I am 26 at the time of this writing and some might say the Journey has just begun for me and I would have to agree.

Salvation Experience

I responded to the Lord at the age of 12. I attended a pre-teen camp in Huntsville called Trinity Pines Baptist Encampment. Our church counselor, Blair Montgomery, took a small group of us boys from Broadway Baptist Church in Houston, TX to camp this particular summer. The worship artists was Jami Smith and the speaker was Scott Crenshaw who was an evangelist at the time but is now working as Singles Leader for Lakewood Houston if you have ever heard of that church. I know this because four years ago I set out to meet this man who led me to the Lord during his evangelistic ministry. We talked for about ten minutes and he was excited about what the Lord was doing through me.

At 18 yrs of age, I surrendered my life to ministry at Mt. Lebanon Baptist Encampment during Campamento. I was there as a counselor for IB Houston under Johnnie Musquiz’s leadership. Before this experience I had not prayed inside of the church and I certainly had never led a bible study lesson. It was then that Alex Marin took me under his wing and spoke power truth into my life, he really encouraged me to dream big and put all I do in God’s hands. I started to lead bible studies, and really I was teaching all that I was learning since I didn’t have any training but I did have a calling and I believe that God uses people who are called and gets them trained to do greater things. I started to speak on Wednesday nights in the Sanctuary and the youth group started to grow and students would come from other churches as well. Things were going great until I had to take a college course on Wednesday night. So my friend Matt Musquiz and I sat down and started to discuss the possibilities of started a bible study on Friday nights. It was then that the idea of Refuge Bible Study was created and from 2/1/01 forward, we had a bible study every Friday night in Houston from young people all over the city. See the website www.refugebiblestudy.com.

Congreso

My first Congreso that I ever attended was in Corpus, two years later I would serve as President. This was the first time I met Gus and Leticia and other Hispanic Baptist Leaders. I was still in Houston working full time for a large energy company called El Paso Corporation, formerly known as Tennecco. I’m grateful for El Paso Corp, because they paid for my junior college years or they reimbursed me. I am also grateful because they hired me at 16 years of age when Enron wouldn’t, well we all know how that cookie crumbled. So I worked for the pipeline dept as a Strategist Assist for 6 years before moving to Dallas.

Gus

One day I received a call from none other than, Dr. Gus Reyes. He called only to tell me one thing that afternoon, it was to ask me how long it was going to take me to finish college taking 1-2 courses a semester working full time. It’s funny how he asks questions that he already knows the answer too, but thats his way of teaching or mentoring. So that was my first mentoring session of many to come with Gus and of course like all sessions, I was left having to make a decision, do I quit my job and go full-time to HBU or DBU which were his suggestions. I was just excepted into the College of Business program at the University of Houston and I decided that I was going to answer my calling of ministry and attend DBU to take Christian Studies courses. So I moved and turned on the jets and completed 80+ hours of course work in two years, starting in Jan ‘04 finished in Dec ‘05 with a 3.0 GPA which is the mininum requirement for Graduate School and it was just enough for them to accept me into the Management Program. So after 2 1/2 years I am going to receive a Masters of Arts degree in Management and this time I am going to finish with a 3.85 GPA. This will take place May 15, 2008 at DBU. The best part of graduation is that I finished paying cash for school and not taking out student loans.

My wife Andrea and I have been married for eight months and we are debt free everything but the mortgage. I now want to share with people steps they need to take to get out of debt, my financial blog is www.debtfreehispanic.com I get to share tips, ideas and random thoughts about money. Why is this important to me? Because I want to change my family tree and I want for my children to not have to work as hard during their college years. I want to pay for their school from start to graduation. Plus I want to retire with dignity & money.

Future

My wife Andrea, who works for Guidestone Financial, is looking to pursue her PhD so we are looking at schools where she can attend. I’m going to take a break since i’ve been in school since I graduated high school in 1999 but I will look into pursuing a PhD further in life. I would like to do some consulting work helping organizations know the difference between Hispanic generations.

I currently work for the Baptist General Convencion of Texas where I am in charge of web content and the Spanish website which is www.bgct.org/espanol.  This summer Andrea and I are giving leadership to Hispanic Singles by overseeing Hispanic Singles Camp www.bgct.org/singlescamp .

Our Journey has just begun. Let HIS light shine through us. - Fabian Ramirez

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