Article September 8, 2003 Issue

I found my place in God's 'infinite symphony'

By Marcos Dengler

My father, a high-school principal, is fluent in Portuguese, German, and English, and has a working knowledge of French, Italian, and Latin. Still, it was not easy for him to learn how to use a computer. He found it a slow process.

But it inspires me that my father didn't let himself be intimidated by the technology "monster." And today, at age 72, he has no problem surfing the Internet. Anyone can embrace technology at any time. Before college, I had no interest in learning about computers. I took a computer course, and there were 40 students in each class with an average of four students on each computer, and that course didn't help much. But when I began my degree in mechanical engineering in 1990, I had to buy a computer to create graphics and technical drawings.

When I finished college, my wife, Clarissa, was pregnant. She had not been able to enroll at any university where we lived in Rio de Janeiro, and risked losing the only other enrollment available to her at a college in her hometown in the south of Brazil. I was discouraged with my job, and there seemed to be no room for growth in my work. We prayed that God would inspire us to make the right decision in our desire to see our lives improve. Clarissa found a very appropriate and helpful passage in the Bible. It says: "They cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses. And he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation" (Ps. 107:6, 7). Reading that, we became calm. We felt there would be a clear path, and that we would have a "habitation," a home. We decided to move to Clarissa's hometown of São Leopoldo in Rio Grande do Sul.

About the author

Marcos Dengler received a mechanical engineering degree from UERJ, the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He now lives in São Leopoldo with Clarissa and their children, Hugo and Isabela, and works in Novo Hamburgo.

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