Dear Bishop,

This Sunday, we attended your service at 6Pm, and we heard when you spoke about the “prophets and prophecies among believers”. You reminded me of when I was a member of the Baptist Church. There, it was customary not to make any decisions, travel, do business or start a relationship without first consulting with the “sisters in prayer”. Everything had to go through them, because they were the “anointed vessel of the Lord”.

My mother-in-law was one of them.

She is exactly as you described. She is in her second marriage, and her husband was addicted to alcohol, drugs, he slept around and was abusive, both physically and mentally.

She spent her days praying for people over the phone and, often, after praying for so-called “prophets”, she would also ask the prophets to pray for her, so that her husband could change. This is how she spent the 4 years I dated my current wife: humbled by the moral and emotional misery, and at the same time, an “anointed vessel of the Lord”.

And when we decided to get married, she took us to two prophets to confirm our wedding. My mother-in-law was not much in favor of our marriage because I was poor.

Then, look what happened:

“Sister Joana” – “a prophet” whom we took food and money to all the time, because she lived in a house with dirt floors –, prophesied that the “will of God” was for us to get married.

Then we consulted “pastor ant ” (that is what everyone called him because he lived in a neighborhood where all the streets were of dirt and your car would always come back with so much red dust).

There, the pastor and his wife, who was a “prophet”, prayed for us and revealed that our marriage was not the “will of God”.

And now? We had a tie. What would we do now?

We went back to “Sister Joana” to consult her again. After all, her “prophesy” was in our favor.

Just imagine the mess, we almost didn’t even get married!

During this religious confusion, we got married, but it was a complete fiasco. The church members were so worried about whether or not it was God’s will, that no one bothered to guide us on how to adapt to the marriage.

Within 6 months, we were living in someone else’s house. We fell into such a financial crisis that we almost separated within a year and a half of marriage. And this is how we came to the Universal Church, looking for another confirmation: to separate or not to separate?

Here, we found out that everything we believed in was a lie from the devil. We passed through a long and hard process of deliverance. I learned how to be a real man.

Today, I love my wife. We are happy and are completely sure of our relationship, not because someone revealed it to us, but because of the daily sacrifice to God and our marriage.

Thank God and the Universal Church, we learned about an intelligent faith.

We were delivered from an evangelical hell!

Walber Barboza