Anthony R. Kent:
Thank you so much for this interview, Pastor and Mrs. Canals. Elder’s Digest would like Seventh-day Adventist elders, deacons, and deaconesses around the world to be better acquainted with you. We want to give you an opportunity to share your experiences of meeting Jesus, as well as discovering your ministerial dream and vision at the beginning of your new roles. So, let me ask, how did your journey with Jesus begin?
Ramon J. Canals:
Okay, let me begin, if you don’t mind. God was preparing me to be a Seventh-day Adventist pastor early in my life.
My parents were not religious people. They never went to church, and they divorced when I was just one year old. Then I went to live with my grandmother, who was a very spiritual person. She went to the Roman Catholic Church all the time, almost every day, and she started taking me to her church. I fell in love with worship and activities in the Catholic Church. I enjoyed the singing, and the services, and I became an altar boy.
One of the things I enjoyed a lot was to go up to the roof of the cathedral with the priest and the other altar boys, to look at the stars. Those opportunities were amazing. I had an experience with God, looking at all those beautiful stars, and contemplating the universe. I spent most of my youth at the church, but I never read the Bible, even though I had this devotion to God. I often confessed my sins. That was in the Dominican Republic where I was born.
Then, when I was 16 years old, we moved to the great city of New York. Before I left the island, the priest gave me a Bible.
AK: Was this the same priest who had shown you the stars?
RC: Yes. We became really good friends. Before he handed me the Bible, he wrote in the first blank page, “So that you will always remember your friend, your soul, and God. Never forget God.”
I took the Bible, put it away, and I started to live my life in the city of New York.
I started to go to church in New York, but I got together with some friends that were not church people. Then I started to ask questions about God and religion, and I didn’t find any answers in the Catholic Church, so I decided to just leave and began to live life as a hippie. I did not want to have anything to do with God.
Then one day, a friend of mine who was a drug dealer became converted. He had been raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, and his mother was always praying for him. Because of his mother’s prayers, he was converted. After his conversion he started to talk to me about Jesus. He invited me to his house and then he shared with me the book The Desire of Ages, and through that book, I fell in love with Jesus.
My friend taught me about my body being the temple of the Holy Spirit and the Sabbath. But I was a dancer; I loved to go to dances and discos. And I told my friend, “Saturdays are for dancing, not going to church!” He was very patient with me; I went to church with him three or four times but then I told him I didn’t want to go anymore and that I didn’t want anything to do wi
th religion. My friend said, “I’ll continue to pray for you.”
So, I left New York and moved to New Jersey, but every weekend I drove back to New York to dance. One night, when I was coming back from New York—it must have been three or four in the morning— I heard a voice saying, “Read the Bible. Read the Bible. Read the Bible.” It was not audible, but it was so clear in my mind and in my heart. When I got home, I started looking for that Bible.
AK: That Bible that the Catholic priest had given you? And it’s four in the morning?
RC: Yeah, it’s four in the morning and I find it—my Bible. I had never read it, never opened it, all these years. Then I opened it and started reading. I read Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and I read some of the Apocrypha because it’s a Catholic Bible, but I couldn’t understand anything. So, I put it away and I went to sleep. A few hours later, around 7:30, I was awakened by the same voice telling me, “Go find a church. Go find a church. Go find a church.”
AK: This is a Sunday morning?
RC: It was Sunday morning. I got myself dressed up, got into my car, and drove around the city of Paterson, New Jersey. I stopped and looked at several churches, at the people coming and going. But I didn’t go into any of those churches. I went back home, parked my car, and as I was walking towards my home, there was this man working on his car. He had the hood up, and I said to him, “Good morning. Do you have a problem? Do you need any help?” He said, “Oh no, I’m just checking the oil.” So I said, “Okay, have a nice day.” And then he called me and said, “Hold on a second. I want to give you something.” I walked back to him, and he handed me two magazines, which I recognized because I had seen them in my friend’s home in New York. It was like a lightning bolt coming to my mind and I thought, “Wow, this is interesting!”
So, I asked him four questions. “Are you a Christian?” He said, “Yes.” Then I asked, “Are you a Seventh-day Adventist by any chance?” He said, “Yes.” “When is the next time you’re going to church?” I asked. He said, “Wednesday.” And the fourth question I asked, “Can you take me with you?” And then he said, “Sure!”
And so I went with him and his family. From that Wednesday until now, I have been attending the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
AK: Prayers were being answered.
RC: Yeah, I feel God called me directly to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
After a few weeks, I told the pastor that I wanted to get baptized. He gave me some printed Bible studies to read. I studied the whole set of Bible studies in just a few days; I was so eager. The pastor couldn’t believe it! He started asking me questions about the studies and I answered all his questions, and I was baptized soon after.
AK: Wow, that’s a wonderful touching testimony. What about you, Aurora? What’s your experience with Jesus?
Aurora Canals:
Well, I was also a Roman Catholic Christian.
AK: Really?
AC: Yeah, I grew up Catholic in my family. We were very devoted Catholics. We went to Mass every Sunday. I went to Catholic school, my whole elementary schooling. I started school in Colombia. I was born in Colombia, South America, and then came to the United States at the age of ten, to Paterson, New Jersey.
AK: I can see where this is going . . .
AC: Yeah, I lived in Paterson, I grew up there. When I was sixteen years old, my uncle Nestor met Ramon. They were taking some technical classes together on refrigeration and air conditioning. Uncle Nestor invited Ramon to our house. We lived on the first floor; my uncle lived on the second floor of the house. Ramon started Bible lessons with my uncle. Then Ramon noticed that our family lived downstairs, so he said, “Why don’t you invite your brother and the family to come up for the lessons?” Uncle Nestor said, “Oh, they’re very Catholic.” But anyway, my father did go upstairs by himself first, just to see what Ramon was teaching.
When my father learned what Ramon was teaching, we all went upstairs, to study the Bible with Ramon. Ramon was an elder at the Paterson Seventh-day Adventist Church at that time. My whole family was converted, except my Uncle Nestor. My father, mom, brothers, sisters, and I, were baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church through Ramon.
When Ramon was encouraging us to decide for Christ, he was new to the faith and inexperienced, so he brought the pastor from the church. Unbeknown to us, the pastor lived just a few houses from our house, but we didn’t know him. But he came in and helped us with the decision to get baptized.
After we were baptized, Ramon and I developed a friendly relationship. We’ve been married ever since. [Aurora and Ramon both smile broadly as she says this.]
Ramon has always been a role model for me because he brought me to the Lord and helped me give my life to Jesus.
AK: So, Ramon, you’re first elder of the Adventist church in Paterson, New Jersey. How did you become a pastor?
RC: Yeah, that’s a good question. When I was baptized, the pastor said to me, “Now you are a missionary.” I didn’t know what a missionary was. I thought a missionary was someone who went to faraway countries. So I asked, “What is a missionary?” Someone told me, “Well, a missionary is just someone who tells somebody about Jesus, so you got to go and tell your friends about Jesus.” “Oh, okay,” I thought.
The church at that time did not have a lot of young people. The youth meetings were mostly attended by older people. So I said, “Okay, I’ll go and tell all my friends about Jesus and the church.” I started sharing with all my friends and bringing them to church. The church actually got packed with a lot of young people that the Lord helped me to bring.
I didn’t know how to preach; I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff. I was just excited about what I had found, and I wanted to share it with everybody. But when people saw me, they thought that I was a pastor. The interesting thing is that I had to learn how to be an elder by myself.
It was during that time that I started feeling that God was calling me, by the testimony of people in the church and outside of the church, that were looking at me as a pastor. I felt like God was talking to me through people. And one day I was in a camp meeting, and I met this pastor who was the main speaker at the camp meeting. He said, “I’ve been watching you and your family.” We had our little daughter, Jessica. He asked, “Are you a pastor here at this conference?”
I said, “No.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“What do you mean why not?
I’m just not a pastor. I’m an elder.”
“Well, you should be a pastor.”
I said, “Why do you say that?”
“You look like you could be a good pastor.”
I said, “Well, I’m not a pastor. I don’t want to be a pastor.”
I was doing well financially in my profession as a machinist and technician. We owned a house, and I was only in my twenties. But I felt that God was calling me, but I never paid attention to it.
So this pastor who had never met me before says, “I think you should go and study to be a pastor. I feel like God is impressing me to tell you this.”
And this pastor, he didn’t know anything about me. I had never seen him in my life, and he had never seen me. He didn’t know anything about me. Out of the blue, he says, “God is impressing me to tell you that you should go and study to be a pastor.” And I confess, “I feel God has been calling me for the past five years. But I have been rejecting the call because I feel unworthy because of my background.”
And he said, “No. God doesn’t look at you as you were, but what you can become through Christ.”
When he said that, my heart was touched, and it made me want to study and be a pastor. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I talked to Aurora, “This pastor is telling me that I should study to be a pastor. At first I didn’t want to do it, but now I think we ought to go and study.”
AK: Aurora, you married a machinist, a refrigeration technician, not a pastor. How did you feel when Ramon said this?
AC: Well, for me it was hard enough being the wife of the first elder because I had only recently joined the church and we had a church in the basement of our house.
AK: You had a church in your basement? Wow!
AC: Yes, we remodeled the whole basement. We had chairs and a pulpit because on Sabbath afternoons we would bring our neighbors to our basement for meetings and Bible lessons. I would prepare meals for everyone, and we would work together. We opened our house to people learning about God. So, when he told me that he wanted to go to study, for me, it was very hard. But I saw his passion, and I said, “Okay, I am with you.”
AK: But I guess there were complications?
AC: We only had one child, Jessica, and Ramon wanted to have a boy. Ramon prayed to God and gave God a challenge . . .
RC: Let me tell you this part. This part is very interesting, because it goes against all that we teach and tell people not to do. But I did it. I was fighting the call. Even though I made my decision, I was still unsure. I wanted to make sure that God was directing, that it was not just my own thinking, my own impression.
At the time, I did not have a high school diploma. I had studied vocational things and done well but a high school diploma was an entry requirement, and I didn’t want to go back to high school. So, I planned to take the high school equivalency test and I prayed that if I passed that test, that means that God is calling me. If I didn’t pass, then it would be clear that God was not calling me. Guess what? I passed!
But we wanted to have another child, and we didn’t want to have one while I was in school. So, I prayed that we want to have a child. After the child is born, then we go to study. But I also prayed that it must be a boy because we had a girl. Within the year, we had our son, Gabriel!
AK: So, you passed the exam and you received Gabriel.
RC: There was a third thing. Aurora says, “What are we going to do with the house?” We needed to sell it quickly because the school year was starting soon. We only told one person we wanted to sell it. Before we put it up for sale an interested person came and purchased it and with that money we went to study.
AK: What an amazing journey of divine leading!
This interview will be completed in the next issue.
