Pastor Rogelio Aguirre is pastoring in a poor village in which he lives. The church can usually only afford to give about two dollars for the pastor to live off of and he has a wife and three young children. Fortunately, he is also a fisherman when he has time. His family usually gets by on ten dollars a week. There are times when he cries out to the Lord for food for his family because there is nothing to eat the next day.
In one such circumstance he went walking to look for crabs in the mud near his home. He called out to God as he walked, “Lord, please give me something to bring back to my family. I cannot let them go hungry tomorrow.” As he walked in the mud he stepped on a crab weighing over 1 1/2 pounds. He praised the Lord and sold the crab for a little under $2, which provided for the next three meals. Nothing new to him, Pastor Aguirre gathered his wife and three children and they cried together, asking God to provide. “My children are trained,” he said with a smile on his face and a fatherly pride in his tone, “to rely completely on God. They cry because they have nothing to eat, but they know God will provide and they rejoice with us when he does.”
Once a church offered Pastor Aguirre a much nicer house with electricity and plenty of room for his children, financial support, and a church to pastor, but he turned it down. He eagerly told me, “We were not free to follow the Holy Spirit. Those churches are run by old men who just tell you what to do. I cannot live that way. I must follow God’s call. In 1997 he called me to plant 120 churches on many islands in the Philippines.” Pastor Aguirre started preaching when he was seventeen years old, he is
now thirty-five and trusting the Lord to make his dream a reality.
Pastor Aguirre had been praying for the construction of a church building for a while. One night he found himself out in the ocean fishing, praying that he could feed his family the next day. All night he fished. He went home with empty hands and a prayer on his lips. “God, you have always provided for me and my family. Who am I to complain? I will trust in you.”
The next day arrangements were made for the construction of a building. Tomorrow, on the one year anniversary of his first church plant, that construction will be finished.
The past two days I have seen Pastor Aguirre working harder and more joyfully than everyone else. Yesterday he worked until 10:00pm on the church before going to search for crabs until 2:30am; he woke this morning at 5:30 to begin the construction again. Tonight will be the third night of the same, but each new day Pastor Aguirre is full of energy. As I pondered this, already jotting down notes for this blog, one of my teammates asked him, “Pastor what can we do to help you?”
“I want,” he paused, “just that you will remember us when you go back home.” I looked up at him, a man completely selfless and right before the Lord and knew that I would never forget.
