VL-Issue 44- July 22

Lay Your
Burden
Down
THE STORY OF JAY BASTARDO
Who is Jesus to me?
Jesus is my everything.
At every stage of my life, whether I realized
it or not, God has been exactly who I
have needed Him to be—my Savior, healer,
and friend; my protector, provider, and redeemer;
my comforter, strength, and refuge.
And lately, Jesus has been revealing
Himself as my source of peace and identity.
It took a scary trip to the hospital in
2020 to begin to know Him this way, but
you need to know more about me before
I tell that story.
I started life in the Dominican Republic,
where my family worked very hard for
what little we had. My grandmother was
the first entrepreneur I ever met, and man,
was she a hustler! She always had creative
ideas, and I was right there by her side.
Grandma was poor, but she never complained
or focused on what she didn’t have;
she just went to work. We did all sorts of
things to make money: we bagged the charcoal
we found on the ground. We cooked
beans. We made hair products. And people
came to our home to purchase these
treasures. Grandma’s work ethic sowed an
enterprising seed in me that thrives today.
My mother was a hard worker too. She
came to America through a government
program in 1994 and worked three jobs to
make a better life for us. She fought hard to
take me with her to the States, but it wasn’t
possible at the time. She was forced to leave
me in the care of my grandmother.
Being away from my mother was incredibly
painful, and my heart still hurts
when I think about it. No matter how much
love my grandmother and other relatives
showed me, nobody’s love ever felt like
Momma’s. I lived with an enormous hole in
my heart. It was difficult knowing she was
so far away, and even as a young boy, I felt
an urgent need to protect her.
Thankfully, God made a way for us to be
reunited five years later. On May 26, 1999,
I arrived in Newark, New Jersey. I came
armed with five dollars that my aunt had
given me. She told me, “Go be a man and
make your mark on this world!”
And that’s what I set out to do from that
day forward. I was 15 years old.
I had dreamed about this moment and
my life in America for years. I was so happy
to be reunited with my mother, but the
perfect life I had imagined was not to be
found. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and
we’d both changed. She was now married
and had another child. I hadn’t met her
husband or my half-brother before the
day I arrived. I felt very out of
place and alone. Not to mention,
I was a teenage boy wrestling
with deep emotions and
raging hormones.
And then I had to start school
in a new place where I didn’t
speak one word of English and
I had only one pair of jeans that
I wore every day. It was a cruel world.
One incident haunted me for years.
It happened on the first day of school. I
entered a classroom to ask a teacher—in
Spanish, of course—if I was in the correct
room. When he answered “no,” I assumed
he spoke Spanish and continued speaking.
No is, after all, a Spanish word.
Suddenly, a young Latina burst out
laughing. I’ll never forget her mocking
voice. “Are you stupid? Don’t you see that
man doesn’t speak Spanish? You’d better
learn the language!”
The way she spoke ignited something inside
of me. I didn’t appreciate being called
stupid or being challenged. I turned to her
and replied in Spanish, “I promise you that
I’ll be speaking better English than you
before this year is over.”
I went home and got to work. I grabbed a
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