This is definitely one of the key reasons I’ll believe in God for the rest of my life. It’s just impossible to explain otherwise. Some would like to think differently, something like manifest destiny, but I know God was the mechanism by which these things finally took place.
My wife, Joisy—I found her on Instagram in January of 2021. COVID was wreaking havoc, so I had started trying to date online. At first I met this other Einstein of a girl from Colombia: full scholarships to university, and she could talk circles around me in the Bible. I was so impressed.
My wife, Joisy—I found her on Instagram in January of 2021. COVID was wreaking havoc, so I had started trying to date online. At first I met this other Einstein of a girl from Colombia: full scholarships to university, and she could talk circles around me in the Bible. I was so impressed.
I started learning Spanish, and I decided I’d pay Colombia a visit. But then the little candle-flame of a relationship went sideways when we had a crisis in faith. She went to a Seventh-day Adventist church in her town, and came back saying she could never become a Seventh-day Adventist. I don’t know what happened at that church that day, but she was certain. I had this burden that I couldn’t pair up with someone who wasn’t in the same faith, so I told her we needed to break up.
To be fair, knowing what I know now and what she had told me about the SDA faith, maybe if I had known more then things would be different, but as it turns out, I was destined to marry a Seventh day Adventist.
And just like that, Colombia was in my heart. I had to go. The hope of finding a woman as beautiful as the women from Colombia had sparked something in me. So I started searching #adventistascolombia on Instagram. After a few sessions of searching and saying hello to several people, I found this young woman who had made videos for her church.
I had no idea what she was saying, but she spoke with such authority and confidence that I could tell she really knew what she was talking about. For her, it wasn’t an act. I just kept watching the video again and again, and I was in awe. Then I looked at her profile. She was simply beautiful. Every time I looked at a new photo, it was like I could feel myself being pulled toward her.
And somehow, right then and there—I’ve never done something like this before—I got down on my knees in front of my computer and I prayed to God. I said, “God, this woman here… I see the way she works for you. She’s doing the same thing I’m trying to do. She seems perfect to me. I don’t know why I feel like this, but I just want to say to you that perhaps, if I could marry that woman right there—if you know it would be good for me—I would want to do it. And I don’t even care what you have to put me through. You have my permission: if it’s right for me, you can drag me through anything and I won’t care. And if not her, then someone just like her… because that’s it. That’s IT right there.”
Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have tried to promise that I wouldn’t be upset with Him—because I would cause an emotional scar or two, and I’d pick up a few of my own before it was all done.
I don’t want this story to go sideways, so I’m going to tell you how it goes before I explain the whole thing. Otherwise it’s going to feel like the buildup is about to fizzle right at the last moment.
Essentially:
I message her, and she has a boyfriend.
I find another woman who makes me laugh so much that I fly to Colombia to meet her. We even fell in love enough that we were talking about getting married.
And I asked that woman to marry me—even though, when I arrived in Colombia, I knew from the first day it wasn’t right. I just kept telling myself I was stupid if I thought I couldn’t work past it. She was a good woman, after all.
Eventually my heart hurt so much that I prayed to God in a taxi, sitting right next to her. It hurt so badly it felt like my heart filled the entire street. I asked God to show me what to do.
While I was praying, I had this fear that later I might doubt whether God had actually influenced me—so I asked for something specific. “Please show me in a dream, and then wake me up. I want to be so awake and coherent that I know it’s impossible I was just sleeping. Then I’ll know it was from you.”
After that, I put the matter behind me, hoping that—like Daniel—someday in the future I’d get my answer. But that very night, the very night I prayed, I had a dream.
In that dream, God showed me what He wanted, and He showed me what was going to happen. But the dream was so coded that I didn’t understand He was also showing me what was going to happen. I’ll explain it in full detail later.
And then I woke up—100% coherent, like I’d been doing something else entirely, like working or something. I was shocked. The same day. This is insane.
The next day I called my mother and told her all the details of the dream. She said that if the dream was really from God, then it was probably symbolic—and she was right, as we’re about to find out. I also told the dream to a lot of people, in Colombia and back home. I kept looking for meaning in it.
I broke up with my fiancée that same week. I needed a few days to sort things out first, but it didn’t take long to realize what I had to do.
Not long after that, I ended up going to Medellín and I spent almost a year in South America. My first weekend there, I met this really pretty Adventist girl named Sara while I was up on a mountaintop. For a moment I wondered if maybe it was her—if she was somehow connected to the dream. But she wasn’t into me.
A few months later, I tried to visit my now-wife, Joisy, when I was in her city. She was single by then, but she told me no—no to even a quick coffee. Later Joisy told me it was because she couldn’t afford to pay for her own coffee, and she didn’t want to seem like that kind of girl if, for some reason, I wasn’t expecting to pay.
After that, I caught COVID while visiting Cartagena, and a friend actually flew in from Peru to take care of me. Later, I went to Peru to pursue a relationship with her—but she wasn’t honest with me, so I left.
I went back to Medellín and tried to help with every emergency my crush there seemed to have, until it added up to thousands of dollars and I started to wake up to what it really was: a scam.
In April of 2022, I went back to Canada, moved to Toronto, and started working for IBM. My crush there made me feel awkward more than once, so I eventually gave up on that too. Maybe it was because I had made other friends who were girls. I don’t know. But honestly—it was a hell of a thing trying to be selective and successful at the same time.
But I kept thinking about that dream. The dream was in Colombia, in the Andes mountains. The woman had to be from Colombia.
I kept hunting on Facebook, and I flew to Colombia several times—mostly with the excuse of dental work, but also because I was trying to use my time wisely. In the fall of 2022, I went to Bogotá to see a girl. She seemed to have a lot of connections to the dream I’d had, and she had even come to meet me in 2021 after a pastor told the conference we were at that I was single. But it wasn’t it. My heart just wasn’t in it.
Then I flew to Colombia again in December to meet a new crush. Wow—I thought she was too beautiful. I think this time she didn’t like me, but there might have been more to it than that. She was from a really dangerous part of town, and she was super cautious because of her mother’s concern. In the end, I cancelled our last meetup based on the vibes.
I remember talking to my mom while I was getting ready to fly home and preach on New Year’s Eve 2022. She was trying to make me promise I’d never try with another Colombian again. I thought about it hard while we were on the phone, and I said, “Well… but there’s Joisy. I’d always say yes to Joisy.”
When I got home, I texted Joisy. We hadn’t spoken in a while, but we used to text back and forth daily for weeks—sometimes even a month at a time. I told her I had a dentist appointment in Colombia scheduled in two months (I did—and it’s cheaper to fly there and get the work done than it is to pay for a root canal or crown without insurance in Canada).
Joisy said I could come and meet her. Oh my goodness—what news.
Joisy and I started talking every day again, and we kept that up for more than a month… until, well—there had been this other girl I’d been speaking to over the summer.
That girl said hi to me again after I commented on a photo on Facebook. We chatted on Messenger for a bit, and then she asked, “So do you have a girlfriend yet?”
“No,” I said—joking—“I’ve been waiting for you all this time,” trying to flirt.
She replied, “Oh, I would really like that…” and now I was in trouble. She was really cute too, but that was beside the point. I felt bad, because Colombian girls aren’t usually like that. I felt bad because it meant she really liked me—she wasn’t even going to play more games and make it easy for me to back out.
Eventually, I started reasoning that maybe Joisy was going to be a dud. I mean, she had been telling me no to visiting her city for well over two years. And my mother was really serious about me never going to Colombia again, so if I was going to try to listen to her wisdom, this might be my last chance.
So I told Joisy that I really liked her, and I hoped that when we met we’d hit it off—and that maybe then I could officially dream about more with her.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can only be your friend.”
And to be fair, that’s actually pretty typical of a Christian Colombian girl. Usually they need to be the boss and tell you. Otherwise they’ll stiff-arm you—even if it’s just to save face and still be the boss.
So there it was. Joisy was going to be the same she had always been. I felt genuinely disappointed. I went and told the other girl that I’d come and visit her, and that I was willing to try.
When I told Joisy I was going somewhere else, she wasn’t happy with me. I felt kind of nauseous. I even wondered a bit about her games—if I was being stupid—but I was over games at that point. I wanted solid ground under my feet.
Before my flight to Colombia, a missionary friend came over to my house, and we were talking about the dream I’d had in Bogotá when God answered my prayer. In that dream, I was standing on top of Mount Monserrate. I saw a woman, pointed at her, and said, “I want her,” and then I woke up immediately.
I already knew that woman wasn’t my fiancée in the dream—and that was my answer. And as we’re about to find out, everything about that dream pointed to Joisy. Because if you remember, I had gotten down on my knees and asked God to let me marry Joisy if it would be good for me. It was kind of an insane thing to do, when I think about it. But she was working in ministry too, and I was so taken back by everything about her. Just like in the dream, I had already pointed at someone and said, “I want her”… but for some reason, that connection never came to mind.
I asked my missionary friend whether flying over the exact point where I had been in the dream—on my way to see this new girl—could be a sign that she was the one. We pondered it, pulled up Google Earth, and drew a line from one airport to the other. It missed the spot where I’d been standing on the pathway on top of Monserrate in my dream by about 200 meters or so. My friend said that was much too far. It would have to be within a stone’s throw of the location, otherwise there was no sign.
So we tried again: we drew a line from the airport I was leaving Bogotá from to her house. Same thing—it missed by about 200 meters, but on the opposite side. We also drew lines from the apartment where I’d had the dream, but it wasn’t any closer. Okay. So we knew this wasn’t a clue to who the girl from the dream was. Still, it was interesting. I mean, we were really chasing this dream thing.
And the truth is, I had been chasing it for a long time. In the dream, when it started, I was super tall—tall enough that my head could touch the sparsely placed clouds. It was dark: full moon, stars, and only one or two clouds. I could see Bogotá below me. I was like a giant.
But then I shrunk down to normal size, and suddenly I was on the ridge of a mountain above Bogotá—Monserrate, specifically. In real life there’s an old Catholic monastery up there. The monastery wasn’t in my dream, but the cobblestone pathway was, just like it is in real life.
That’s where I saw the woman—hair down to the middle of her back—and I pointed directly at her and said, “I want her.” That was it.
My mother had told me maybe the mountain meant something symbolically. If the dream was from God, then the imagery should have clues in it. Symbolically, mountains and governments are a thing—and this particular mountain had a church on top of it. For a year and a half, I kept saying that if there was something to the dream, then the woman in it must work for God somehow.
The crush in Medellín—the one who eventually asked for thousands of dollars—was a Pathfinder leader. Sometimes they even paid her for some of her work. I told myself maybe that meant something. I mean, she grew up right at the base of the same mountains below Bogotá. I used that idea to convince myself it was safe to keep helping her. The dream really meant something to me.
So anyway, I get to Bogotá, and then we board a jet to go deep into the interior of Colombia—super rural—where people get taken hostage and where a lot of the ex-FARC history comes from. That’s where this other girl lived.
As we’re on the jet, we fly directly over Monserrate. And it was the strangest déjà vu, because I was looking down at the mountain and it felt like I was in the exact same spot from the dream. Same height—almost at the clouds. It was a steamier day, and some clouds were even passing below us.
As I looked down, I could see the pathway, and suddenly I had an idea. The night before, we had been drawing lines. Now I’m on the plane, and I’ve got nothing to do for the next fifty minutes. Why not see where the line goes if you point up the pathway the way I did in the dream?
Monserrate on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YNJjnnYfAiw7mx8p7
I grabbed my phone and opened Google Earth—an app where you can actually draw lines. I drew a line up the pathway and kept extending it. There was nothing for hundreds of kilometers. And then, eventually, it landed in the city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.
I pondered for a minute. Who was from Venezuela? Joisy—she had told me she was born in Venezuela. And I still had signal on the plane, so I sent her a message.
“From where in Venezuela did you come?” I asked.
She texted right back: “Maracaibo.”
A chill went down my spine. But wait—okay, if 200 meters is “too far,” then there’s no way this is going to work. Still, I zoomed in and looked around Maracaibo, and then I asked, “What neighborhood?”
“I’m from San Francisco,” Joisy replied.
Sure enough, the line hit San Francisco—but it’s a wide area. I had a mixture of feelings. I was scared that maybe God had known all along and I was just sitting here being stupid. But at the same time, I couldn’t let myself think like that, because I had already told this other girl I would try. I needed to be a man of my word, and if I took this further, I was going to be unfaithful to what I said I would do.
After that day, I spent a month in Colombia. I stayed at the girl’s grandmother’s house. I had a good time, but somehow I was just sad inside. She asked me over and over what was wrong, and I couldn’t shake it.
On my way home, I told my mom that something was wrong.
“It’s me this time,” I said. “Just like the first time I went to Colombia.”
My mother asked me to stop chasing it—and even to consider moving to the United States. I told her I’d try, but I also told her the truth: my heart is in love with Joisy, and I know it. I just need to be single because of that.
I wasn’t ready to try something new after Joisy and I had been talking throughout the day, every day, from New Year’s Eve through February.
I broke up with the girl in Colombia as soon as I got home, and by the next Sunday I told Joisy about it.
And then the weirdest thing happened. Wow. Just thinking about it while I’m writing this—for the first time—I almost feel tears welling up, mainly because I’m so thankful for what happened next.
That very same day, and every day after, Joisy kept talking to me. Not even a few hours would go by without a new text. And that continued every day from the beginning of April all the way through June 18, when I flew to Colombia again to finally meet her. I suppose after that, the rest is history.
Except I still haven’t told you about the dream—and how it all ends. Joisy didn’t know the exact location of the building she had lived in, so after she and I decided to be a couple officially (you know, after she shot me down the first time I tried to kiss her), I asked her father.
Now, granted, there’s a fair amount of “play” when you’re pointing up a pathway toward something more than 700 kilometers away. But not enough to just randomly land anywhere in San Francisco, Maracaibo, Venezuela. That’s because this neighborhood is long and thin—it stretches from one side of the city to the other. It’s a very strange shape.
But you can draw a line—from the exact point in my dream—to the very house she lived in, about 711 kilometers away. It blew my mind. And after all that time, there was my new girlfriend… who was a secretary for the Seventh-day Adventist church.
The woman from the dream—the one I had said must work for God if the dream was really from Him—was Joisy. And even the direction I pointed in led to Joisy. Oh the irony of only a short time before this and my friend and I reasoning about being over that exact point where I’d had the dream possibly leading to the answer of what this all meant.
I don’t know what else to say, other than that God—somehow—showed me what He was going to do. I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t even remember that I had already asked God about Joisy. I didn’t remember that part until shortly before I arrived in Colombia to see her, and then it all started to make sense.
I spent a month and a half in Colombia, got to know her family, and then I came back again about a month and a half after leaving. I asked Joisy to marry me. She said yes. And we were married within another four months.
I can’t imagine a better person for me. And usually, I think she feels the same way. I say that a little mischievously.
This will always be another reason I believe in God—because, in the strangest way, He showed me what was coming. Or at least what He wanted for me… and in such detail that I can’t deny it.
He knew I’d chase the dream and figure it out. And prophecy is kind of the same. We chase it, and we learn while we’re chasing it—especially when we’re searching for symbolism. It’s a beautiful thing, the way God works. And ultimately, for those who have faith, prophecy is one of the tools we have to see that God is really working.
And I’m sure that leads right into my next article in this Why I Believe in God series, which is even more material than my personal evidence. We’ll discuss how existing copies of Daniel chapter 9 that point to the exact time of Christs death are around 190 years older than the death of Christ, which reasonably points to true evidence regarding fulfilled prophecy.
May the Lord continue to bestow upon his people a good testimony, and may you also have some reasons to believe.
