"You are ready to be baptized," Pastor Fernando La Rosa told Florencio Rojas after he took the Bible knowledge test. Florencio Rojas, a retired military man, lives in the Chorrillos district (Lima-Peru) and was bedridden. The fever increased, the sore throat left him uncalm, and the cough was very uncomfortable. His body had been arrested by pneumonia.

The fury of the pandemic was reflected in the increase in confirmed cases of COVID-19, the virus attacking without mercy, causing hundreds of fatalities daily. This all seemed like a horror movie, but it was a reality.

"I don't want to see the news anymore," Rojas said because it made him feel like he couldn't fight anymore. 

"Don't worry, I will give you strong drugs to end the disease. We will start with five IVs for a week,” his cousin, who is a doctor by profession, told him.

Florencio only saw a valley of shadow and one option: to cry out to God. At the end of a week, they replaced five more vials and then five doses of vitamin C. Apparently, the process had finished and Florencio would no longer be the same. The terrifying news overwhelmed him and discouraged him from expecting a full recovery, until a phone call made him see something he hadn't seen. 

"If you want to cheer up, watch TV Nuevo Tiempo at 571 on Movistar TV," his friend told him. He never imagined that a phone call would change his life.

Every program and musical piece were messages of peace and hope in the face of this battle. “I started watching Pastor Joel Flores's programs, and that encouraged me,” Rojas said. He learned the habit of reading the Bible, which greatly strengthened him. "I applied for the Apocalypse Bible course, and there I discovered more things that made me feel more confident about how God acts in the history of the world."

Meanwhile, Nuevo Tiempo Peru continued to speak of a powerful God at the forefront of everything, through live broadcasts such as "Beyond Pain" with Pastor Alejandro Bullón. "I reaffirmed what I was learning and decided to give myself to Christ through baptism," Rojas said. “I looked for an Adventist [church] through Google Maps, and they were all closed. I was looking for a [church] to be baptized,” he added.

In his interest in finding an open church, Rojas found one near his house. ’I'm going to stand guard here until they open it,’ he told himself, but he never managed to see it open. Nuevo Tiempo announced {a program?} with Pastor Luis Gonçalvez: "A New Beginning." 

“How nice it was to know more about God!” Rojas confessed. He sent a message to Nuevo Tiempo through WhatsApp asking to be baptized. That same day, he received a phone call from Pastor Fernando La Rosa, who verified his preparation and biblical knowledge acquired through TV Nuevo Tiempo.

Florencio Rojas entered the baptismal waters on Sabbath, November 28 at the La Campiña Adventist Church in the district of Chorrillos, Lima. "I am a person who has been born again, and I do not want to separate myself from God," he said.

This article was originally published on the South American Division’s Spanish site