One girl’s witness sparks series of conversions_82304

Posted: 8/20/04

One girl's witness sparks series of conversions

By Ferrell Foster

Texas Baptist Communications

WACO–Earlier this year in Mexico City, 30 people stood in a church service to note a common connection. Each traced his or her salvation experience back through links of family and friends to a single encounter five years ago at a park in Utah.

That was the day an 11-year-old girl asked her dad if she could go to the park with him and witness to people about Jesus. William Ortega let his daughter, Vasti, go along.

She spied another girl her same age and went to talk to her about Jesus. Before she was through, Vasti had led the girl, two siblings and their mother to faith in Christ.

But the story didn't end there. The mother went home and eventually led her husband to Christ. That family became friends with the Ortegas, and they attended church together.

Later, federal authorities discovered the new Christian family was in the United States illegally and deported them to Mexico.

Back in their homeland, they shared their newfound faith with others, who also followed Christ.

The Ortegas had been preparing to move to Mexico City as missionaries before the other family was deported, and they all eventually were reunited.

Vasti Ortega–now 16–was in the Mexico City worship service when 30 people stood to testify they came to Christ as part of the chain reaction of faith she started five years earlier.

“God blessed … because someone was not afraid to witness,” Orpha Ortega, Vasti's mother, told participants at the recent Texas Leadership Conference in Waco.