By grace of God, I am a Christian. My deeds, alas, prove me a great sinner and regarding my life, I am a man with no home, coming from a very inglorious family and wandering from place to place.
—The Way of a Pilgrim
I am writing this article thinking of every missionary who, with their own heart and life, abandoned everything for the proclamation of the Gospel in different parts of the world, applying the Lord’s command.
When you are born in a country where the majority of its people are Orthodox Christians, you have the impression that the missionary work is easy, and in fact, there are many who talk about it without relying on personal experience. However, the reality is far from desks and university amphitheaters.
It is beyond any doubt that God is omnipresent. The best example is us, in Latin America, where, despite being far from Greece and every orthodox country, the Lord called us in various ways to seek true faith, which was unknown to us, the natives.
When I started the journey to find Orthodoxy, I did not imagine what God’s plan was for me the unworthy one, because I never expected to get as far as here, that is, to become a bishop of the Orthodox Church of Christ. Along with His Grace Bishop Athenagoras of Myrina, we are the first two indigenous orthodox bishops in this wider area of the Ecumenical Throne of Constantinople, in the Holy Diocese of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia and Venezuela.
I am not a saint and I am not worthy, I am a simple, ordinary man coming from a nation of humble people who are evolving spiritually amidst a religious chaos, because there are so many confessions here that it is difficult to discern which one is the Church of Christ. Here, every single confession sprung up out of nowhere claims that it is the Church of Christ; as a result, the whole situation looks like a public market where you can find religious products according to the reasoning of every psychopath and every interpretation of the Holy Bible. Today, as I am writing this article, about 9,000 denominations call themselves “the Church of Christ”.In this chaos, some Colombians, without knowing each other, years ago, sought our faith beyond the known confessions in Colombia, and so we sought the Church which holds the unwavering faith that the God-man Jesus Christ taught us through the Apostles. I firmly believe in the call of God, because this is how I can interpret what happened in our own lives, where there was no presence of Orthodoxy; and yet, we started the path that allows us today to experience a new Pentecost in Latin America, because that old message of the Gospel of Christ proclaimed by Orthodoxy is something new for us.
My father was a farmer, and my mother a simple woman from the plains, from the mountains in the Los Andes of Colombia, both uneducated, who raised us in great financial hardship. More often than not we had nothing to eat. Having no money to buy food, we went hungry despite the fact that our land is productive and the soil fertile. There are too many people who sleep hungry due to financial shortages. When we moved from the plain to the city of Cucuta, we had to deal with extreme situations. My mother was on the go from five o’ clock in the morning until eight in the evening to work washing clothes to make ends meet, and my father left for neighboring Venezuela to work in the fields with my elder brothers.
We did not have the chance to have our mother and father by our side, because if we did, we would not have the money to meet basic needs by ourselves. We, the three younger of seven brothers, were left alone for most of the day, as our parents had to work hard to make a living and pay for a rented room, actually a hut, to live in. Growing up in poverty, the only option we had, even though we were little ones, was to take to the streets in order to work, and so it happened. We sold pastels, that is, pies of different types, ice creams and many others. Everything that happens in our lives is a lesson, which we just have to understand. Why am I saying this? Simply because I believe that God allows certain things in our lives in order to prepare us for better battles that we have never thought of before.
It has been a year since the Ecumenical Patriarchate elected me Auxiliary Bishop of His Eminence Metropolitan Athenagoras of Mexico for the country of Colombia, and all these trials are more useful than ever for my missionary course in this country.
Today, when in Colombia Orthodoxy is growing as much as one could never imagine, when as bishops with the blessing and concern of His Eminence we respond to the request of many groups of people who want to know and embrace Orthodoxy, I can assure you that every childhood experience was a preparation for the current ministry in these places, without complexes, complaints and protests. Thanks be to God for the childhood hardship and all the deprivations I went through! If something good happens here, it is always for the glory of God because it is not accomplished by our own actions but by His will, as He wants to help us taste the Divine Grace and the joy of Orthodoxy. (To be continued)
† Timotheos of Assos
