“The Fever Hasn’t Cooled off Yet”

In the Pacific seaport of Buenaventura lived a young Catholic lad named Óscar, an honor student in his last year of high school. He counted the bishop among his personal friends. Óscar’s mother began to study the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses, so he agreed to a Bible study too, intending to confuse the young pioneer minister who was teaching his mother. The sessions turned into heated discussions on various doctrines​—the Trinity, the soul, hellfire, infallibility of the pope.

Óscar sought the bishop for reasoning to defend his Catholic belief in the Trinity. What a disappointment, no help from that source! Next he asked the priest in his religion class in school. The priest replied, “I know that the Trinity does not appear in the Bible, Óscar, but I have burned the midnight oil studying for over 13 years, and I have to reap the benefit from what they taught me.” No help there either.

Finally, convinced that Jehovah’s Witnesses had the truth, Óscar began to study in earnest. Baptized in six months, he abandoned plans for a university education in biology. The critical times in which we live and Bible chronology convinced him of the urgency of pioneering instead. His old high school chums said he just had a fever that would soon cool off and that in five or six years, when they were all enjoying success in their professional careers, Óscar would come to them begging for work.

Óscar pioneered in the oil-refining city of Barrancabermeja, served in the challenging Córdoba circuit for four years, then went on to other circuit assignments, 12 years in all. Now a member of the Bethel family in Bogotá, along with his wife, Otilia, Óscar Rivas thinks back on how his old school buddies scoffed at him. “Twenty-one years have passed, and the fever hasn’t cooled off yet,” he says. “In fact, the warmth I feel in my heart for Jehovah’s truth goes on increasing all the time.”

[Picture on page 116]

Óscar Rivas chose a career in full-time service, now in Bethel