ANDRIK JULIÁN MARÍN FRANCO

My name is Andrik Julián Marín Franco. I was born in Esmeraldas, Ecuador in 1998. God has blessed me with two brothers and a sister, we have been born every 7 years, with me being the third, the Lord has allowed me to love the history of salvation that he has made with me through my family. My parents, after so many years in the struggle to transmit the faith, God granted them the sacrament of Marriage in February 2019, thus conceiving a Christian family.

At the age of 14, I was called to belong to the youth group of my parish, through the announcement of a priest when the Sunday mass ended. Little by little I learned more about the Catholic Church where I participated in its activities, but it was not until 2015 where the Lord placed me in my reality as a sinner, thus belonging to a Christian community towards a path of Christian initiation. After my first years on the path I lived in persecution to try to make the tripod and never lose the word that I received at every moment. The pilgrimages and the sanctuaries that I visited for the first time, in which I was asking for grace, helped a lot. after grace. After this, God fulfilled a grace with me by allowing my mother to know the way, and after a year, my father and my brothers. Despite being filled with so much grace, it was not enough for me not to fall into rebellion with my parents and especially with the Lord, during my university studies, linked to the world that the devil presented to me through pride, alcohol. and sexuality.

Despite all the situations of sin that I lived, God makes a choice with me again, allowing me to enter the Esmeraldas vocational school, which after long years had been reopened in 2020. In my second experience of the vocational school, after always defensive of the vocation that the Lord was calling me to, the catechists decided that it was good for me to do a mission experience in Guayaquil during 2022, that time of mission was crucial for me and a time of discernment that I received from God through the priests who guided me, it was also the same year that I graduated from my university degree in electrical engineering.

Thus, for the first time I did not decide to do my own will but that of God, when I received the third vocational fellowship, the catechists of the nation asked me if I was willing to enter the Seminary, it was God who was carrying everything in the mission experience showing me the call he has always been making to me. On August 21, 2023, I entered the Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Esmeraldas, seeing another grace that the Lord is granting me, a vocation that I long for evangelization.