FREDDY DANIEL CASQUETE MOSCOSO

My name is Freddy Daniel Casquete Moscoso. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1989. By the grace of God, I come from a large Christian family made up of my parents, Freddy and María de Lourdes, and ten siblings (three of them in heaven). Thanks to the transmission of faith that they gave me at home, I came to know the love of God in my life. Being the second of my brothers, I was able to realize how over time it was the Lord who sustained us. I witnessed that plan of salvation that the Lord was carrying out in my family, through forgiveness, reconciliation and his providence.

Having grown up in the midst of a Word and the faith that I saw in my parents and in their community in the Church, I decided to enter my own community when I was 13 years old. This time was providential for my life, because at that stage of the school the Lord sustained me with a Word of life in the face of a world that seemed very attractive to me. However, when I entered the University, at the age of majority, I was dragged into a selfish attitude and pushed God out of my life. Having the seed of faith, there was an internal struggle in me at all times, because as Saint Paul says: "I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I do not want." The Lord made a call to my life when I was 17 years old, but then I did not want to listen to it. God, who has set us free, allowed me to do with my life what I wanted, like the prodigal son in the parable. In the midst of all that time, I also experienced his closeness, allowing me to finish my degree in Industrial Psychology and to have practiced it in a company. In my rebellion against God and in the midst of my selfishness, I fell into alcoholism and knew existential death due to the sin in which I lived and the lack of love I had with those around me. I had achieved what the world called happiness: a status that my profession gave me and the esteem of my friends. However, I lived alienated in my sins. All this situation at the end of the day made me feel empty and neither money nor affection nor work made me feel happy.

Despite all this situation, although inconstantly I went to my community. And he always saw in their midst a joy and a welcome with love like that sheep that returned to the fold. It was in a coexistence with them, that by not resisting the voice of the Lord that invited me to conversion, I approached the Sacrament of Penance and experienced for the first time in my life the relief of all the chains that dragged me and the mercy of God with forgiveness. It is there that the Lord began to work granting me a time of grace through a vocational discernment group that, together with my community, was essential for what God was going to do. On May 22, 2016, after being scrutinized by my catechists, on behalf of the Church I was sent to the Redemptoris Mater "San Pedro Claver" Seminary in Esmeraldas. During these years, the Lord, through the sacraments and his Word, has illuminated realities of my life that have shown me the patience that He has with me and His goodness "because His mercy is eternal." It has been years that I have experienced a God the Father who grants me the dignity that sin had taken from me and who calls me every day not to resist the work of salvation that he has with me. I thank you for everything you do for us and I ask you to please pray for me so that God can carry out the work he started.