in contact only because I wanted to friends and I was confused when her siblings suggested that she thought I was interested in something more than that, when I wasn't. I honestly thought she was misconstruing my motives when actually she had been honestly misled by me pretending to have said motives.
A friend of that girl encouraged me to give my worries to God. I began to read the Bible more, listen to sermons and Christian songs, and also to blog. I didn’t share this blog with anyone yet, but writing out my feelings helped me somewhat. I was so focused on these things that I even stopped playing Minecraft during this time.
In spite of all this, I couldn't seem to shake off the idea that my motives were intentionally misconstrued, but it was when one of the girl's siblings talked me out of suicide that I finally understood that this was nobody's intention. I eventually realized it was an honest misunderstanding.
Online ministry
During the pandemic, I connected with various Christian ministries online. One of these ministries impressed me with the idea of doing Minecraft videos to illustrate the Bible. In July 2020, I met someone via Zoom who was being interviewed by an online ministry. He shared the same vision I had of using Minecraft to share the Bible. Other people watching were also interested in this idea too and so we all joined together and formed an online ministry. I began to co-manage a Minecraft server for an online ministry called “One Accord: The Guild”. There, we “build” stories from the Bible. I’m also a moderator in their Discord server.
I began doing other things for ministry too, like writing lyric videos for hymns and uploading them to Youtube. I also begam streaming services for my local church. Then, thanks to the help of a job coach, I was able to find a job as a waiter at a retirement community in August 2021.
To be continued...
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