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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Adrien Charles-Marcel

My Testimony

There is something I want to share this morning.

And as I was mentioning, I'm in dental school here and getting close to the end of my training.

The interesting thing about it though is that it's not finished.

I still have 3 months to go and quite a lot before I get to graduation.

But I think that the fact that it's not finished can actually make it somewhat more of an impactful testimony, at least it has for me.

And the reason why is because when we read in the Bible we see that God constantly asks us to walk by faith and not by sight.

And so as I share this morning, just kind of keep in mind, all of us, as we're going through different experiences that perhaps haven't come to the end yet and we don't know the outcome, we can still have faith in God as we go through those different experiences.

The First 1 is that this is my story this morning.

It's not how everybody goes through dental school.

There's gonna be things that are uniquely about me and maybe not be generalizable to other people.

And then second of all is that I don't claim to have a perfect understanding of how God leads, which should become pretty obvious as I share my testimony.

But I do think that we can have a basic understanding of God's leading, especially as we look back at where God has brought us through.

And A verse that comes to mind is Psalm 107, verse 43, in the New King James Version, which I'll be using throughout this morning.

And it says that, "'Whosoever is wise will observe these things "'and they will understand the loving kindness of the Lord.'" So let's just have a prayer as we get started.

Dear Lord, thank you so much for the privilege to know you.

Thank you for the Sabbath day that we can put aside all of our worries and our stresses and come to you.

Lord, thank you that you have showed us who you are through your word and that you show us every day as we're willing to listen to your leading.

And Lord I just pray that this morning as I share how you've worked in my life, specifically in regards to dental school, I pray that the story would be clear, that the lessons that I believe that you've been trying to teach me would be applicable to others and that at the end of this we would all give praise and glory to you for your leading in all of our lives.

So I've organized the story into a couple of different steps or lessons that I think God has taught along the way.

I'm just gonna go through them before I start.

The fourth, my faith in God is only as strong as my hardest trials.

And the seventh comes from Proverbs 16, verse 9.

A man's mind, sorry, a man's heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.

So let's start with lesson 1, never say never.

I was not the type of person that knew from the cradle what I was gonna be when I grew up.

In fact, I was in high school and in my last year coming down to graduation and I still didn't know what I was gonna study.

And I was starting to get very stressed out about it because where I was at the time, I was living in Mexico with my family, we were missionaries there.

And in Mexico, the way the educational system works, you basically have to choose your career right out of high school.

So you have to decide whether you're gonna do dentistry or medicine or engineering or art or whatever it is.

You have to decide your first year of college.

So I remember being in Bible class 1 day and our Bible teacher was having a special time of prayer for us.

The thing that was on my heart was what was I going to study the next year?

And I remember as I prayed that I got this distinct feeling that God was saying, whatever it is, it's going to be something good.

Now you might say that's kind of weak, but I felt that that was meaningful, and it actually turned out to be very meaningful because it took quite a while to figure out what that was gonna be.

So during the next 3 years, I was 16 at the time when I graduated from high school, just about turned 17, my career options went from everything from communication to software engineering, dental technology, medical technology, medicine.

I spent about 3 days in art school, decided that wasn't for me.

I then did 2 and a half years, I took that, then I took the next year off.

Then I did 2 and a half years of medical technology, learning to do blood tests and things like that, and spent about 4 and a half months working in a hospital laboratory.

And that experience turned out to be so negative for me that I decided I didn't want to do anything related to health care at all.

And I went so far as to even mock the idea of doing anything in health care.

I thought it was completely crazy to do something where your schedule was so limited and you had all these different things you had to know and it seemed very difficult.

And so I was like, I'm not doing healthcare at all.

I thought of several other interests that I had, kind of went back to computer science.

And so I thought maybe I'd do computer science for a little while.

I was thinking about becoming a math teacher.

And by the time I was 20 years old, I was still living in Mexico, but planning the next year to go to Southern Adventist University and study computer science.

Well, through an interesting series of events, which I might not have time to tell all about this morning, God put the idea of healthcare back into my mind.

And I started thinking, you know, it might not be that bad of an idea to kind of fall on the footsteps of my dad, at least, because my dad's a physician and my mom did medical technology and then a master's in public health.

So it's kind of in the family a little bit.

And then through the intervention, actually, with my parents, which up until that point they had been very kind of hands off.

They had kind of given me some general guidance, but they hadn't said, oh, you must do this or you must do that.

Through their intervention as well, I ended up deciding, you know what, I'm going to do something in healthcare.

And that was a major frame shift for me but I felt that God was leading me to do that and after I had made that decision that I just had to figure out what will I do and through process of elimination I ended up with dentistry.

I wasn't completely sure about it but I thought it would be pretty good because I wanted to be a missionary overseas and so dentistry is something that's very portable you can take with you and It also gives you quite a balanced lifestyle you have time for other things and so I thought okay.

I'll probably do dentistry So that was lesson 1 never say never.

I basically said I'm never going to do anything in healthcare and then here I am now, almost a dentist.

Lesson 2 is little miracles can guide us.

So when I decided that I wanted to go to dental school, I was still living in Mexico.

And I remember sitting down 1 day with my dad and mapping out a plan for how am I going to get to dental school.

Because I'd done 2 and 1 1 half years of college in Mexico.

And coming back to the States, I didn't want to do it in Mexico.

I wanted to come back to the United States because this is where I'm from.

And so the path to getting from there to here was going to be a little bit of a journey.

And so I remember sitting down and deciding, well, I want to get there as soon as possible.

So it was 2011, I think, end of 2011 or beginning of 2012.

And so I sat down, mapped it out, and figured everything goes just right.

I could get to dental school in the fall of 2014.

So that would mean, though, that I would have to apply to dental school without a bachelor's because all those classes that I took in Mexico would not transfer to a college here.

So I started emailing Southern Adventist University again.

And to be able to do this, I was going to have to take some science classes together that normally you can't take together.

So I sent a whole bunch of different emails.

What is he emailing us about all these things for?

1 of the people even told me, you know, most of the people going to Loma Linda have a bachelor's, if not a master's, kind of saying, you know, you're kind of going in a strange direction.

But I still was determined that this is what I was gonna try to do.

And if God wanted me to become a dentist, why should I spend time getting a bachelor's when that wasn't gonna help me towards my final goal?

As it turns out, I had to, sorry a second, yes.

There were several different things that would be required of course to get to dental school and 1 of them was taking all of the prerequisite courses.

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My Testimony

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