A Wyoming man going blind in one eye has a clearer picture of who God is after going through BGEA’s free online discipleship course called KnowJesus.net.
“Since I’ve had this affliction in my eye, I tell people I have to go blind so I can see,” said 61-year-old Michael Romero Sr. “I can see things better, but it’s more of a mental vision, an understanding (about God).”
Romero first noticed a pang of discomfort in his right eye last fall. He saw a doctor, hoping for a quick fix, but it ended up being a serious virus that he’s still fighting. While doing some research on it last October, he came across a website about the Gospel.
He prayed a prayer to ask Christ into his life, then followed a link to KnowJesus.net, BGEA’s five-lesson discipleship course that answers questions like, “What does it mean to have faith in Jesus?” and “Can I communicate with God?”
Through BGEA’s Internet evangelism ministry—which oversees KnowJesus.net—Romero connected with an online mentor who guided him through the lessons.
“I had always considered myself one that believed in a ‘Superior Being’ that was all good and overseeing,” Romero said.
But he had distanced himself from church years ago and never attached a name to the “Superior Being” he believed in. … Until he came across the KnowJesus course and couldn’t get enough of it. He knew it wasn’t an accident that he found the course through such extraordinary circumstances.
“I was truly guided and filled with the Holy Spirt while taking the course,” he said. “The answers just seemed to flow off my fingertips.”
Romero was raised by his aunt who had him reading from a Spanish Bible before he hit school age. But even as a kid, “I always had trouble taking it word for word.”
He became cynical not only of the Bible but of history books.
“How do you know something happened?” he wondered. “Why should I believe it?”
He needed concrete explanations.
“I always believed that there’s a God, but I didn’t necessarily believe what the Bible said because I saw that as something that man had written,” he said, adding that people make mistakes.
Yet, over the past few months, since Romero started the KnowJesus course, his enthusiasm for wanting to learn more about God has steadily increased. He reads an online prayer and devotional every day. Many times, he’ll read not only the Scripture from the devotional, but the chapter it’s taken from, or a whole book of the Bible “to get the bigger picture.”
“I’ve read a lot more of the Bible in the last three or four months than I have in my whole life,” he said. “I have a better understanding of what the Bible means and what it says.”
More than that, the “Superior Being” now has a name: Jesus Christ.
“This course … has cemented my commitment to the Lord Jesus and the desire to continue to learn more about His way in order to become more pleasing to our Father God, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” Romero said.
In the past, he would occasionally offer up a quick thanks to whoever was up there watching over him and guiding him. Now, he has Someone “more tangible to be grateful to.”
“Before, it was kind of an unknown,” he said, “… but now I can actually look back and say thank you God and thank you Jesus.”
As doctors continue working to save the vision in Romero’s right eye, his spiritual life has come into focus. Like the blind man in John 9, it seems Romero’s affliction has a greater purpose: so that “the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).
