11/11/2025
To Sabbath School teachers: This adult mission story is for Sabbath, November 15.
Praying for a Tumor
Maria grew up in a devout Christian family in Chile. They celebrated all of their church’s holidays. But no one ever prayed to God until the day that a doctor found a large tumor in the liver of 5-year-old Angel.
“God, please save the life of my little sister,” Maria prayed.
Maria was 21 and eldest of the three sisters in the family. Angel was the youngest.
When Angel’s teacher learned about the tumor, she also prayed. She asked her church to pray. She was the wife of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor.
The prayers touched Maria’s heart. She couldn’t understand why a church would pray for a little girl they didn’t even know.
As the date approached for Angel’s surgery, Maria prayed more fervently. She promised to go to the Adventist church if Angel recovered.
“If You heal her, we’ll go to that church,” she prayed. “It will be confirmation for us that You want us to go there.”
The surgery went well, and Angel recovered completely after a month in the hospital.
After she returned home, Angel’s teacher and her pastor-husband began visiting the family regularly. They gave many hugs. They asked about their well-being. They showed sincere interest in their lives, and they kept returning.
To Maria, the pastor and his wife were like a fairy-tale couple. She had never seen such a loving couple, and she saw Jesus’ love in a whole new light.
After two years, she and her family gave their hearts to Jesus in baptism. Even little Angel, who was 7, was baptized.
The family was won to Christ through the same method that Christ used when He walked on earth. Ellen White says, “Christ’s method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Savior mingled with people as one who desired their good. He showed sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He invited them, ‘Follow Me’” (The Ministry of Healing, p. 73).
For many months, the pastor and his wife practiced Christ’s method: spending time with the family, wanting things to go well for them, feeling for them, and helping when they could until the family wanted to know their Jesus.
Today, Maria is 35 and a teacher and counselor at the only Seventh-day Adventist university in Chile, Chile Adventist University.
Wherever she goes, she loves to share her testimony of how God answers prayers and she met Jesus through the unconditional love of a pastor and his wife. She even spent a year as a missionary teacher with Adventist Volunteer Service in Ecuador and saw people’s lives changed through her testimony.
“Since I met Jesus, everything has been one amazing story after another,” she said.
This quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering, also known as the Quarterly Mission Project Offering, will go toward two projects at Chile Adventist University, where Maria teaches, in Chillán, Chile. One project will expand the dormitories to make room for 50 more students to study on campus. Currently, the university has about 3,000 students, the vast majority of whom are not Adventist and live off campus. The new dorm rooms will be open to all but are especially needed by Adventist theology and education students who come to the university from far-off places and are studying to work in Adventist churches and schools. The second project is a new Adventist Volunteer Service center at the university that will send 30 missionaries to different parts of the world every year. The center will have five classrooms for training students to be missionaries and an auditorium with 250 seats. Thank you for your generous offering for these two projects. Next week, hear about Maria’s experience as a missionary teacher with Adventist Volunteer Service.
Story Tips:
Show South America and Chillán, Chile, on the map.
Watch a short YouTube video of Maria at: bit.ly/Maria-SAD.
Download photos for this story from Facebook: bit.ly/fb-mq.
