我姐姐在14岁的时候轻生了。

在极度悲痛之下，我母亲决定再生一个女孩。但是令她失望的是，她生了一个男孩，那就是我。

母亲在南葡萄牙的法罗抚养我和大我九岁的哥哥，我父亲在中东做建筑工程。

母亲的悲伤挥之不去。与父亲的离婚，以及哥哥的离家出走更加深了她的痛苦。然后她因癌症住院，而我当时只有11岁，最后我被送去与亲戚一起生活。

母亲从来没去过教会，但是我亲戚每周日都会带我去。当我了解到上帝的时候，我祷告我母亲能得医治。两年后，我母亲去世了。这对我来说简直无法理解，我认为上帝就是个无稽之谈。

之后我就没去教会了，当我父亲回到葡萄牙的时候，我搬去和他的新家庭一起住。

进入大学之后，我的生活完全失控了。我酗酒吸毒，开始听乱七八糟的音乐，实行撒旦崇拜。几次遭遇恶灵的恐惧，让我意识到在肉眼能看到的范围之外还有灵界的存在。

在我20岁出头的时候，我开始品尝我之前所种下的恶果。我一直生活在对恶灵的恐惧中。我也想要戒掉烟和毒品，但是我做不到。

然后我听说我的一个无信仰的瘾君子朋友受洗了。

“你是怎么回事？”我问他，“你为什么要受洗？”

“我读了《圣经》，而且我也信了。”他说。

不知什么原因，我向他敞开了心扉，告诉了他我对恶灵的恐惧。他也很认真地倾听。

“这样吧，为什么你不去读《圣经》呢？”他说。

这是个很好的问题。对我来说，上帝不再像是无稽之谈了。我知道恶灵是存在的，并且我能感觉到它们一直被一种更高的权柄所约束着。我读了《圣经》，也做了祷告。

当我阅读时，我感觉到一个很明显的声音在我心中说：“弃绝你的瘾。”

我并不是很想放弃一切，我想：“我可以继续享受一些让我上瘾的东西。”然后我突然意识到，我从来就没能成功地一件件戒掉我的瘾，所以为什么不尝试一次性把所有的嗜好都戒掉呢？

在那一刻，一个邪恶的声音出现在我脑海里。

“你在干什么？”它问道。

当我听到这个声音，我就知道大事不妙了。于是我立刻把我所有的瘾都戒掉了。

读《圣经》是一件很快乐的事。创世纪第三章向我展示了上帝并没有在人堕落之后抛弃他们，还为我们设立了救赎计划。我看到上帝关于以色列人的预言成真，我的信心也增长了，我明白《圣经》并不是虚构的。

几个月后，我毕业了，搬去了爱兰的都柏林，在那里做软件工程师。

有一天，我那位先前没有信仰的朋友发给我一个视频链接，是一个关于罪的起源的证道。我很喜欢那个演讲者，他是安息日会的传道人，我还找到了他证道的其他视频。但是当他讲到周六是安息日的时候，我觉得这太奇怪了，就拒绝了他所讲的信息。

但是那个关于安息日的证道留在了我心里。在我的母语葡萄牙语中“周六”是“Sábado”，也是安息日的意思。为什么所有基督教都在周日敬拜，我觉得这肯定有一个源自《圣经》的解释，然后我决定在《圣经》中找到答案。但是我找不到有任何经文说安息日从周六改成了周日。

我在网上继续听那位复临教会传道人的证道。他讲的安息日和末世的证道都很有道理，并且我接受了基督复临安息日会是上帝的教会这一信息。

我在网上找到了复临教会的地址之后，就去参加了礼拜仪式和之后的圣经学习。我开始理解为什么我在童年时遭遇了那么多痛苦。这并不是上帝的原因，而是因为罪，以及我和在我生命中的其他人所做的错误选择。就如大卫在诗篇16:4说的：“以别神代替耶和华的，他们的愁苦必加增。”

我在26岁时受了洗。

如今，我和乔安娜婚姻幸福，生活美满，她是一位来自巴西的护士，我和她是在都柏林的安息日教会里相识的。她也在爱尔兰受了洗。我们一边工作，一边给人查经，也在教会帮忙。我们一直在祷告上帝指示我们，接下来祂想让我们做的事。

Why Suffer?

My sister committed suicide when she was 14.

Overcome with grief, my mother decided to have another child, a girl. To her disappointment, she gave birth to me — a boy.

Mother raised me in the southern Portuguese town of Faro with a brother who was nine years older. Father lived in the Middle East, working in construction.

Mother was perpetually sad. That sadness deepened when Father got a divorce and my brother left home. Then she was hospitalized with cancer and I, only 11, was sent to live with relatives.

Mother had never attended church, but my relatives took me every Sunday. As I learned about God, I prayed for Mother to be healed. Two years passed, and Mother died. It didn’t make any sense to me. I decided that God was a fable.

I stopped going to church and, when Father returned to Portugal, I moved in with him and his new family.

Life spun out of control when I entered the university. I drank and used drugs. I listened to the wrong kind of music and practiced Satanism. Several encounters with spiritual beings frightened me into realizing that a spiritual realm existed beyond what people could see with the naked eye.

In my early 20s, I began to reap what I had sown. I lived in constant fear of evil spirits. I wanted to quit smoking and drugs, but I couldn’t.

Then I learned that one of my friends, a drug-using atheist, had been baptized.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him. “Why were you baptized?”

“I read the Bible, and I believe it,” he said.

For some reason, I opened up to him about my fears regarding evil spirits. He listened thoughtfully.

“Look, why don’t you read the Bible?” he said.

That was a good question. God no longer seemed like a fable to me. I knew evil spirits existed, and I sensed that they were being restrained by a higher power. I read the Bible and prayed.

As I read, I sensed a distinct voice say inside me, “Leave your addictions.”

I didn’t want to give up everything, and I thought, “I can still enjoy some of my addictions.” Then it struck me that I had never been able to quit my addictions piecemeal, so why not to try to quit everything at once?

At that moment, an evil voice came to my mind.

“What are you doing?” it asked.

When I heard the voice, I understood that something serious was happening. I gave up all my addictions immediately.

The Bible was a joy to read. Genesis 3 showed me that God didn’t forsake man at the fall and had a salvation plan. I saw that God’s prophecies about the Israelites came true. My faith increased, and I saw that the Bible was not fiction.

Months passed, and I graduated and moved to Dublin, Ireland, to work as a software engineer.

One day, my former atheist friend sent me a link to a YouTube sermon about the origin of sin. I liked the speaker, a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, and looked for more of his sermons. But when he spoke in a sermon about Saturday being the Sabbath, I rejected his message as too strange.

But the Sabbath sermon stuck in my mind. The word for “Saturday” in my native Portuguese is “Sábado,” or Sabbath. It seemed to me that there must be a biblical explanation for why all the Christian world worshipped on Sunday, and I determined to find it in the Bible. But I found no verse changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

I returned to the Adventist evangelist on YouTube. His sermons on the Sabbath and end-time prophecy made sense, and I accepted the Seventh-day Adventist Church as the church of God.

Finding the address for an Adventist church online, I attended worship services and later Bible studies. I began to understand why I had experienced so much suffering in my childhood. It wasn’t because of God. It was because of sin and the bad choices that I and other people in my life had made. As David said in Psalms 16:4, “Their sorrows shall be multiplied who hasten after another god.”

I was baptized at the age of 26.

Today, I am happily married to Joana, a Brazilian nurse, whom I met at the Adventist church in Dublin. She also was baptized in Ireland. We are working, giving Bible studies, and helping out at church. We are praying for God to show us what He wants us to do next.