Well, good morning, Valley View. We, normally work through a book of the Bible at a time. We’ve been working through the Book of Proverbs. We’ve taken a break from that for the summer for a couple of weeks to hear from a few folks. And today is we’re going to continue in that theme. We’re going to start back to the book of Proverbs next week. But this week we’re going to do something even a little different. A few months ago, our Sojourners were meeting. They meet about once a month. There are more experienced group at the church. They meet for fellowship, encouragement. Eddie Lee heads up that group. And that week in particular, so this was a couple of months ago now, she had asked Isaac Sanchez to share his story, his background with the group, how God led him to the U.S., how they ended up at Valley View. And it was a really encouraging story. I was there for it, and I left there very moved, very stirred, very encouraged. And I thought, I think the whole church needs to hear his story. This was about the same time that we brought Isaac on as our worship pastor. You know, Isaac has been here on staff about ten years now. I think at this point he’s been around a lot longer than a lot of our staffs. Maybe not Eddie Lee yet he’s hasn’t reached that status, but he’s been here a while, and I think a lot of people will be very encouraged to hear his story. So if you would, let’s welcome up Isaac Sanchez. Isaac, would you come on up? John. Appreciate it. Appreciate church. That introduction. Thank you, pastor. Thank you to the elders for giving me this opportunity to talk to you this morning. I, usually come up here with, a guitar in my arms, and that gives me a lot of security. So today I’m a little bit nervous, even though I’m on stage every single week, I don’t usually get to talk this much. And, and I don’t I don’t want you guys to be here for two hours hearing my rambling. So I really, really concized it into, hopefully a coherent, story of my life and my family’s journey here. And, I’m sorry to disappoint you, church by, not having the first, having the first person in three weeks with a little bit of hair on their head, all jokes aside, thank you, Troy. And thank you, Colby, for bringing the, the word to us this past two weeks. We really appreciate hearing from God through all of you. But this morning, church, I want to church, share a little bit of my background, share a little bit of my family’s history. And if you notice a little bit of my accent, I don’t have the pleasure of having some of y’all’s southern drawl or country accent. But the accent comes from from Cuba. I was born in, Havana, Cuba on May 13th, 1995 was just a long time ago. I now feel like. And I think we have some images on the screen that might pop up here in a second, showing, me and my family as little kids, where you can see here on the side screens. That is me and my very young parents. They had me when they were about 21 years old, which is very old for Cuba. Honestly, usually is not much younger. Me and my family. And there’s a couple more images here. They’ll come up. Me and my family live there. I come from, from my dad’s side. I come from a background, a pastoral background. My great grandpa, he was, one of the founders of the denomination that I was a part of in Cuba. And my grandpa follow suit, and he also became a pastor in that denomination. My dad, though, he wanted to be the black sheep of the family. He saw the, the struggles, and he saw the hardships. But it comes from, being in ministry, being, on staff at a church. And he just wanted to be a musician. He wanted to just play the piano and lead worship. So that’s where I get some of my family’s background. That’s, actually our home in Cuba. That’s our front porch. So you can see it needs a little bit, a little, a little bit of paint. And that back there is, my actually my grandparents house. We lived in a multicultural, multi-generational, home where we live with our grandparents as well. But, dad, he, taught himself how to play trumpet and piano and, but God knew that that wasn’t all he wanted for him. So a couple of years into me being a baby, we, he actually accepted the call to become a pastor as well. So from a very young age, I was blessed to grow in a Christian home. I was blessed to, be at church all the time, go through all the motions that comes with that, from being in students, to, getting to, middle school and elementary. And it was such a blessing. I’m telling you, if you are a teenager now, if you’re, a student and you have the privilege to be here today and to go and to be raised in a home that loves the Lord and brings you to church, you have no idea what a privilege you have in your life. So really hold on to that as you grow. And for those of you that are, the parents that are raising kids in the church, I, I hope that you take some out of my story, out of the story of my family as we came to the States. But, my dad, ended up being a young pastor. He, started to become, like, an interim pastor. I guess you would call it here. Where he was sent to different churches to, you know, give vacation time to the pastors, the time to be with their families. Maybe it was a transitional time in the church. They were looking for a new pastor, so we were sent all over, all over the city of Havana. So from a very young age, I learned to have a lot of hats. In every church that I went to, I was either, playing, the accordion, kind of. I was either having a tambourine in my hands or maracas or whatever it might be, or it might be just a chair that I found to have some some sound to it. So from a very young age, I was just immersed in that life. Later on in life, my grandpa, my dad, gets assigned to move to the countryside of Cuba. And the next photos coming up here, show a little bit of that. So we went from being in the city and, place with four walls and, fans. We didn’t have ac but we had fans. This is Cuba. To sometimes be in and doing church in a place like this. I’m the one that kind of have has his hand up. And if you see, I’m playing the chair as a little drum. So from a young age, I was really interested in playing drums and music. On the right side corner. There’s my mom and some of my grandparents there as well. And there’s another picture there that shows what, vbs looked like, for me growing up, my mom is leading the kids, and, on the corner, maybe with the pink dresses. You see two girls there? Those are my sisters. They’re two years younger than me. You saw them in some of the pictures as well. But we went from city people to when we walked in the first day They handed my dad a horse, and they were like, this is your horse now, you got to feed it and you got to make sure it doesn’t die. So we went from walking in faith streets to having to take care of a horse and learning how to farm. But in that time, man, God showed us so much of his provision for us. We did not know how to farm. We didn’t know how to garden. And every single day, we never went without food or something to have for breakfast a day in our lives when we were there, because whenever we didn’t have it, God will wake someone up in the middle of the night and tell them that they needed to bring us food. And all of a sudden some, some beans would show up in the front yard. Some eggs would show up in our backyard. And God provided for us in that time of need, so much and, that we would have never, experienced. But being in the countryside, there was no, no schools. We had, we had no schools. There was basically just an elementary school. So we had to make the decision that I had to move back to the city, in order to continue my education. So I was a little sad, but I was very excited. I was getting to move with my grandparents. And if you’ve ever stayed with your grandparents, you know that you can get away with a couple more things than you would with your parents. So, even though I was missing my family tremendously, I was actually very excited to kind of be a little bit away from them. I was enjoying my independence. But at the same time, I found myself. That I was kind of steering away from God, just because I didn’t have that routine. I didn’t have my parents there to, to make me go to church when I didn’t want to, if I was sleepy enough or if I played that I was a little bit sick. I could just stay home. So, in that time, even though I had great independence, I started to fall way back from God. I didn’t have that routine that helped me focus. I didn’t have that community that, strived to raise me up whenever I was down. So I began to question my faith. I had been my whole life with my parents. They have guided me, my grandparents. I’ve always been at church. So this time, being away, it really made me test my faith. I don’t know if any of you can relate to that notion. Maybe you went to college and you had a tough time, but I really had to trust God, to to show up and to and to give me, show me that he was there with me, even though I didn’t quite believe it at that point. Well, it was, sometime where I went back to, the church, our church home, which was, a couple miles away from my grandparents house for, like a little youth event. And in this youth event, there was a guest speaker, and he, spoke about his testimony, just like I am doing right now. He said that he was, a teenage criminal. He was someone that hated God. He was someone that would get in trouble, steal from people, hurt people. And one day he had stolen some goods from store, and he was being chased by the cops. So he was running, and he was trying to get away. And the cops were threaten him to send him to jail. And he was jumping fences and backyards. Chickens were following him. It was it was crazy. And, he jumps over a fence and, I don’t know if you ever did this as a kid, but his shirt got stuck and he was dangling in the fence just like like this. And he couldn’t. He couldn’t get away. The cops were running. They were trying to find him. And in that moment, he remember what his grandma taught him, about the Bible. He remember that he could cry out to God, and God would help him even in, in this moment, which he was being bad, and he probably deserved to be caught by the cops and shown a lesson. He cried out to God. He asked for repentance, and he asked God that if he would free him in that moment, that he would turn away from his, from his path and follow him. And lo and behold, his shirt ripped open and he was able to escape. Later on, he returned to that store and he returned the items at his store, asked for forgiveness. And from that point forward, he promised to follow God. And he was now a guest speaker at a youth conference. So God has shown in his life, and he was kind of showing us, what God can do through us. Man, this, this testimony resonated with me. I don’t know exactly what it was, but in that moment, I felt the presence of God speaking to me. I felt that loneliness. I felt everything just came crashing down. I was being bad at school. I was not following Christ how I should. And in that moment, God spoke to me and I felt his presence for the first time, for the first time I wept, for like what felt like hours. I just feel his presence and the Holy Spirit speaking to me in that moment. And I knew that God wanted me to turn away from my the path that I was kind of going into and to follow him, with all my heart. So from that point forward, church, I decided to give my life to Christ at the age of 11, and I could not be happier. I remember telling my parents, whenever I got home, calling them because they lived in a different, a different city. And, I could not wait to get baptized. So that summer, I went and visited my parents, and, my dad orchestrated, trip to the beach, and I was able to get baptized by my dad. Here’s a picture of me. Anyone else got baptized in the beach at some point? I see one hand. That’s awesome. We didn’t have a fancy baptismal like this with heater, heater and water. So the beach was the best we could do. So I got baptized there with four other, folks. And I could not be happier. So, I had to experience what it was like to find my faith for my own, to be away from the things that I knew, to be away from my comfort zone in order for me to truly believe God. So, later on, we, I told you guys that I come from a family of, three generations of pastors that is on my dad’s side. On my mom’s side. My mom had barely become a believer. By the time he met. She married my dad. So by the time I was a little baby, while mom was very fresh in her faith, and also almost all her family there were not believers, like, on my dad’s side there were. So when my grandpa one day came to us and told us that he had played the lottery, that came to no surprise with us. He was always playing Little Scratch. Scratch offs and and doing things that we didn’t really could relate to because, you know, we weren’t in that lifestyle. So he told us that he not only played the lottery, but he had won the lottery. We were amazed. Now, this wasn’t a money lottery. I’m not a hidden millionaire or anything like that. No way. We would have, huge LCD screens already. Right now we would not have a broken projector, if that was the case. But, we won, well, he had won– it’s called as an international lottery. And this basically is a visa opportunity. So you can win, you can enter your name, your family’s name, and you can enter for a chance to win the opportunity to come to the States. Can you believe that? Like there is something out there internationally that people are wanting to come to the place where y’all live already to have a better life? So that’s what my grandpa entered to. And this would secure us a legal pathway for not only him, but my family to come to the States. Now, I said, how poor we were. Our house in Cuba was probably as big as from those steps to probably over here. We lived very poorly, and moving to America would give my family an opportunity to not only improve their opportunities, but also help the rest of our family, in Cuba. So we had a family meeting. The whole family gathered around, and he basically told us that he wanted to, come to the States, but he needed all of us to be bought in. He needed all of us to not only, help raise the money that he needed for plane tickets and to move to the United States, but also, for us to promise that we would at some point move to the States as soon as we had the opportunity to, so in 2000, 2000, he moved, to America. And I think I have a picture of our goodbye party to him. So on the side with his hands up, just like I was there is my dad and my mom and my grandpa. Frank is right there in the middle. He has the tie. And in 2000, he moved to the States with only about $500 to his name. He showed up in Miami, and he was met with people from the organization that, were going to help him out, but he showed up with only $500 in his pocket. He showed up, being an unbeliever, he didn’t believe in God at the time. But I remember, we were able to communicate very briefly with him because international calling in 2000 was very expensive. So we knew that he was safe. And a couple weeks later, he called us. And, my grandpa is a very logical and academically, sound person. He was a college professor in Cuba. He taught internationally, in Portugal as well. This man can recite full sections of, of scientific books to you at a moment’s notice. So this, this, this. My grandpa is a very logical thinker. So believing in God was something that was very hard for him to get to. I don’t know if any of you have experienced that before, but I remember him calling my mom, and he said, he said Arelis, which is my mom’s name, Arelis, I’m the happiest that I have ever been in my life. And my mom said, of course, you’re in the U.S., of course it’s the happiest you’ve ever been. You have a little bit of money, you have AC, you have some food finally. Which is awesome. Of course, you are the happiest you have been in your life. But he said, actually, no, I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. Because for the first time ever, I got down on my knees and I prayed to God and I thank him for how he brought my whole family and he brought me here without me believing in him. He set out many different paths so that I could make it here in this moment. So at that point, my grandpa started working through his faith. It took him being away from everything he knew, being away from his comfort zone in order for him to truly experience God and His provision. I remember that he, he was given and he was going to be assigned a place to move to, like a, permanent residence. He was still in Miami, and this is right before my grandpa came. And my grandma came and reunited with him, and, he was trusting God in this process. He maybe started going to a church service or two, and the lady came and told him, hey, I have different places, different states that we can move you to. And, I’m going to name them off and you can move to, Louisville, Kentucky. You can move to Chicago, you can move to Texas, or you can move to North Dakota. I don’t know, and he said that he, was trusting God in that moment, that God was going to put him in the place that he needed to be. So he just said yes to the first words that came to her, to her from her mouth, which was Louisville, Kentucky. So in that moment, he got assigned a place in Louisville, Kentucky. He was reunited with my grandma. And this is 2001. Well, my grandpa learned that he needed to stop relying on his own intellect, on his own human plans, and he needed to rely on God to move in his life and to tell him where he needed to go. Can you relate to that this morning? That sometimes our own plans, that own our own intellect, our own decisions can get in the way if we don’t really trust God and we don’t really, kneel down on our knees and ask him, God, what do you really want me to do? So that’s what my grandpa started doing. And he started, growing in his faith in church. Nine years later is when me and my family got the opportunity to even have an interview in order to be able to come to the state. So in 2001, we were told that we were at some point we’re going to move to the States. A month later, I asked my parents, hey, when are we moving? We don’t know yet. A year went by. When are we moving? We don’t know yet. Nine years of waiting went by for us in order to, get an interview. And church, this was the first time, of two times that I experienced time traveling, because I went from being and the hot line in order to get to the U.S. embassy. And when the doors open, I remember that cold AC just hit my face, probably for the first time ever. And I looked to the walls and I saw a flat screen TV in color. I had never seen that before. So in that moment I time travel basically 20 years in the future. Based on what I had been accustomed to in my life to not make this story long, we, we gather our papers. We were approved, and we were ready to move to the States. And this is another time that was very difficult for us because we had to say goodbye to everything we knew. The government seized our home. I mean, we we lived in a in a communist country, and the government basically controls everything. So even our home, it was seized from us. We had to basically, I remember they and this is a little bit off path, but they came and, did an inventory on everything we had in our house so that when we left, everything was still there. We had to leave everything behind because we were moving to the United States, almost like as a as a punishment. And I remember that we had to say goodbye to everything our cousins, our friends, our families. And this was a bittersweet moment at the airport because not only where we move into United States, but we were having to say basically goodbye to everybody we knew we had a huge amount of people there at the airport saying goodbye to us and, it was a lot of crying because we may have never see them again. At that point, international calling wasn’t really a thing. There weren’t cell phones. This is 2010. I mean, there were flip phones, but and FaceTime wasn’t even a thing. So we basically when we said our goodbyes, we knew that we there was a big chance that we would never see them again. But at the same time, we were contrasted by the idea that we were moving to United States and we were meeting, reuniting with our grandparents. When I got to the Miami airport, I experienced time traveling for the second time because I walked in the bathroom and I experienced a self flushing toilet for the first time. Let me tell you, it was scary. I was not ready for that. But I think I have a photo here, of when we arrive to the States. Yeah, there’s my sisters and my grandparents. There’s me, and I don’t know if you guys can see what I’m holding in my hand, but that was basically the only thing that I brought with me. This was this guitar right here. This is the only thing that I could bring from the States. And I decided to bring a guitar. God was already working in my life, and he knew that he wanted me to, be a worshiper. He knew that he wanted me to at some point lead his people in worship. So this is I knew that this was important. So I brought this with me. And I can’t play it anymore, so I’ll try to get it fixed soon. But it brings me so much joy when I, when I’m at home and I look at the wall and I see the guitar that I brought from Cuba. It reminds me of home. Is. I think there was another photo as well. Perfect. It was a super happy and emotional day to be reunited again. Well, time went by. And, the first our first Christmas came along. We we had never celebrated Christmas. Again, we lived in a communist country. And basically any outward display of religion any outward display of Christianity is is very persecuted. Our churches all the time got burglarized and we would be in the middle of service and people would throw rocks through the windows and break them. So Christmas wasn’t something that we got to celebrate a whole lot. So when we experienced our first Christmas here, we were really excited. In the back of my head, I was more excited about the presents than anything else. But again, my family had just moved here. We had nothing. We moved into our grandparents house. Which is, if you guys ever drive down Third Street and you, if you ever been to Lee’s Famous Chicken, has anybody has some chicken there? It’s pretty good. It’s pretty good. Well, our house was basically the one behind Lee’s Famous Chicken. So if you look behind that fence, that was the house that we moved to. It was a two bedroom home and that two bedroom home. My grandpa split so that we could host about, at some point, 12 people in that house. So he split the living room in half and created rooms for, me in the living room and my sisters. And then he split his master bedroom in half so he could put a bed there for my parents. And my uncles and aunts. After later on, So whenever we knew that Christmas was coming, we knew not to expect a whole lot. But we heard of this program, that was in the city. And this program allowed families that were in need to partner with, families that could provide. And they had a little bit extra in order to help them with Christmas gifts, in order to help kids receive probably their first Christmas gifts ever. So we were ecstatic. We showed up in line and, everyone there was really excited. The workers came. And can I explain a little bit of how it all worked? And everybody, they told us that we could ask for anything, almost like if it was Santa Claus, we could ask for anything. So people were they were asking for cars. They were asking for, bicycles. They were asking for computers. Anything you could imagine because they told us we could ask for anything. Well, that didn’t sit too well for me and all I really wanted church, was a skateboard. I grew up watching American movies. I grew up seeing how fun Tony Hawk was having. And I knew I wanted, in order to achieve that American dream, I needed a skateboard. And I just went up there. And when they asked me what I needed, I wrote down skateboard. Well, weeks went by and, we get a random knock on our door. I think it was two weeks before Christmas or so, and my sister, probably one of my sister’s girls, went out the door, saw there was some people there. They were like, there’s some white people in our front door right now. We don’t know. Who’s going to talk to? So, me being the person that I knew a little bit of English, I came up and I asked for, what they were there for. They asked to come inside our home, and somehow we let them in, and, they began. They had this huge bags, and they began pulling out presents. They pulled out backpacks for us to go to school. They pulled out books, pulled out notebooks. We pulled out some, probably some dolls for my sisters. And all of a sudden this random bag comes out and I open it and lo and behold, church, it was the skateboard I wanted. I was so excited because I could finally go out into the street, which was didn’t have any potholes with all the street security, and I could ride my skateboard down the street. So God has really provided for us in ways that we could never imagine. And this wasn’t this wasn’t just about, This wasn’t just about God providing us with the necessities. But when he delivered Christmas gifts to us, we believe that this was God showing us that he could take care of us more than what we, what we absolutely needed. We didn’t need it. Christmas gifts. We didn’t need to have a skateboard. But God so graciously saw how faithful our family have been, and God wanted to bless us. And, in Matthew 7:17 it says, if you then, who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who are those who ask them. So this for us wasn’t something material that we could receive, but it was God showing us that he wanted to provide for us and give us abundantly in our lives. So we praise him for that moment, and we rejoice. This is something that myself and my grandpa Frank and the rest of my family experienced, and it was a huge part of our story. God provides for us no matter what our circumstances are, and in turn, that teaches us to rely on his timing and his trustworthiness. And now today church. I think we have a picture of my family today, but not church. We have a growing family in our midst. As you can see, there’s a couple more people that have been added. Some of our cousins from Cuba were able to come to the states. We were able to reunite each other, my uncles and aunts. And if you go to the next picture, you’ll see that we have also added to our family as well, my sisters and myself, we’ve all had little babies. So our, our, my, my parents are more than ecstatic that we finally have a growing and thriving family here in the US, and it’s only because of him. So in conclusion, church, my faith journey heavily involves my grandpa Frank and the sacrifices that he made to bravely jump into the unknown to a new country to lead our family into a better future. You see, one thing that my grandpa and I have in common is that we both had to be taken out of our comfort zone in order to truly experience God for ourselves. I’m sure that many of us here today can relate to that. My parents did everything the right way. They taught us how to faithfully serve the Lord. They taught us how to, know him, how to pray to God. But that wasn’t enough. We knew, that they model well, they model for us what it was to be a true believer. And although I believe in God and had accepted him as my Savior, I didn’t necessarily know him to trust him because I didn’t have a personal relationship with him yet. I had a small seed of faith that needed to be nurtured, or it would die. When I moved away, and my grandpa moved away, we were able to, know and find God for ourselves, find the faith that was in not only what was modeled and taught, but it was real for us. And when the times when we ask ourselves, God, are you really good? Are you really trustworthy? What I want to tell you today is that if you really lean in and trust him through the hard times, God will become as real to you as he is to me. He has been so amazing in my life, more than I could ever imagine. I have seen him show me the right people to talk to and the right doors to walk through, over and over again. This little Cuban boy would have never thought that he would be right here in the States, speaking to probably 100 or so hundreds of American people in English, I would have never thought that this would be an opportunity I would have. But if you can take anything away from this is that this is part of God’s promise to us that he will respond when we seek him and he would answer to us when we cry out in Psalm 34, verse four, it says, I sought the Lord. And he answered me, and he delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and he saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. My family is proof of that reality that God is with us in all things. So I want to leave you with this last verse and it’s in Matthew 6:31, therefore do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So let’s promise God to invite him into our busy weeks and to the hardships that we may go through. Let’s promise to invite him into our lives and to guide us in, through, through every circumstance that we may go through, not only this week, but for the rest of our lives. Because he will respond and guide us down the path that he’s already laid out for us. Thank you, church.